He had scarcely published this amazing document,
however, when he died after three days of pain on August 30, 526, the
very day the revolution was to have taken place.
The Gothic king was buried outside Ravenna upon the north-east and in
the mighty tomb--a truly Roman work--that the Romans, at his orders,
had prepared for him: a marvellous mausoleum of squared stones in two
stories, the lower a decagon, the upper an octagon covered by a vast
dome hewn out of a single block of Istrian marble. There in a porphyry
vase reposed all that was mortal of the great barbarian who failed to
understand what the Roman empire was, but who almost without knowing
it rendered it, as we shall see, so great a service. But the body of
Theodoric did not long remain in the enormous silence of that
sepulchre. Even in the time of Agnellus (ninth century) the body was
no longer in the mausoleum and what had become of it will always
remain a mystery. A weird and awful legend, in keeping with the
tremendous tragedy that was played out in his time and in which he had
filled the main role, relates how a holy hermit upon the island of
Lipari on the day and in the hour of the great king's death saw him,
his hands and feet bound, his garments all disarrayed, dragged up the
mountain of Stromboli by his two victims, pope John and Symmachus, the
father-in-law of Boethius, and hurled by them into the fiery crater of
the volcano.
Pages:
100
101
102
103
104
105
106
107
108
109
110
111
112
113
114
115
116
117
118
119
120
121
122
123
124