His care and adornment of Ravenna are remarkable.  It was his capital and he built there with a truly Roman splendour.  We hear vaguely of a Basilica of Hercules which was to be adorned with a mosaic, though what this may have been we do not know; but we still have the magnificent Arian church of S. Apollinare, which he called S. Martin de Coelo Aureo because of its beautiful gilded roof; and less perfectly there remains to us the Arian church he built, called then S. Theodore and now S. Spirito, and the Arian baptistery beside it; the ruin, known as his palace, and his mighty tomb.

The government of Theodoric was great and generous, Roman in its completeness and in its largeness; but he did not succeed in establishing a new kingdom, a nation of Goths and Romans in Italy.  Why?

The answer to that question must be given and it is this:  Theodoric and his Goths were Arians.  Much more than race or nationality religion forms and inspires a people, welds them into one or divides them asunder.  Even though there had been no visible difference in culture and civilisation between the Goths, when for a generation they had been settled south of the Alps, and the Romans of the plain and of Italy, nevertheless they would have remained barbarians, for Arianism at this time was the certain mark of barbarism.[3] Had the barbarians not fallen into this strange heresy, had the Goths, above all, been Catholics, who knows what new nation might have arisen upon the ruin of the Western empire to create, more than five hundred years before, as things were, it was to blossom, the rose of the Middle Age?

[Footnote 1:  Cassiodorus, op cit. iii. 9.  Trs.  Hodgkin, op. cit.]

[Footnote 2:  Cassiodorus, op. cit. v. 8.]

[Footnote 3:  Heathenism even more so of course.  It cannot be altogether a cooincidence that those barbarians which first became Catholic, though they had been ruder and rougher than the rest, were destined to re-establish the empire in the West—­the Franks.]

[Illustration:  S. APOLLINARE IN CLASSE]

[Illustration:  Colour Plate THE MAUSOLEUM OF THEODORIC]

But this was not to be.  The work of Theodoric, a useful work as we shall see, was serving quite another purpose than that of establishing a new Gothic kingdom.  As for him and his government, they were utterly to pass away and by reason of the religion they professed.

The first blow at the endurance and security of the Ostrogothic hegemony was the conversion of Clovis to Catholicism in 496.  This changed the political relations, not only of every state in Gaul, but of every state in Europe, and enormously to the disadvantage of the Arians.  The second was the reconciliation, in 519, of the pope and the emperor, which rightly understood was the death warrant of the Gothic kingdom.  Had the Goths been Catholic, either that reconciliation would not have taken place, or it would have been without ill results for them.  As it was it was fatal, though not all at once.