[Footnote 2:  “Prone on the ground the emperor, whom all other men adored, adored the weary pontiff....  When Easter-day came, the pope, taking the place of honour at the right hand of the patriarch of Constantinople, celebrated Mass according to the Latin use in the great cathedral.”—­Marcellinus Comes, quoted by Hodgkin, op. cit. iii. p. 463.]

That was a great day not only for the papacy but for Italy.  The pope can never have hoped that Theodoric would open to him so great an opportunity for confirming the reconciliation between the emperor and the papacy which was the great need of the Latin cause.  There can be little doubt that pope John used his advantage to the utmost.  Early in 526 he returned to Ravenna to find Theodoric beside himself with anger.  The barbarian who had perfidiously murdered Odoacer his rival, and most foully tortured the old philosopher Boethius to death, was not likely to shrink from any outrage that he thought might serve him, even though his victim were the pope.  Symmachus, the father-in-law of Boethius, a venerable and a saintly man, was barbarously done to death and Pope John and his colleagues were thrown into prison in Ravenna, where the pope died on May 18 of that same year, and one hundred and four days later was followed to the grave by the unhappy Gothic king.

[Illustration:  CAPITAL FROM SANTO SPIRITO]

Theodoric had utterly failed in everything he had attempted.  His Romano-Gothic kingdom proved to be a hopeless chimaera, and this because he had not been able to understand the forces with which he had to deal.  Nor was he capable of learning from experience.  Even after the death of Pope John he countersigned the death warrant of his kingdom by an edict, issued with the signature of a Jewish treasury clerk, that all the Catholic churches of Italy should be handed over to the Arians.  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.