If Theodahad was a villain as well as a fool, perhaps Vitiges was only the latter.  At any rate, he is generally considered to have acted with criminal folly, when, as the first act of his reign, he abandoned Rome and fell back upon Ravenna, determined to make his great defence in northern Italy.  But I think, if we consider the position more closely, we shall see that Vitiges was not such a fool as he looks.  He had seen the two great fortresses of Palermo and Naples fall, and mainly for the same reason, the fact that the whole of their populations except the Gothic garrisons were eagerly on the side of the enemy.  The situation of Rome, its great size, made it difficult to defend except with a very great army, and this would become a hundred times more difficult, if not impossible, if the population were to side with the attack.  Yet not only was that already certain, but the sympathies of the citizens there might be expected to be even more passionately Roman than others had been elsewhere; for Rome was the capital of Catholicism, the throne of the Church, the seat of Peter.  The Goth had to face the fact that, while he was perhaps hardly holding his own in Rome, Belisarius might stealthily pass on to overthrow the Gothic citadel at Ravenna.  He had to ask himself whether he could expect to defend both Rome and Ravenna, for if Ravenna were to fall the whole kingdom was lost, since now, not less but rather more than before, Ravenna was the key to Italy.

There is this also; Justinian had in the summer of 535 despatched two armies from Constantinople.  One of these was that which Belisarius had disembarked in Sicily, and which till now had been so uniformly and so easily victorious.  The other under Mundus had entered Dalmatia which it had completely wrested from the Goths by the middle of 536.  It is probable that Vitiges expected to be attacked in the rear and from the north by this victorious army.  If that should fall upon Ravenna while the Gothic strength was engaged in the defence of Rome, what would be the fate of that principal city, and with that lost, what would become of him in the Catholic capital?

Of course Vitiges ought to have met the imperial army in the field and given battle.  That was the true solution.  But no Gothic army ever dared to face Belisarius in the open, for though the Goths enormously outnumbered his small force of some 8000 men, they feared him as the possessor of a superior arm in the Hippotoxotai, mounted troops armed with the bow, and above all they feared his genius.

But Vitiges was no fool; his cause was hopeless from the first.  He abandoned Rome and fell back upon Ravenna, because that was the best thing to be done in the circumstances in which he found himself.  Among these must be reckoned the newness of his authority and the necessity of consolidating it by a marriage with a princess of the blood of Theodoric.  As it happened, this retreat enabled him to prolong a war that at first looked like coming to an end in a few months for four more years.