Belisarius, who had fought the first great war so gloriously against Vitiges, and for so long and with so little encouragement had opposed Totila in the second, is of course one of the great soldiers of the world and perhaps the greatest the empire ever employed.  His capture of Ravenna, by stratagem it is true, but against time and, as it were, in spite of the emperor, brought the first Gothic war to an end, and would, had he been left in Italy a few months longer, have prevented all the long drawn out agony of the second.  As it was his achievement, and his achievement alone, made that second war something better than the hopeless affair it seemed for so long, and though he himself to all appearances made little headway against Totila, it was his series of heroic campaigns, in which he refused despair, that made the ever glorious march of Narses possible, and the final crushing of the barbarian in the Apennines after all but the crown of his endeavour.

Of his master, the great emperor, it is not for me to speak since to this day his works speak for him.  The thirty-eight years of his reign are the most brilliant period of the later Roman empire, and if the military triumphs he conceived were the work of Belisarius and Narses we must attribute to him alone the magnificent conception, the tireless energy, and the heroic purpose which established the great pillars of the Corpus Juris Civilis which is the legal foundation of mediaeval and of modern Europe, the basis of all Canon Law and of all Civil Law in every civilised country.  Of his great ecclesiastical polity perhaps we must speak with less enthusiasm, though not with less wonder; while his glorious buildings remain only less enduring than his codification of the laws.  If in Ravenna we are most nearly and splendidly reminded of him in S. Vitale, we do not forget that he was the creator of perhaps the greatest ecclesiastical building left to us, the mighty church—­lost to us now for near five hundred years—­of S. Sophia in Constantinople.  On the whole we see in Justinian the greatest of all the emperors save Augustus, and perhaps Constantine.  Nor can any later state show us so great a ruler.

Justinian in his Italian designs had been very well served by Belisarius, nor were his ideas less splendidly carried out by Narses.  Indeed, in many ways the eunuch was the better instrument and especially in administration.  He ruled in peace in Ravenna as I have said for eleven years, devoting himself to the resurrection of unhappy Italy.  In this we may think he was as successful as the shortness of the time of his rule would allow.  The catastrophe that put an end alike to his work and to the regeneration of Italy was the death of Justinian.  In that very year, 565, the great eunuch was deposed, an insulting recall reached him from the empress Sophia, and he retired to Rome, where he passed the few years that remained to him in retirement, and died there, it is thought, in 572.