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426 THE DECLINE AND FALL [Chap, xliii virtues of Totila are equally laudable, whether they proceeded from true policy, religious principle, or the instinct of humanity : he often harangued his troops ; and it was his constant theme that national vice and ruin are inseparably connected; that victory is the fruit of moral as well as military virtue ; and that the prince, and even the people, are responsible for the crimes which they neglect to punish, second The return of Belisarius, to save the country which he had ofBeu^ 1 subdued, was pressed with equal vehemence by his friends and Italy. aj>. enemies; and the Gothic war was imposed as a trust or an exile on the veteran commander. An hero on the banks of the Euphrates, a slave in the palace of Constantinople, he accepted, with reluctance, the painful task of supporting his own reputa- tion and retrieving the faults of his successors. The sea was open to the Romans ; the ships and soldiers were assembled at Salona, near the palace of Diocletian ; he refreshed and reviewed his troops at Pola in Istria, coasted round the head of the Hadriatic, entered the port of Bavenna, and dispatched orders rather than supplies to the subordinate cities. His first public oration was addressed to the Goths and Romans, in the name of the emperor, who had suspended for a while the conquest of Persia and listened to the prayers of his Italian subjects. He gently touched on the causes and the authors of the recent disasters; striving to remove the fear of punishment for the past and the hope of impunity for the future, and labouring, with more zeal than success, to unite all the members of his government in a firm league of affection and obedience. Justinian, his gracious master, was inclined to pardon and reward; and it was their interest, as well as duty, to reclaim their deluded brethren, who had been seduced by the arts of the usurper. Not a man was tempted to desert the standard of the Gothic king. Belisarius soon discovered that he was sent to remain the idle and impotent spectator of the glory of a young barbarian ; and his own epistle exhibits a genuine and lively picture of the distress of a noble mind. "Most excellent prince, we are arrived in Italy, destitute of all the necessary implements of war, — men, horses, arms, and money. In our late circuit through the villages of Thrace and Illyricum, we have collected, with extreme difficulty, about four thousand recruits, naked and unskilled in the use of weapons and the