This page needs to be proofread.
308
THE DECLINE AND FALL
of each other, advanced near three hundred miles along. the sea-coast. The people of Bruttium, Lucania, and Campania, who abhorred the name and religion of the Goths, embraced the specious excuse that their ruined walls were incapable of defence; the soldiers paid a just equivalent for a plentiful market; and curiosity alone interrupted the peaceful occupations of the husbandman or artificer. Naples, which has swelled to a great and populous capital, long cherished the language and manners of a Grecian colony;[1] and the choice of Virgil had ennobled this elegant retreat, which attracted the lovers of repose and study, from the noise, the smoke, and the laborious opulence of Rome.[2] As soon as the place was invested by sea and land, Belisarius gave audience to the deputies of the people, who exhorted him to disregard a conquest unworthy of his arms, to seek the Gothic king in a field of battle, and, after his victory, to claim, as the sovereign of Rome, the allegiance of the dependent cities. "When I treat with my enemies," replied the Roman chief, with an haughty smile, "I am more accustomed to give than to receive counsel ; but I hold in one hand inevitable ruin, and in the other, peace and freedom, such as Sicily now enjoys." The impatience of delay urged him to grant the most liberal terms; his honour secured their performance; but Naples was divided into two factions; and the Greek democracy was inflamed by their orators, who, with much spirit and some truth, represented to the multitude that the Goths would punish their defection and that Belisarius himself must esteem their loyalty and valour. Their deliberations, however, were not perfectly free: the city was commanded by eight hundred Barbarians, whose wives and children were detained at Ravenna as the pledge of their fidelity; and even the Jews, who were rich and numerous, resisted, with desperate enthusiasm, the intolerant laws of Justinian. In a much later period, the circumference of Naples[3] measured only two thousand three
- ↑ Nero (says Tacitus, Annal. xv. 35) Neapolim quasi Græcam urbem delegit. One hundred and fifty years afterwards, in the time of Septimius Severus, the Hellenism of the Neapolitans is praised by Philostratus: γένος Ἕλληνες καὶ ἀστυκοὶ, δθεν καὶ τὰς σπουδὰς τω̂ν λόγων Ἑλληνικοί εἰσι (Icon. l. i. p. 763, edit. Olear.).
- ↑ The otium of Naples is praised by the Roman poets, by Virgil, Horace, Silius Italicus, and Statius (Cluver. [tal. Ant. l. iv. p. 1149, 1150). In an elegant epistle (Sylv. l. iii. 5, p. 94-98, edit. Markland), Statius undertakes the difficult task of drawing his wife from the pleasures of Rome to that calm retreat.
- ↑ This measure was taken by Roger I. after the conquest of Naples (A.D. 1139), which he made the capital of his new kingdom (Giannone, Istoria Civile, tom. ii. p. 169). That city, the third in Christian Europe, is now at least twelve miles in
