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 Chap, xli] OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE 353 nearly transpierced with an arrow, if the mortal stroke had not been intercepted by one of his guards, who lost, in that pious office, the use of his hand. The Goths of Osimo, four thousand warriors, with those of Faesulae and the Cottian Alps, were among the last who maintained their independence ; and their gallant resistance, which almost tired the patience, deserved the esteem, of the conqueror. His prudence refused to subscribe the safe-conduct which they asked, to join their brethren of Eavenna ; but they saved, by an honourable capitulation, one moiety at least of their wealth, with the free alternative of retiring peaceably to their estates, or enlisting to serve the emperor in his Persian wars. The multitudes which yet ad- hered to the standard of Vitiges far surpassed the number of the Eoman troops; but neither prayers, nor defiance, nor the extreme danger of his most faithful subjects, could tempt the Gothic king beyond the fortifications of Eavenna. These forti- fications were indeed impregnable to the assaults of art or violence; and, when Belisarius invested the capital, he was soon convinced that famine only could tame the stubborn spirit of the Barbarians. The sea, the land, and the channels of the Po, were guarded by the vigilance of the Eoman general ; and his morality extended the rights of war to the practice of poisoning the waters, 121 and secretly firing the granaries, 122 of a besieged city. 123 While he pressed the blockade of Eavenna, he was surprised by the arrival of two ambassadors from Constanti- nople, with a treaty of peace which Justinian had imprudently signed without deigning to consult the author of his victory. By this disgraceful and precarious agreement, Italy and the 121 In the siege of Auximum, he first laboured to demolish an old aqueduct, and then oast into the stream, 1. dead bodies ; 2. mischievous herbs ; and 3. quick- lime, which is named (says Procopius, 1. ii. c. 29) r'navos by the ancients, by the moderns &<r£e<TTos. Yet both words are used as synonymous in Galen, Dioscorides, and Lucian (Hen. Steph. Thesaur. Ling. Grsec. torn. iii. p. 748). 122 The Goths suspected Mathasuentha as an accomplice in the mischief, which perhaps was occasioned by accidental lightning. 123 In striot philosophy, a limitation of the rights of war seems to imply non- sense and contradiction. Grotiu6 himself is lost in an idle distinction between the jus naturae and the jus gentium, between poison and infection. He balanoes in one scale the passages of Homer (Odyss. A. 259, &c.) and Florus (1. ii. c. 20, No. 7 ult.) ; and in the other the examples of Solon (Pausanias, 1. x. o. 37) and Belisarius. See his great work, De Jure Belli et Pacis (1. iii. c. 4, s. 15, 16, 17, and in Barbeyrac's version, torn. ii. p. 257, &c). Yet I can understand the benefit and validity of an agreement, tacit or express, mutually to abstain from certain modes of hostility. See the Amphiotyonic oath in ^schines, de Falsa Legations. vol. iv.— 23