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 470 THE DECLINE AND FALL river Addua, and from the Po to the Rhaetian and Julian Alps. Before the in-uption of the Barbarians, fifty V^enetian cities flourished in peace and prosperity ; Aquileia was placed in the most conspicuous station ; but the ancient dignity of Padua Avas supported by agriculture and manufactures ; and the property of five hundred citizens, who were entitled to the equestrian rank, must have amounted, at the strictest computa- tion, to one million seven hundred thousand pounds. Many families of Aquileia, Padua, and the adjacent towns, who fled from the sword of the Huns, found a safe, though obscure, refuge in the neighbouring islands.-'*' At the extremity of tlie (julf, where the Hadriatic feebly imitates the tides of the ocean, near an hundred small islands are separated by sliallow water from the continent, and protected from the waves by several long slips of land, which admit the entrance of vessels through some secret and narrow channels.^" Till the middle of the fifth century, these remote and sequestered spots re- mained without cultivation, with few inhabitants, and almost without a name. But the manners of the ^enetian fugitives, their arts and their government, were gradually formed by their new situation ; and one of the epistles of Cassiodorius,^^ which describes their condition about seventy years afterwards, may be considered as the primitive monument of the repub- lic. The minister of Theodoric compares them, in his quaint declamatory style, to water-fowl, who had fixed their nests on the bosom of the waves ; and, though he allows that the Venetian provinces had formerly contained many noble families, he insinuates that they were now reduced by misfortune to the same level of humble poverty. Fish was the common, and almost the universal, food of every rank ; their only treasure ^ This emigration is not attested by any contemporary evidence : but the fact is proved by the event, and the circumstances might be preserved by tradition. The citizens of Aquileia retired to the isle of Gradiis, those of Padua to Rivus Altus, or Rialto, where the city of Venice was afterwards built, <S:c. lOh the forged decree of the Senate of Patavium and the supposed foundation of a church of St. James on the Rivus Altus in A.D. 421, see Hodgkin, Italy, ii. 182 S(f^.] 5" The topography and antiquities of the Venetian islands, from Gradus to Clodia, or Chioggia, are accurately stated in the Dissertatio Chronographica de Italia Medii JEvi, p. 151-155. '^ Cassiodor. Variar. 1. .xii. epist. 24. Maffei (Verona Illuslrata, part i. p. 240-254) has translated and explained this curious letter, in the spirit of a learned antiquarian and a faithful subject, who considered Venice as the only legitimate offspring of the Roman republic. He fixes the date of the epistle, and consequently the prnsfecture, of Cassiodorius, A.D. 523 [?537 A.D.j ; and the marquis's authority has the more weight, as he had prepared an edition of his works, and actually published a Dissertation on the true orthography of his name. See Osservazioni Letterarie, torn. ii. p. 290-339.