Page:The age of Justinian and Theodora (Volume 2).djvu/197

 the sight of a sword." As a result his tuition in letters was abandoned, and Athalaric was left free to follow his own devices. If he died in his eighteenth year, after a short career of dissipation and debauchery, we may feel assured that he was incapable of either arms or letters, and the issue need not be attributed to his emancipation from tutorial control.

Having despaired of her popularity among the chief men of her nation, Amalasuntha began to nourish treacherous designs against the Goths. While her son was in apparent health she concerted a flight to Constantinople, with the interested connivance of Justinian, contingent on her failure to destroy a faction whom she believed to be seeking her own destruction. When his decease was in prospect she went further, and meditated the total surrender of her kingdom into the hands of the Eastern Emperor. Justinian listened, but the scheme was only remotely feasible, and the Gothic queen made an effort to repair her feminine disability by assuming her cousin Theodahad as her partner on the throne. She offered him the name of King, with the convention that in her alone should be resident the regal prerogative. He accepted, but in bad faith and with a private reservation as to his own prepotency.

Theodahad was a married man of middle age, and has the distinction of being the first recorded scholar of the great German nation whose work in literature and science has so much contributed to the progress of knowledge in modern times. He was a devoted student of Latin and Greek philo-*