Page:The age of Justinian and Theodora (Volume 2).djvu/262

 *suntha, pre-eminent by her birth, her talents, and her beauty, would receive unremitting homage and admiration from Justinian and his nobles, and eclipse the Empress in her own halls, might be foreseen as an inevitable result of such an arrangement. While this affair was under consideration, and might at any moment be realized, another woman appeared on the scene, to whom the rivalry of the Gothic queen was at once as odious as it threatened to become to Theodora herself. Gudelina, the wife of Theodahad, participating in her husband's elevation, assumed the attributes of royalty at the Court of Ravenna, where she immediately found herself outshone by her brilliant cousin, whose prerogatives and merits were so much superior to her own. An instinctive alliance between the two women, the sting to whose vanities was projected from the same source, was quickly formed. Letters passed between them, cautiously expressed, but clear to the mind of each; and Theodora infused some of her own determination into the mind of the nominal queen in the West. The details of the plot which ensued are lost to us, and we can only see that the daughter of Theodoric, probably without apprehensions as regards those for whom she had been the author of fortune, was ensnared by a coalition of her foes, and under some specious pretence deported from her own court. By this consummation the Gothic clique might, perhaps, have been appeased; but the Empress was no advocate of half measures, and when Peter departed on his embassy to Ravenna he was intrusted by her with a secret mandate to encompass the death of Amalasuntha. Instead, therefore, of acting on behalf of Justinian, he obeyed Theodora, and