When he came round to the Salarian Gate again he found a crowd of soldiers and Roman citizens listening to the speech of a Gothic nobleman. The Goth addressed himself to the citizens in good Latin (which the marines did not understand), reproaching them for their faithlessness in admitting a pack of Greeks from Constantinople into their city. 'Greeks!' he cried, contemptuously. 'What salvation do you expect from a pack of Greeks? Surely you know what Greeks are from those whom you have seen — those companies of strutting Greek actors and those lewd pantomime dancers and those thieving, cowardly sailors?'
Belisarius turned to the marines and said to them smiling: 'I wish that you understood Latin.' They asked:' What does he say?'
'He is particularly abusing you sailors, and some of the things that he says are true.'
My mistress persuaded him to cat a little bread and meat and drink a cup of wine. As he was eating, five of the leading Senators came to him trembling, and asked: 'Tomorrow, General, you will yield?'
He laughed:' Treat the Goths with contempt, my illustrious friends, for they are beaten already.'
They looked away from him and exchanged glances of wonder. He told them: 'I am not either joking or bragging, for today I learned that the victory is ours if we behave with ordinary prudence.'
' But, Illustrious Belisarius, the arrows of their infantry headed you away from the Mulvian Bridge, and their cavalry in enormous strength chased you all the way back to Rome.'
Belisarius wiped his lips with a napkin and said: 'Excellent fellow-patricians, you have described exactly what happened, and this is the reason why I say that the Goths are already beaten.'
They muttered indignantly to themselves that he must be mad. But anyone with the least common sense would have seen at once what he meant. Their infantry had shown only defensive powers against him, and their cavalry also had been unable to ride him down, even with enormous superiority in numbers, and fresh horses. For, not being archers, they were obliged to keep their distance. We recalled another remark of Belisarius's, made at Daras: rare as was a general who could handle 40,000 men, he was rarer still who could handle 80,000. What of Wittich, who had brought nearly twice that number against us?
The first night of the Defence of Rome passed, and no attack was made at dawn.
CHAPTER 15
The first action that the Goths took against the city was to build six fortified camps, complete with ditch, rampart, and palisade. These were sited at intervals around the whole northern circuit, at distances from the walls varying between three hundred paces and one mile. Their next action was to cut every one of the fourteen aqueducts that had for centuries past supplied the city with abundant pure water fetched from a great distance. However, there were rain-water wells, and the western wall enclosed a stretch of the River Tiber, so we were by no means waterless; but the richer citizens took it very ill that they were obliged to drink rain-water and, if they wished to keep clean, to bathe in the river, being deprived of their own commodious baths. Belisarius was careful to stop up the aqueduct conduits with masonry at convenient points. He also built semicircular screens enclosing several of the city gates from inside, with only a small, well-guarded door in each of them, to prevent the citizens from making a sudden treacherous rush and admitting the enemy. The Flaminian Gate was so closely threatencd by a Gothic camp that he blocked it altogether. He inspected the whole course of the defences very carefully, both from inside and outside, in search of a weak spot, inquiring especially about the exits of the city sewers; but he found that these emptied into the Tiber, under the water, so that nobody could enter by them.
The greatest inconvenience that we suffered at first was from the stoppage of the public corn-mills on the Janiculan Hill, which were worked by water from Trajan's aqueduct. Since we had no horses or oxen in the city to spare for turning the cranks, for the time being we were compelled to use slaves. But Belisarius soon had the mills working again by water-power. Just below the Aurelian Bridge he tied two stout ropes across the river, tightened them with a winch, and used them to hold two large barges in position, head-on to the current and only two feet apart. He put a corn-mill in each barge, geared to a mill-wheel suspended between them, which the rush of water from under the arch of the bridge turned round at a good speed. When he saw that the method was successful he strengthened the ropes; and forty more barges, in couples with mill-wheels between them, were tied on to the original pair in a long line downstream. Thenceforward we had no difficulty in grinding our com; except when a few days later the Goths, having heard of the mills from deserters, sent trunks of trees floating down the river, some of which were carried against the mill-wheels and broke them. Belisarius then tied an iron chain-work across the bridge, constructed like a shallow fishing-seine. The floating tree-trunks were caught in this, and boatmen pulled them ashore to cut up as fuel for the public bakeries.
The citizens of Rome had hitherto been entirely unacquainted with the trials and perils of war, but Belisarius soon let them know that they must not expect to be inactive spectators, like the audience at a play: what privations the soldiers suffered, they must suffer too. In order to spare a reserve force of fighting men who could be hurried to any part of the walls threatened by attack, he enrolled still more unemployed labourers as sentries. He gave some of them daily archery practice in the Fields of Mars, and others he trained as spearmen. But they were sulky soldiers and remained a rabble, however hard the officers and sergeants worked at them.
Wherever Belisarius went in the city, Romans of both sexes and every social class had only black looks for him. They were angry that he had dared to take the field against the Goths before he had received sufficient troops from the Emperor, and thus involved them in a siege that threatened to end in starvation and massacre. King Wittich was told by deserters that the Senate was especially indignant against Belisarius; and therefore sent envoys to the city to take advantage of the disharmony.
These Goths, brought blindfolded into the Senate House, were permitted to address the Senators in the presence of Belisarius and his staff. They forgot the courtesies of the occasion and spoke roughly to the luxurious patricians, accusing them of having broken faith with the Gothic Army of National Defence and admitted a mixed force of 'Greek interlopers' to man the fortifications of the city. On Wittich's behalf they offered a general amnesty conditional upon Belisarius's quitting the city at once; they would even undertake to give him ten days' grace before starting in pursuit, which was most generous, they said, considering that the forces at his disposal were wholly inadequate to the defence of so enormous a stretch of walls.
Belisarius replied briefly that the Roman patricians had not been treacherous: they had merely admitted fellow-patricians into the city, together with the Imperial Forces that these noblemen lawfully commanded. 'My Gothic lords, I am empowered to answer with the voice of this loyal Senate, being of high rank among them, as well as with that of my Serene Master. I reply, then, that it was not Goths or any other Germans who originally built this city or these walls — why, you have not even kept them in good repair! Thus it is you who are the interlopers and without any title to possession. Wittich, your king, is not even recognized by my Serene Master as his vassal. So away now, I advise you, excellent Goths, and use your eloquence to persuade your compatriots of their folly; or the time will come, I warn you, when you and they will be glad to hide your heads in bramble-bushes and thistle-patches to avoid our lances. Meanwhile, understand well that Rome is only to be won from us by siege-craft and hard fighting. Siege-craft is an art in which no Goth, fortunately for ourselves, was ever adept; diercfore our forces, though small at present, are more than adequate to defend the walls which our ancestors built and which you Goths have abandoned without a struggle.'