Think not to despise the aid of a man unprotected and unknown! The citizens will never yield to your blockade; you shrink from risking the dangers of an assault; the legions of Ravenna are reported on their way hitherward.

Outcast as I am, I tell it to you here, in the midst of your camp--your speediest assurance of success rests on my discovery and on me!' The king started suddenly from his seat.

'What fool or madman!' he cried, fixing his eyes in furious scorn and indignation on the stranger's face, 'prates to me about the legions of Ravenna and the dangers of an assault! Think you, renegade, that your city could have resisted me had I chosen to storm it on the first day when I encamped before its walls?
Know you that your effeminate soldiery have laid aside the armour of their ancestors, because their puny bodies are too feeble to bear its weight, and that the half of my army here trebles the whole number of the guards of Rome?
Now, while you stand before me, I have but to command, and the city shall be annihilated with fire and sword, without the aid of one of the herd of traitors cowering beneath the shelter of its ill-defended walls!' As Alaric spoke thus, some invisible agency seemed to crush, body and mind, the lost wretch whom he addressed.

The shock of such an answer as he now heard seemed to strike him idiotic, as a flash of lightning strikes with blindness.

He regarded the king with a bewildered stare, waving his hand tremulously backwards and forwards before his face, as if to clear some imaginary darkness off his eyes; then his arm fell helpless by his side, his head drooped upon his breast, and he moaned out in low, vacant tones, 'The restoration of the gods--that is the condition of conquest--the restoration of the gods!' 'I come not hither to be the tool of a frantic and forgotten priesthood,' cried Alaric disdainfully.