Round the wide circumference, Narses assigned to himself, and to each of his lieutenants, a real or a feigned attack, while he silently marked the place of easy and unguarded entrance.
Neither the fortifications of Hadrian's mole, nor of the port, could long delay the progress of the conqueror; and Justinian once more received the keys of Rome, which, under his reign, had been five times taken and recovered.

[39] But the deliverance of Rome was the last calamity of the Roman people.

The Barbarian allies of Narses too frequently confounded the privileges of peace and war.

The despair of the flying Goths found some consolation in sanguinary revenge; and three hundred youths of the noblest families, who had been sent as hostages beyond the Po, were inhumanly slain by the successor of Totila.

The fate of the senate suggests an awful lesson of the vicissitude of human affairs.