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The Italians thought that the execution of Symmachus and the imprisonment of Pope John foreboded a general persecution throughout Italy. It was rumoured that the Arians had won from the king his consent to an edict closing the Catholic Churches, and that the Goths were to take arms against their fellow-subjects. Considering the tenor of the whole of Theodoric’s previous life, it is most improbable that he had any such wild scheme of intolerance in hand. |Death of Theodoric, 526.| But he had certainly grown gloomy, suspicious, and hard in his declining days, and it was well for his own fame, as well as for his subjects, that he was carried off by dysentery not long after the death of Pope John. It would have been still better, both for king and people, had the end come three years earlier, before his first harsh dealings with Boethius. His unpopularity at the moment of his death is shown by the survival of several curious legends, which tell how holy hermits saw his soul dragged down to hell by the injured ghosts of John and Symmachus, or carried off by the fiend himself.