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It was just after his triumph over Basiliscus that Zeno received the ambassadors of Odoacer, and was saluted as Emperor of West and East alike, in spite of his advice to the Romans to take back as their Caesar their old ruler, Julius Nepos, who was still in possession of part of Dalmatia, though he had lost Italy three years before. Perhaps Zeno might have been tempted to interfere with something more than advice in the affairs of the West, if his second batch of troubles had not fallen upon him, in the form of his long Gothic war with the two Theodorics—the sons of Theodemir and Triarius—which began in the year following his restoration.

THE EASTERN EMPERORS, 457-518.

The Ostrogoths had never gone westward, like their kinsmen the Visigoths. They had lingered on the Danube, first as members of the vast empire of Attila the Hun, then as occupying Pannonia in their own right. But, in the reign of Leo I., they had moved across the Save into the territory of the Eastern Emperors, and had permanently established themselves in Moesia. There they had settled down and made terms with the Constantinopolitan Government. But they were most unruly vassals, and, even in full time of peace, could never be trusted to refrain from raids into Thrace and Macedonia. |Early life of Theodoric.| The main body of their tribe now acknowledged as its chief Theodoric the son of Theodemir, the representative of the heaven-born race of the Amals, the kings of the Goths from time immemorial. Theodoric was now a young man of twenty-three, stirring and ambitious, who had already won a great military reputation by victories over the Bulgarians, the Sarmatians, and other tribes who dwelt across the Danube. He had spent ten years of his boyhood as a hostage at Constantinople, where he had learnt only too well the weak as well as the strong points of the East-Roman Empire. His after-life showed that he had there imbibed a deep respect for Roman law, order, and administrative unity; but he had also come to entertain a contempt for the timid Zeno, and a conviction that his bold tribesmen were more than a match for the motley mercenary army of the emperor, of which so large a proportion was still composed of Goths and other Teutons, who could not be trusted to fight with a good heart against their Ostrogothic kinsmen.