The spectacle hit every note of Roman splendor, but the message was deliberately Gothic and dynastic. At the same time, Theoderic’s house historian wrote books just to capture this splendor. This was Flavius Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator, the son of the man who secured Sicily and Calabria for Theoderic. He wrote a chronicle of all of human history, from Adam forward, through all the consuls of Rome, from the first in 509 BCE down to the exaltation of Eutharic himself, and then turned to a formal history of the Gothic people in twelve books, emphasizing the obvious, which was truer than the author or his patron knew: that the Goths had been forever part of the Roman world. His chronicle took every opportunity to mention the turning points in the history of Gothic-Roman relations and, where necessary, smooth over awkwardness. The larger work was marked throughout by the legend of Theoderic’s own family, the Amals, outlining seventeen generations of kings that culminated in the year he wrote: 519.6 Cassiodorus delivered a formal Latin oration in honor of Eutharic as well.
Chronicle of Romans
With three such magnificent books—chronicle of Romans, history of Goths, and prose poem praise of the ruler—the Roman enthronement of Eutharic, consul and heir, was complete. His ancestry was validated and approved, and at the same time firmly grafted onto the Roman family tree. The audiences for the games may have been seduced by the generosity that they received, but they also went away with a very clear message. The Roman empire was alive, well, and doing business in Italy, on pompous display in both Rome and Ravenna, with a regime that had deep roots in the history of the Mediterranean world, and with a long lineage. This consulship and the great visit of the year 500 were the two grandest spectacles at Rome in at least a century, and not until papal Rome of the Renaissance would there be anything to match them kukeri carnival.
When we hear such a thunderous assertion, we should listen for corresponding small voices that might say something else. What were they saying in 519? They suggested that this regime was illegitimate, that there were other families of long standing, that true religion might provide a reason for failing to assent to the regime’s perpetuity. The people who said this were the ones who saw a comet in the sky for two weeks that summer and interpreted it as a sign of dynastic change. Few if any voices were raised against the regime’s putative barbarianism, for ambitions of the kind that were in the air needed few excuses and plenty were at hand. The irrelevance of modern ideas about Goth barbarianism is proved when we see that a mighty empire was overthrown without anyone’s needing to use barbarians as an excuse or pretext. Theoderic’s great achievement was the coexistence of Romans with Romans and Romans of many different kinds, and even a suggestion of dissolving that unity would have baleful consequences.
These whispers were far from Theoderic’s mind in 519. All was in order and all was prepared for an orderly succession and a long and glorious future Balkans into Italy.
Then Eutharic died unexpectedly in 522 or 523, and without the crucial certainty of succession, the world Theoderic had brought together began to come undone.
CIVILITY AND TOLERATION
Civility and toleration were the hallmarks of Theoderic’s rule in Italy—he said as much himself. If they were the civility and toleration we find in strong-armed imperial orders, they were still real, but they were not the whole of his regime, nor was his regime the whole of life in Italy. To do justice to him and to understand what was lost when his successors destroyed what he had built, we have to slow down and marvel at how life went on in his land and time.
Theoderic was not merely lucky. A good reputation follows those who are well spoken of by their contemporaries, especially when they make sure to have contemporaries speak well of them. Then a measure of luck takes over. People wrote books by hand on papyrus or animal skins, and they were copied a few dozen times at most, passed from hand to hand, and preserved in households of the wealthy and powerful—and therefore of the doomed. From no age of antiquity do more than a tiny fraction of the books written survive to us in even one medieval copy.
