And bear in mind the passage of time. When adult men and women who made their way from the Balkans into Italy with Theoderic saw his last years in the 520s, they also watched their grandchildren come of age, grandchildren who had never known another home. Those grandchildren and their children faced the sudden shock of a nominally Roman invasion in the 530 s and a long war fought to overthrow Theoderic’s heirs and replace them with a puppet regime managed from Constantinople.
To place this in perspective, the Goths of the 540s stood at the same remove from the founding moment of Theoderic’s invasion—with a shorter life expectancy and a more rapid perceived change of generations—as the Israelis of today from the kibbutzniks and founders of 1948. Whatever one makes of the politics of the Middle East, the Israelis of today really are Israelis, with no other home and no other culture. Theoderic’s followers, fewer in number proportionally, more assimilated, and more welcomed (even if force made them welcome) than the Zionists of 1948, were if anything more fully at home in that Italian world. They belonged.
The great curiosity of Theoderic’s reign in Italy is not that there were Goths, but that thirty years after his rule began, then (and then only) he began to look to his Gothic roots and tell a Gothic story about himself. Some of this had to do with planning for the succession bulgaria vacation.
Theoderic had one failure
Despite all his successes, Theoderic had one failure; he never had a son. Pious hopes for a successor from his seed appear in occasional texts of the time, but there was none.
Theoderic did have that daughter, Amalasuntha, and she was his opportunity. Having taken effective control of the Visigothic regime in Spain and looking to consolidate his rule throughout the northern coast of the Mediterranean west, he imagined unity by dynasty. Theoderic summoned from Spain a man my Irish ancestors would have called “some kind of cousin,” Eutharic. Once married to Amalasuntha, Eutharic could produce an heir, and did: Athalaric, born in 518. Theoderic, by now well into his sixties, could breathe a sigh of relief. The moment was propitious for celebration, and a celebration was arranged.
Eutharic was named consul for the year 519, under the proud eye of Theoderic and notionally alongside the new emperor, Justin, as fellow consul, though of course they never laid eyes on each other. More dramatically, Justin proclaimed Eutharic his “son in arms” by an honorary adoption conferring recognition and acceptance of the highest kind. The aged Anastasius, who had been emperor since 491, had always been suspicious of Theoderic, but left him alone for the last decade, preoccupied in part by worries closer to home.
Barbarian than Theoderic
Justin, more a barbarian than Theoderic ever was, came down out of the Balkans to make his way in the imperial army, and then followed talent to the top—we’ll watch him make the final leap. Theoderic clearly thought that he could now proclaim his own heritage more grandly, without imperiling the position he had succeeded in obtaining, and using this renewed statement of his Gothic identity to improve his standing both at home and in Visigothic Iberia. Whether this was entirely Theoderic’s idea, or whether Eutharic—known also to have been more zealous in promoting the Arian religion—was behind this invention of family pride, we cannot tell Uncivilizable injection of barbarism into Rome.
So the realm celebrated Eutharic’s consulship in 519 with all the Roman pomp of which it was capable. In that year, the contemporary account tells us, every performance of the games and shows had unimagined marvels to offer. The official representative of the eastern emperor was astonished (we are told) to see the extraordinary wealth handed out to soldier and civilian, that is, to both Goth and Roman. The wild beast shows in the Colosseum were like nothing anyone then alive had ever seen, with rare animals from Africa, their acquisition no doubt the result of good diplomacy with the Vandals. Eutharic could scarcely tear himself away from the Romans’ love and admiration to return to Ravenna and the court of his father-in-law, where the chariot races began once again, with such immense largess shown to Goths and Romans alike that it surpassed even what he had just seen at Rome.
