What differentiated Theoderic from Odoacer—other than good luck and a long life—was his identification with the people on whose military loyalty he depended. The creation of Ostrogothic identity—or, if he did not create it, the exploitation and orchestration—is Theoderic’s most audacious and impressive achievement. We will see Clovis, his contemporary, follow a similar path, creating the Franks at about the same time, when it was impossible to predict which of these new groups would have the longer future. Odoacer was too Roman and too naive to take the precaution of cooking up an identity for his followers; that loyalty to old ways undermined him in the end.
In shaping the clay from which Ostrogoths emerged, Theoderic was at a disadvantage, as well, for he needed the collaboration of the native population to reinforce, or reinvent, an older artificial notion of a unified native people—the so-called Romans. In ruling those two peoples, Theoderic was the author of an extraordinarily successful constitutional novelty. Seeing his world hidden behind the scrims of performance and masquerade that he created has challenged the best historians, and none has escaped unenthralled. We must now step into his theater ourselves.
We must enter Theoderic’s theater with appropriate reverence for the stately performance he will stage for us, and with keen-eyed skepticism, determined, as if we were at a magic show, not to let our attention be distracted. Surely, we will be smart enough not to let anticipated misdirection and legerdemain fool us into believing in magic, won’t we?
ROMANS AND ROMANS
Uncontested in power from 493, triumphant at Rome in 500, Theoderic would reign until 526. Of all the rulers who held sway in the Italian peninsula from Romulus to his own day, only the original Caesar Augustus enjoyed a longer reign, and in the eastern empire Theodosius II (r. 408-450) and Justinian (r. 527-565) outdid him, but then no comparably long-reigned rival would appear until Basil II in the late tenth century in Constantinople. To this day, Theoderic has no rival on the Italian peninsula, unless we allow popes into the contest, and even then Pius IX’s nearly thirty-two years fall short. It was an age when Italy was divided between Romans—and Romans.
Contemporaries made the era out to be a golden age, when you could leave your money lying outdoors at night, confident that none would steal it, and when cities never closed their gates. The peninsula was secure from serious military attack, disturbed only by skirmishes on the margins and news of one brief but substantial conflict in southern Gaul. Land tenure
was certain; law was consistent, predictable, and enforced; and public officers served in a regular order, almost all with titles long familiar in local history and use. People could grow up, marry, raise families, and die exactly as their forebears had. The stability of empire had returned. Given how needy and overbuilt the region was—long accustomed to being propped up by tax revenues, living on imports—Odoacer’s and Theoderic’s achievements are unexpected and striking bulgaria tours.
Experience of aristocratic families
As in all of classical antiquity, however, too much of what we hear about this age is filtered through the experience of aristocratic families, the kind who still hung the smoke-stained ancestral death masks in what they probably still called the atrium of their family home, whatever architectural form it took. Those ancestors foreshadowed the ones that Gilbert and Sullivan’s Major-General found in the chapel on his estate in The Pirates of Penzance:
FREDERIC : But you forget, sir, you only bought the property a year ago, and the stucco on your baronial castle is scarcely dry.
MAJOR-GENERAL: Frederic, in this chapel are ancestors: you cannot deny that. With the estate, I bought the chapel and its contents. I don’t know whose ancestors they were, but I know whose ancestors they are.
The legends of Roman families took a particularly sharp turn in the fourth century under and after Constantine, when many old families found themselves rather taken over and brought under new management by the freshly minted aristocrats—usually military men—of the regimes of Diocletian and Constantine. The children and grandchildren of a colonel who made a good marriage to an impoverished blue blood deferred to no one in their ostentatious reverence for ancient lineage. Undoubtedly, genealogists might trace some twig of marriage and descent on even the shakiest family trees back to olden times Seen through Italian eyes.
The Decii, the Anicii, and the Basilii of the fifth and sixth centuries in Rome—those were the families that loomed largest in Theoderic’s Rome—were far removed from the worthies of old whose names they bore. Any members of the Decii of the sixth century could tell the story of their heroic ancestor in the Samnite wars of the fourth century BCE, the one who made an offering of himself and the enemy’s soldiers to the gods above and below before riding into battle in order to ensure victory for the Romans during his consulship. And that was usually enough for family pride dozens of generations later.
