Some of these families we know well enough to strike up an acquaintance, as the generations lead one into another for at least one or two turns of fortune’s wheel. Even when we fasten our gazes on the leading families, though, we see arrivistes as often as we see those who could claim long ancestry. Liberius, for example, we have met already, flourishing in Theoderic’s early days, from a family of no special repute. Still only about thirty years old at the change of regimes, from somewhere in northern Italy and of unremarkable family, he had served Odoacer, had switched allegiance nimbly to Theoderic, and made no pretense of hating his former master while matter-of-factly offering his services to the new. Theoderic admired and accepted the offer, and he advanced Liberius directly to the highest office he had to give, that of praetorian prefect.
Liberius or the Cassiodori
In all Theoderic’s years, only traditional candidates like Liberius or the Cassiodori held the traditional offices of praetorian prefect, count of the sacred generosity, quaestor, master of offices, and the like, the jobs elaborately laid out in the law codes and bureaucratic documents of the evolving late empire. Since the fourth century the praetorian prefect had effectively become the prime minister and highest civil officer of government, drawing his title from notional supervision of the praetorian guard, but now he was responsible for that most important of government functions: survival. In other words, the praetorian prefect was the tax man: rate setter and collector of the money that supported the military, i.e., the real government. The official calendar was managed by the tax years, the indictions we spoke of, running from September to September, the period in which the summer’s harvest was collected and distributed to those who would consume it. Liberius earned enough praise for raising revenues without raising rates to make us think he was efficient, but his efficiency was probably due as much to the support the new ruler gave his prefect, and the power he could wield. The effectiveness of Roman government depended on appropriate fear in the governed private tours balkan.
Liberius was the one who settled Theoderic’s followers on their land with almost no disruption that we hear of. Those who had followed Theoderic into Italy or materialized out of the ground to ally themselves with him during the several years of his fight with Odoacer numbered in the low tens of thousands. Over the sixty years of his and his successors’ regimes, we get a good picture of the strikingly limited settlement patterns of those followers.
Italy north of the Po and mainly east of Milan and Pavia is their heartland; a much smaller community appears at Rome itself. There are sightings in Tuscany, but also indications that their con-centration was small, wealthy, and situated not far from the city of Rome itself. Because of their wealth, on one occasion Theoderic sent tax collectors to dun his Tuscan followers for their arrears, just as traditional Roman tax collectors had dunned senators there for centuries. In what seem to be smaller numbers, others settled down the coasts of southern Italy, in modern Calabria and Apulia.
Military power in the Roman empire
Those strategic few remind us of the central place of military power in the Roman empire at all periods. The Roman word that becomes “emperor” is imperator, general; and from the death of Nero to the death of Theodosius in 395, every emperor had generalship and soldiery about him (with one or two near-exceptions, like the religion-obsessed Heliogabalus). In the fifth century the retirement of delicate young emperors to palaces brought forward the real generals, stern men from the northern marches, to do the emperors’ dirty work for them Theoderic from Odoacer.
For a very long time, the dirtiest of that work had gone on far from the Mediterranean, its cities, and its settled populations. Roman soldiers, coming to the end of their service, expected to be looked after, and the customary form of care was a gift of land. Viewed from inside the empire, they could seem like Zionists in Palestine during the early twentieth century. Looked at from far enough away, with the right spyglass, it could seem that the land they were given was empty. For centuries, soldiers had been given other people’s land like that, and Italy was secure.
Now Italy had to get used to compensating its own protectors. And some land in Italy was empty. The arrangement we have seen Liberius make was very clever, very Roman, and very ingenious. The most settled and wealthy of Roman landlords, the great senators, who held property mainly from Rome south through Campania to the bay of Naples and then in other advantageous areas from Tuscany down to Calabria and—some of them again, or still— into Sicily, would have felt little impact from the supposed invasion. It was the ones without connections, the ones who could be ignored, who suffered. No surprise.
