ITALY AND HER INVADERS

BOOK IV.

THE OSTROGOTHIC INVASION

CHAPTER VIII.

THEODORIC AND HIS COURT.

 

WE have endeavoured in the previous chapter to look at Theodoric king of the Goths and the Romans with the eyes of such of his old barbarian comrades as survived the hardships of the march and the perils of four bloody battles, and found themselves quartered in the pleasant lands of Italy, with every possession that heart could desire except their old freedom. Let us now hear what the Roman inhabitants of the land, the orators and churchmen, who alone could translate his deeds into literature and so transmit his fame to posterity, have to tell us concerning him.

No stirring It may be stated at once that no great events mark his and no great historian illustrate his reign. Seldom has there been a better illustration of the proverb, ‘Happy is the nation that has no annals'; for in the comparative poverty of our historical information one thing is clear, that the period during which Theodoric bore sway, a period equivalent to the average length of a generation of mankind, was a time of great and generally diffused happiness for the Italian population, one that stood out in emphatic contrast to the century of creeping paralysis which preceded, and to the ghastly cycle of wars and barbarous revenges which followed that peaceful time.

But, had the events of this reign been many we could have said little about them. By some strange fatality, the Ostrogothic King, with all his generous patronage of arts and literature, never lighted on the ‘sacred bard' who should keep his fame green through the centuries, nor on the fluent historian who should weave the various actions of his time into a connected history. Or, if such a work ever was written—and possibly the later books of Cassiodorus' history of the Goths would have answered to this description—the foolish sieve of Time, which so often retains the sand and lets the pure gold fall through into oblivion, has not preserved it to our days.

Much valuable and interesting information however, as to both home and foreign affairs, can be obtained from the official correspondence of Cassiodorus, the manner of the composition of which has been glanced at in the previous chapter. But the only continuous account of the history of his reign—except a few meagre sentences of Jordanes—is contained in the mysterious fragment which is quoted by historians as Anonymus Valesii, and which is always printed (for no very obvious reason) at the end of the history of Ammianus Marcellinus.

This unknown scribe, with whom we have already made some acquaintance, takes his literary name from Henri de Valois, a French scholar of the seventeenth century, who first introduced him to the modern world. According to an opinion now generally accepted, he is none other than that Maximian Bishop of Ravenna whose mosaic portrait we still see on the walls of S. Vitale, where, arrayed in alb and pallium and with a jewelled cross in his hand, he consecrates the new church in the (imaginary) presence of Justinian and his Court. Whoever the writer be, he writes as an ecclesiastic and as an inhabitant of Ravenna. A vein of something like legendary adornment runs through his narrative, nor should we be justified in quoting him as an absolutely accurate witness for events, some of which may have happened twenty or thirty years before his birth, and the latest of which (as recorded by him) probably happened in his boyhood. But, as has been before hinted, there is every reason to think that for some of his names and dates he relies upon the absolutely contemporary but now perished ‘Annals of Ravenna'; and on the whole, as historical authorities go, he is, notwithstanding his anonymousness, a very fair voucher for the truth of the facts which he records.

As the extract is not long, and is of considerable importance, it will be well to translate it entire:—

THE ANONYMUS VALESII ON THEODORIC.

‘Now Theodoric had sent Faustus Niger on an embassy to Zeno. But as the news of that Emperor's death arrived before the return of the embassy, and as the entry into Ravenna and the death of Odoacer had intervened, the Goths confirmed Theodoric to themselves as king, without waiting for the orders of the new Emperor.

‘He was a man most brave and warlike, the natural son of Walamir king of the Goths. His mother was called Ereriliva, a Gothic woman but a Catholic, who took at baptism the name Eusebia.

‘He was an illustrious man and full of good-will towards all. He reigned thirty-three years, and during thirty of those years so great was the happiness attained by Italy that even the wayfarers were at peace¹ For he did nothing wrong. Thus did he govern the two nations, the Goths and Romans, as if they were one people, belonging himself to the Arian sect, but arranging that the civil administration of the Romans should continue as it was under the Emperors. He gave presents and rations to the people, yet though he found the Treasury quite bankrupt, by his own labour he brought it round into a flourishing condition. Nothing did he attempt against the Catholic faith. He exhibited games in the Circus and Amphitheatre, so that he received from the Romans the titles Trajan and Valentinian (as he did in truth seek to bring back the prosperous times of those emperors); and on the other hand, the obedience rendered by the Goths to the Edictum Theodorici showed that they recognised its author as in all things their Mightiest.

‘Unlettered as he was, so great was his shrewdness that some of his sayings still pass current among the common folk, a few of which we may be allowed here to preserve.

‘He said, “He who has gold and he who has a devil can neither of them hide what they have got.”

‘Also, “The Roman when in misery imitates the Goth, and the Goth when in comfort imitates the Roman.”

‘A certain man dying left a wife and a little boy too young to know his mother. The child was taken away by a friend of the fathers into another province, and there educated. Returning as a young man to his mother, he found that she had betrothed herself to a suitor. When however she saw her son she embraced him, and blessed God for restoring him to her : so he abode with her thirty days. At the end of that time her lover returns, sees the youth and asks “Who is this?” She replied, “My son.” When he found that she had a son, he began to claim back again his earnest-money, and to say, “Either deny that this is your son, or else go hence.” Thus compelled by her lover, the woman began to deny the son whom she had previously owned, and ordered him out of the house as a stranger to her. He answered that he had returned, as he had a right to do, to his mother in the house of his father. Eventually the son ap­pealed to the King against his mother, and the King ordered her to appear before him. “Woman!'' said he, “you heare what this young man urges against you. Is he thy son or no?”. She answered, “He is not my son, but as a stranger did I entertain him”. Then when the woman's son had told all his story in the King's Court, the King said to her again, “Is he thy son or no?”. Again she said, “He is not my son”. Said the King to her, “And what is the amount of your possessions, woman?”. She answered, “As much as 1000 solidi” [£6oo]. Then the King swore that nothing would satisfy him, unless the woman took him (the young man) for her husband instead of the suitor. With that the woman was struck with confusion, and confessed that he was indeed her son. And many more stories of the same kind are related of him.

‘Afterwards he received from the Franks a wife named Augofleda; for he had had a wife before his accession to the throne who had borne him two daughters. One, named Arevagni, he gave in marriage to Alaric king of the Visigoths in Gaul, and the other, named Theodegotha, to Sigismund son of King Gundebaud [the Burgundian].

‘Having made his peace with the Emperor Anastasius through the mediation of Festus for his unauthorised assumption of the royal title, [the Emperor] also restored to him all the ornaments of the palace which Odoachar had transmitted to Constantinople, contested ‘At the same time there arose a strife in the the Papacy, city of Rome between Symmachus and Laurentius, both of whom were consecrated [bishops]. By Divine ordering Symmachus, the worthier of the visit to two, prevailed. After peace had been restored King Theodoric went to Borne, the Church's capital, and paid his devotions to the Blessed Peter as devoutly as any Catholic. To meet him, Pope Symmachus and all the Senate and people of Rome poured forthwith every mark of joy, outside the gates of the city. Then Theodoric entering the city came to the Senate, and at the Palma delivered an address to the people of Rome, promising that by God's help he would keep inviolate all that the preceding Roman sovereigns had ordained.

‘Celebrating the thirtieth anniversary of his accession he entered the city in triumph, rode to the palace, and exhibited to the Romans the games of the Circus. He also gave to the Roman people and to the poor a yearly supply of grain to the amount of 120,000 modii [3750 quarters], and for the restoration of the palace or the repair of the walls of the city he ordered 200 lbs. [of gold = £8000] to be paid annually from the proceeds of the duty on wine.

Moreover, he gave his sister Amalafrigda in marriage to Transimund king of the Vandals.

‘He made Liberius, whom in the beginning of his reign he had appointed Praetorian Prefect, Patrician, and gave him as his successor in the former office—[The name seems to have dropped out.] Therefore Theodorus son of Basilius [and Odoin his Count (?) conspired against him. When he had discovered this plot he ordered his head to be cut off in the palace which is called “Sessorium.” For(?) at the request of the people he directed that the words of the promise which he had made them in his popular harangue should be engraved on a brazen tablet and fixed in a place of public resort.

‘Then returning to Ravenna in the sixth month he gave Amalabirga his sister's daughter in marriage to Herminifrid king of the Thuringians. And thus he pleased all the nations round about him; for he was a lover of manufactures and a great restorer of cities.

‘He restored the aqueduct of Ravenna which Trajan had built, and after a long interval of time again introduced water into the city. He made the palace perfect, but did not dedicate it, and he finished the porticoes round the palace.

‘Also at Verona he erected baths and a palace, and carried a portico from the gate to the palace. The aqueduct, which had been long destroyed, he renewed, and introduced water through it. Moreover he surrounded the city with new walls.

‘At Ticinum [Pavia] also he built a palace, baths, and an amphitheatre, and carried new walls round the city. On many other cities also he bestowed many benefits. Thus he so charmed the neighbouring nations that they came under a league with him, hoping that he would be their king. The merchants too from divers provinces came flocking together to him, for so great was the order which he maintained, that, if any one wished to leave gold or silver on his land, it was deemed as safe as if within a walled city. An indication of this was the fact that throughout all Italy he never made gates for any city, and the gates that were in the cities were not closed. Any one who had any business to transact did it at any hour of the night as securely as in the day.

‘In his time men bought wheat at 60 modii for a solidus [about 12s. a quarter], and for 30 amphorae of wine they paid the same price [2s. 4d. per gallon].

‘Now King Theodoric was an unlettered man, and so unsuccessful as a student that after years of reigning he was still utterly unable to learn the four letters of his own signature to one

of his edicts Thiud, if in Gothic, THEO if in Latin. Wherefore he ordered a golden plate to be engraved, having the four letters of the royal name pierced through it, so that when he wished to sign any document he could place the plate upon the paper, and drawing his pen through the holes could give it the appearance of his own signature.

‘Then Theodoric, having conferred the honours of the consulship on [his son-in-law] Eutharic, triumphed at Rome and Ravenna. But this Eutharic was a man of very harsh disposition, and a bitter enemy of the Catholic faith.

‘After this, when Theodoric was staying at Verona through fear of hostile movements among the barbarians [north of the Alps], a strife arose between the Jews and Christians of the city of Ravenna. For the Jews, disliking those who were baptized, often by way of derision threw persons into the water of the river, and in the same way they made sport of the Lord's Supper. Hereupon the people being inflamed with fury, and being quite past the control of the King, of Eutharic, and even of Peter who was then bishop, arose against the synagogues and soon burned them. Then the Jews rushed to Verona, where the King was, and by the agency of Triwan the Grand Chamberlain, himself a heretic and a favourer of their nation, they got their case against the Christians presented to the King. He promptly ordered that, for their presumption in burning the synagogues, all the Roman population of Ravenna should pay a contribution sufficient to provide for their restoration; and those who had no money to pay were to be flogged through the streets of the city while the crier proclaimed their offence. Orders to this effect were given to Eutharic-Cilliga and to the Bishop Peter, and thus it was done’.

The ‘Anonymus' then begins to narrate the story of the religious troubles and persecutions which clouded the last years of Theodoric, and which will be described in a later chapter.

Let us try to bring to a focus the somewhat confused and inartistic picture which is here drawn for us by the most valuable of all witnesses to character, an unfriendly contemporary.

Evidently there was peace and prosperity, at any rate comparative prosperity, throughout Italy in the reign of Theodoric. Absolute freedom from hostile invasion—except, as we shall see, some trifling ravages of the Byzantines in Apulia—was a great thing; a thing to which Italy may almost be said to have been a stranger during the ninety years that had elapsed, since the clarions of Alaric first sounded in the plains of Pollentia. But yet more important for Italy, in her then condition, was the presence in the royal palace of a strong will, wielding irresistible power and guided by benevolence towards all classes of the people. Long enough had the name and the reality of power been disjoined the one from the other. Long enough had flatterers and rhetoricians pretended to worship the almost divine majesty of the Emperor, while every one knew that in reality some menacing barbarian freebooter, or some yet more intolerable barbarian life-guardsman, was master of the situation. Now, the man who was hailed as king was once more in truth a king of men. He knew, every Goth in his disbanded army, every Roman possessor in the most secluded valleys of the Appennines, knew, that Theodoric was and would be undisputed master. He could be terrible to all extortionate and unjust governors, because behind him there loomed no figure greater than his own ; he could be just, because the welfare of his subjects was in truth his own highest interest; he could be gentle, because he was irresistible.

The same picture of firm and just rule is brought before us by a few sentences of Procopius, who again, as a man employed in the Byzantine army, may be considered as a witness unfriendly to the Gothic rule.

‘Theodoric' says he, ‘ was an extraordinary lover of justice, and adhered rigorously to the laws. He guarded the country from barbarian invasion, and displayed both intelligence and prudence in the highest degree. Of injustice towards his subjects there was hardly a trace in his government, nor would he allow any of his subordinates to attempt anything of the kind, save only that the Goths divided among themselves the same proportion of the land of Italy which Odoacer had given to his partisans. So then Theodoric was in name a tyrant, but in deed a true king, not inferior to the best of his predecessors, and his popularity grew greatly, contrary to the ordinary fashion of human affairs, both among Goths and Italians. For generally, as different classes in the State want different things, the government which pleases one party, has to incur the odium of those who do not belong to it.

‘After a reign of thirty-seven years he died, having been a terror to all his enemies, and left a deep regret for his loss in the hearts of his subjects.’

The fact that such results were achieved by an unlettered chieftain, the scion of an only half-civilised German tribe, must be accounted a signal victory of human intelligence and self-restraint, and justifies, if anything can justify, the tight rein which, while curbing himself, he kept upon the old Teutonic freedom. Obviously however, with the best good-will on the part of the King, these results could not have been obtained in detail unless he had been well served by ministers—from the necessity of the case chiefly Roman ministers—like-minded with himself. To these men, the Sullys and the Colberts of the Gothic King, let us now turn our attention.

The first man who served as Praetorian Prefect under Theodoric, holding that great office for the first seven years of his reign, was Liberius. This man—who was of course Roman, not Teutonic, by origin—had occupied an important place among the ministers of Odovacar. Unlike the treacherous Tufa, he remained faithful to the last to his barbarian chief, and took an active part in directing the operations against Theodoric. On the downfall of his old patron, he showed no unmanly fear as to his own fortunes, no servile haste to propitiate the new lord of Italy, but, with calm sadness, intimated that he accepted the judgment of Heaven, and since he could no longer be loyal to Odovacar, he was willing to serve with equal loyalty that monarch's conqueror. Theodoric was wise enough to accept the proffered service, and, as we have seen, to confer upon the true-hearted Roman the still vast powers of the Praetorian Prefect.

Unhappily these seven first years of the reign of Theodoric—perhaps its most interesting portion —are an almost absolute blank. Liberius left no such copious record of official work behind him as was left by the fluent Cassiodorus. But we are informed incidentally that one of the chief cares of the new ministry was, as we might have expected, finance. He introduced a wise economy into every department of the State, and while the Exchequer found itself every year in a more flourishing condition, the tax-payer was conscious that, at any rate, there was no addition to his previous burdens. It seems probable that some, at least, of that praise which arose from a prosperous and contented Italy should be attributed to these early measures of Liberius.

One work of great delicacy and importance, which was successfully performed by him, was the assignment of the Tertiae, or third part of the soil of Italy, to the new-comers. Broadly, as has been already said, the new land-settlement was probably a transfer of these Land-thirds from the men of Odovacar to the men of Theodoric. But there may have been reasons, unknown to us, which prevented this from being the sole principle of distribution, and which obliged the commission, of which Liberius was the head, to proceed in many instances to a new division as between Roman and Goth. Here we are told he showed great tact and skill, settling neighbour by neighbour in such a way that not rivalry but friendship sprang out of their new relation, introducing probably the Gothic settlers chiefly into those parts of the country where the land really cried out for more numerous cultivators* and ever impressing upon his Roman countrymen the great principle of the new government, that the Goth was there for the defence of the whole land, and that, by sacrificing one-third, the Roman cultivator might reckon on enjoying the remaining two-thirds in security.

It was probably through the hands of Liberius that the tedious negotiations with Byzantium passed, those negotiations which ended at length in the recognition of Theodoric as legitimate ruler of Italy. The chief persons employed in these negotiations were Faustus and Festus, two Roman noblemen of about equal rank, and whom it is not easy to distinguish from one another. Faustus was a successor, though not the immediate successor, of Liberius in the office of Praetorian Prefect; and Festus, who was dignified with the high title of Patrician, was apparently at about the same time Prefect of the City. It may be useful, as a note of distinction between them, to observe that Faustus was the unsuccessful ambassador to Constantinople in 493, Festus the successful one in 497. Further, that while Faustus, in the disputed Papal election of 498, took the part of the ultimately successful candidate, Pope Symmachus, Festus, who desired to obtain a pontiff favourable to the Henoticon of Zeno, sided with the Anti-Pope Laurentius.

It was in one of the lucid intervals of this prolonged struggle for the chief place in the Roman Church that Theodoric visited the ancient capital of the Empire. ‘Murders, robberies and infinite evils' had afflicted the citizens of Rome, and even the nuns had been cruelly maltreated in this street warfare, which was to decide whether Symmachus or Laurentius was henceforward to have the power of binding and loosing in the kingdom of heaven. But, as has been said, there was a lull in the storm, during which the Ostrogothic King wisely determined to visit the city. Constantinople, the New Rome by the Bosporus, he had gazed upon near forty years before with eyes of boyish wonder. Now he was to see for himself the mysterious and venerable city by the Tiber; that city which had so long cast her spell upon his people, but of which he, a barbarian from the Danube, was now unquestioned lord. Having knelt devoutly at the shrine of St. Peter, in the long pillar-lined basilica (so unlike its modern representative) reared amid the gardens of Nero, he was met outside the gates of the city by the procession of Pope, senators and people, who, with shouts of loyal welcome, pressed forth to greet him. Then came, as the Anonymus Valesii has told us, the speech in the Forum, the games in the Circus, probably also in the Colosseum, and the solemn renewal of the grain largesse to the Roman populace, which had perhaps been interrupted since the days of Odovacar.

It seems probable that this may have been the occasion chosen by the King and his enlightened minister for the formal publication of the Edictum Theodorici. It is true that the somewhat obscure language of the Anonymus Valesii does not prove, as was once supposed, that it was promulgated at this time. The solemn privilegium, to which he refers, engraved on a brazen tablet and posted in the Forum, was quite a different document, and little more than a promise to observe the laws of his predecessors, such a promise as William the Norman gave to govern according to the laws of King Edward. But there is a certain amount of concurrent testimony in favour of this date, and no valid argument against it. Upon the whole, it may fairly be stated as a probable conjecture, though not an ascertained fact, that Theodoric's visit to Bome was the occasion of the publication of the Edict, and that Liberius was its author.

This Edict, of which a slight sketch is given in the note at the end of this chapter, is (as was stated in the last chapter) utterly unlike the codes which formulated the laws of the other barbarian monarchies. There is hardly a trace in it of German law or German ideas: it is Roman and imperial throughout. We may remember how Sidonius complained of a certain renegade Roman governor, as ‘trampling under foot the laws of Theodosius and setting forth the laws of Theodoric.' But here it is a German, a Theodoric himself, who, wisely no doubt for the most part, and with statesmanlike insight into the necessities of the case, treads the laws of his Amal forefathers in the dust and exalts on high the laws of Theodosius.

It may have been—though there is nothing but one darkly enigmatic sentence in the Anonymus to confirm the conjecture—the publication of this obviously Romanising edict, and the evident desire of Theodoric to draw as close as possible to his Roman subjects, which brought the Gothic disaffection to a head. Odoin, a barbarian Count, planned a conspiracy against his lord. We have no details of the plot or of its discovery. We only know that it failed, and that in the Sessorian Palace, just within the southern wall of Rome (hard by the Basilica della Croce, where rests Helena, mother of Constantine and discoverer of the Holy Cross), the treacherous Goth knelt down to receive the blow of the executioner, and the headless trunk of Odoin showed to all the world that the mild and righteous Theodoric could also be terrible to evil-doers.

It may have been during this tarriance at Rome that Theodoric commenced his great works of draining the Pontine Marshes and repairing the Appian Way, works commemorated in an inscription still preserved in the Piazza at Terracina. At the last-named place, situated about sixty miles from Rome, where a spur of the Volscian mountains juts out into the blue Tyrrhene Sea, stand yet on the brow of the hill the massive ruins of the so-called Palace of Theodoric. It may be doubtful how far this name is correctly given to them : but if the great Ostrogoth ever did dwell here, and look forth from these windows over the sea, which his wise rule was covering with the white winged messengers of commerce, and over the plain where the peaceful army of his labourers was turning the wilderness of the Pontine Marshes into a fruitful field, it was probably during this visit to Eome, in some weeks of villeggiatura, away from the sun-baked capital, that he thus sojourned at Terracina.

We see, from the statement of the Anonymus Valesii, that it was also during the King's residence in Rome that he took in hand the repair of the walls and of the imperial residence on the Palatine. So large a sum as £8000, spent yearly on these objects, would make a marked difference in the condition of both sets of buildings. We learn, from a letter of Cassiodorus that 25,000 tegulae—the square flat bricks which the antiquary knows so well—were used yearly in the restoration of the walls. We may well wonder, not that some tiles have been discovered bearing the name and titles of ‘Our Lord Theodoric, the benefactor of Rome', but that the number of these is not much larger¹.

Upon the whole we may probably conclude that this Roman visit, which lasted for six months, was one of the happiest periods in the life of Theodoric. There was peace abroad and at home. The barbarian stranger had borne the ordeal of an entry into the fastidious city by the Tiber, once the capital of the world, successfully, though it was an ordeal before which born Romans, like Constantius and Honorius, had well-nigh quailed. He had addressed the people in the Forum, he had shared the deliberations of the Conscript Fathers in the Senate House, and it seems safe to say that he had produced a favourable impression upon both assemblies. As he journeyed along the Flaminian Way to his chosen home by the Hadriatic, he felt himself more firmly settled in his seat, more thoroughly king of all the Italians as well as of all the Goths, than he had done before. The headless corpse of Odoin was well atoned for by the remembrance of the enthusiastic shouts, both of welcome and farewell, of the Roman people.

During this sojourn in Rome, Liberius, who was now probably a man advanced in years, was honourably dismissed from the laborious though dignified post of Praetorian Prefect, and received the rank of Patrician, which was generally conferred on those who were retiring from this office with the favour of their sovereign.

His successor as Praetorian Prefect, though perhaps not his immediate successor, was Cassiodorus, father of the writer so often named in this history. And here, in order to disentangle a needlessly complicated discussion, a few sentences must be devoted to the Cassiodorian pedigree.

From a sketch of the history of his ancestors, which Cassiodorus (the author) included in the official letter announcing to the Senate his father's elevation to the Patriciate, we learn that, for at least three generations the family had taken an active part in public life.

The first Cassiodorus who is here mentioned attained to the rank of an Illustris, and held a leading position in the province of Bruttii, which, with the neighbouring island of Sicily, he defended, apparently with a troop raised at his own cost, from an invasion of the Vandals. This may very probably have occurred in the year 440, when, as we learn from the Chronicle of his descendant, ‘Gaiseric sorely afflicted Sicily’.

His son, the second Cassiodorus, was a Tribune (or, as we should say, Colonel) in the army of Valentinian III, and a Notarius in the secret cabinet of the Emperor. In both capacities he seems to have attached himself zealously to the party of the brave and statesmanlike Aetius, the man to whom all true Roman hearts then turned with longing. In company with the hero's son Carpilio he went on an embassy to the court of Attila, one doubtless of the innumerable embassies with which the Emperor sought to soothe the anger of the terrible Hun in the years between 440 and 450. According to his descendant, Cassiodorus exercised, over the quarrelsome Mongol, something of the same magnetic influence that was afterwards obtained by Pope Leo. He dared to meet the omnipotent victor in argument; he calmly braved his wrath; he convinced him of the reasonableness of the Roman demands; he inspired him with respect for the State which could still send forth such ambassadors: finally, he brought back with him the peace which was well nigh despaired of. We are not bound to believe all this highly- coloured picture, which seems to be at least suggested by the embassy of Leo, perhaps simply adapted from that well-known scene. But we may fairly presume that his conduct earned the approbation of his superiors, since Aetius offered him the rank of an Illustris, and some charge upon the public revenues, if he would remain at court. Cassiodorus, however, preferred returning to his beloved Bruttii, and there, under the shadow of the purple hills of Calabria, ended his days in quietness, undisturbed apparently by the ruins of the falling Empire.

His son, the third Cassiodorus, entered more boldly into public life. When still a young he discharged the duties of Comes Privatarum Rerum and Comes Sacrarum Largitionum (the two offices which represent the duties of our Commissioners of Woods and Forests, and Chancellor of the Exchequer), and in both capacities he earned the good opinion alike of his own countrymen and of his barbarian master Odovacar.

In the struggle between Rugian and Ostrogoth he seems not to have taken a part, but, as soon as Theodoric's throne was set up at Ravenna, he and then at once offered his services to the new monarch, and they were gladly accepted. The inhabitants of Sicily, who looked upon the Gothic rule with doubt and suspicion, were won over by their neighbour to the side which he had made his own; and, on the other hand, his wise and soothing words restrained Theodoric from the revenge to which some hostile acts of the Sicilians might otherwise have impelled him. For these services he had been rewarded with the post of Corrector of Lucania and Bruttii, chief governor, that is to say, of his own native province. He had large herds of horses on his estates—the Calabria of that day by the dense shade of its forests afforded great advantages to the horse-breeder—and out of these he made such generous presents to Theodoric that his son in later years, speaking by the mouth of the King, said (no doubt hyperbolically), ‘he has mounted our whole army.’

This was the man who, having passed through all the lower ranks of the official service with credit and success, was now, in the first or second year of the sixth century, raised to the high honour of Praefectus Praetorio; an honour which had been already held for the extraordinary term of eighteen years by his kinsman Heliodorus, at Constantinople, when Theodoric himself was a guest of the Eastern Emperor. His own tenure of office was not long—we may conjecture it to have ended by the year 504—nor, except from the general terms of laudation in which it is referred to by his son, have we any information respecting it. We are fairly entitled to infer that he carried forward the policy of mild firmness and equal justice to both nations, which had been inaugurated by Theodoric and Liberius, and that his short administration contributed its share to the peaceful happiness of Italy.

Its chief event however, and that which has made it worth while to dwell upon the family honours in so much detail, was the fact that it his son to the notice of Theodoric, and was the means of starting that son on an official career which lasted for nearly forty years, and will for ever connect his name beyond any other name in literature with the varying fortunes of the Ostrogothic monarchy.

Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator, the fourth of the family whose fortunes we have to trace, was born at Squillace in Calabria about the year 480. The year was a memorable one, since it witnessed the birth of three of the foremost men of their age—Cassiodorus, Boethius, and Benedict, the politician, the philosopher, and the saint. The place—let it be sketched for us by the loving hand of the greatest of its sons :—

‘Scyllacium, the first city of Bruttii, founded by Ulysses the overthrower of Troy, is a city overlooking the Hadriatic Sea [more strictly the Gulf of Tarentum], and hangs upon the hills like a cluster of grapes; hills which are not so high as to make the ascent of them a weariness, but high enough to give a delicious prospect over the verdant plains and the deep blue back of the sea. This city sees the rising sun from its very cradle. The coming day sends forward no Aurora as herald of its approach, but with one burst uplifts its torch, and lo! the brightness quivers over land and sea. It beholds the rejoicing Sun-god, and so basks in his brightness all the day, that with good reason it might challenge the claims of Rhodes to represent itself as his birthplace. Its sky is clear, its climate temperate. Sunny in winter, it yet enjoys cool summers, and this moderation reflects itself in the character of its inhabitants. For a burningly hot country makes its children sharp and fickle, a cold one heavy and cunning; the best characters are produced by a more temperate clime.

‘Scyllacium has an abundant share of the delicacies of the sea, possessing near it those Neptunian doors which we ourselves constructed. At the foot of Mount Moscius we hewed out a space in the bowels of the rocks, into which we caused the streams of Nereus to flow. The sight of the fishes sporting in their free captivity delights all beholders. There man feeds the creatures on which he himself will shortly feed; they swim eagerly to take the morsels from his hand : sometimes, when he has fished to satiety, he sends them all back into the water.

‘Fair is it to see the labours of the husbandmen all round while tranquilly reposing in the city. Here are the cluster-drooping vineyards, there the prosperous toil of the threshing-floor, there the dusky olive shows her face. Thus, as Scyllacium is an unwalled town, you might at choice call it a rural city or an urban farm; and, partaking of both characters, its praises have been sounded far and wide'.

Such was Scyllacium and such Bruttii in the days of Theodoric's minister. It may be feared that a modern traveller would not find all the delights in the modern Squillace and the modern Calabria which then existed, still less that delicate and lovely civilisation which ten centuries before had tinged every shore and headland of ‘the Greater Greece'. Still, as then, the purple chain of Aspromonte divides the sparkling waters of the Eastern and the Western seas. Still do cities, beautiful at a distance, crown the finely-modelled hills that project into the plain. But the temple, with its pure white marble columns, has disappeared: a squalid commune replaces the Greek republic, instinct with life and intelligence, or the well-ordered Roman civitas. Instead of the white-robed Hellenes, wild-looking peasants, clad in goatskins, with their guns in their hands, slouch along through the cactus-bordered ways. The Saracen, the Spaniard, and the Bourbon have laid their heavy hands on the lovely region and brutalised its inhabitants. May better days be in store for it and for them in the Italy of the future!

The son who was born to Odovacar's minister at Squillace was named, as we have seen, Senator. It seems a strange thing to give a title like this as a personal name ; but there is no doubt that it was done in this case. Cassiodorus speaks of himself as Senator, and is so addressed by others. His letters are written by ‘Senator, a man of illustrious rank'; and in his Chronicle, when he has to record his own consulship (A.D. 514), his entry is ‘Senatore, viro clarissimo consule'

It is evident that the young Senator received the best education that Italy could furnish in his day, and imbibed with enthusiasm all that the rhetoricians and grammarians who conducted it could impart to so promising a pupil. All through life he was essentially a literary man. We may perhaps in this aspect compare him to Guizot, a man of letters who rose to be first minister of a mighty monarchy, but whose heart was always given to the studies which engrossed him, when still a professor in the University of Paris. There are some indications in Cassiodorus' works that, next to Rhetoric, next to the mere delight of stringing words together in sonorous sentences, Natural History had the highest place in his affections. He never misses an opportunity of pointing a moral lesson by an allusion to the animal creation, especially to the habits of birds. Of course most of the stories which he thus introduces are mere imaginations, and often of a very laughable kind; but, had he fallen on a happier and more scientific age, it is reasonable to think that there might have been found in him some of the qualities of a Buffon or an Audubon.

It seems probable that, immediately on the elder Cassiodorus receiving the post of Praetorian Prelect, Senator, still quite a young man, obtained an appointment as his Consiliarius, or legal assessor, a post generally filled by young men with some legal training,— we shall find Procopius holding it in the tent of Belisarius,—and one which no doubt gave valuable experience to any man who hoped some day to sit himself on the judgment-seat.

It was while he was thus acting as Consiliarius to his father that he pronounced in presence of Theodoric an oration in his praise, which by its eloquence so delighted the King that he appointed him, still quite a young man, to the office of Quaestor, which brought with it what we should call cabinet-rank. The rank of Illustris gave him the privilege of sharing the secret and friendly conversation of the monarch, and entitled him to pronounce in his master's name solemn harangues to the ambassadors of foreign nations, to the Senate, sometimes perhaps to the citizens and the army. Allusion has already been made to the spirit in which Theodoric probably regarded the necessary labour of translating his own weighty, sledge­hammer sentences into the tumid Latin of the Lower Empire. But, however Theodoric may have regarded that work, there can be no doubt that Cassiodorus thoroughly enjoyed it. To have the charge of the correspondence of so great a king, to address to the officials of Italy, or even to the Sacred Majesty of Byzantium, a series of flowing sentences interspersed with philosophical reflections, excellent if not new, and occasionally to illustrate one's subject with a ‘delicious digression' on the habits of birds, the nature of the chameleon, the invention of letters, or the fountain of Arethusa,—this was happiness indeed; and, though the emolumenta of the office were large, one may believe that Cassiodorus would have been willing to pay, instead of receiving them, for the privilege of doing the very work which was more to his liking than that done by any other Italian between the mountains and the sea.

Cassiodorus has been aptly likened to one of the improvisatori of modern Italy. The Variae are State papers put into the hands of an improvisatore to throw into form, and composed with his luxuriant verbiage, and also with his coarse taste. The shortest instructions begin with an aphorism or an epigram. If they are more important or lengthy, they sparkle and flash with conceits or antitheses, and every scrap of learning, every bit of science or natural history, every far-fetched coincidence which may start up in the writer's memory, however remote in its bearing on the subject, is dragged in to exalt or illustrate it, though the subject itself may be of the plainest and most matter-of-fact kind. You read through a number of elaborate sentences, often tumid and pompous, sometimes felicitous and pointed, but all of the most general and abstract sort; and nestling in the thick of them, towards the end of the letter or paper, you come upon the order, or instruction, or notification, for which the letter or paper is written, almost smothered and lost in the abundance of ornament round it.

Yet let us not be unjust to the rhetorician-statesman. We can all see, and seeing must smile at, the literary vanity which peeps out from every page of his letters. All who consult those letters for historical facts must groan over the intolerable verbosity of his style, and must sometimes wish that they could have access to the rough, strong sentences of the Gothic King, instead of the wide expanse of verbiage into which his secretary has diluted them. Yet literary vanity was by no means the only motive of his service. Like his father, and like Liberius, he had perceived that this so-called barbarian was the best and wisest ruler that Italy had had for centuries, and that the course of true civilisation could be best served by helping him to work out his own scheme of a State, defended by German arms but administered by Roman brains. Perhaps too he saw, what we can see so plainly, the heavy price which Italy as a land had paid for Rome's dominion over the world. The desert expanse of the Campagna, though

                           ‘A less drear ruin then than now,'

may have spoken to him, as it does to us, of the disastrous change since the days when Rome was a little town and those plains were covered with the farms of industrious and happy husbandmen. Above all, as the instincts of a true statesman may have showed him, a return, at that time of day, to the imperial order of things meant dependence on the Eastern Emperor, on grasping, grovelling, eunuch-governed Byzantium. ‘Let the old Roman Empire go, and let Italy live: and if she is to live, none so fit to guide her destinies as Theodoric.' It would be unsafe to assert that this thought, thus definitely expressed, found an entrance to the mind of Cassiodorus or any other patriotic Roman of the sixth century. But it was the limit towards which many thoughts were tending (ignorant, as ours are, of the future that is before us but conscious that some bit of the past has to be put away); and the subsequent history of Italy, traced in characters of blood from Belisarius to Barbarossa, showed how well it had been for her if that idea, of dissevering her from the wreck of the ruined Empire, might but have been realised.

It was with this hope doubtless, of reconciling the proud and sensitive Roman to the hegemony of the sturdy Goth, that Cassiodorus, near the middle of his official life, composed in twelve books that history of the Goths with which we have already made acquaintance through the extracts taken from it by the hasty and ignorant Jordanes'. In this book, as he himself says, speaking of it through the mouth of his king, ‘he carried his researches up to the very cradle of the Gothic race, gathering from the stores of his learning what even hoar antiquity scarce remembered. He drew forth the kings of the Goths from the dim lurking-place of ages, restoring to the Amal line the splendour that truly belonged to it, and clearly proving that for seventeen generations Athalaric's ancestors had been kings. Thus did he assign a Roman origin to Gothic history, weaving as it were into one chaplet the flowers which he had culled from the pages of widely-scattered authors.'

In other words, he collected what ‘ hoar antiquity among the Gothic veterans had to tell him of the old Amal kings, the fragments of their battle-songs and sagas, and persuaded or forced them to coalesce with what his classical authors, Dio and Trogus and Strabo, had to tell him about the early history of the dim Northern populations. By identifying the Goths with 'the Getse—an error for which he is not originally responsible—and by claiming for them all the fantastic imaginations of the poets about the ‘Scythians'—a word of as wide and indefinite a meaning as the ‘Indians' of modern discoverers—he succeeded in constructing for the fore elders of Theodoric a highly respectable place in classical antiquity. He ‘made the Gothic origin Roman', nay, rather pre-Roman, carrying back their earliest kings to Hercules and Theseus and the siege of Troy, and thus giving that connection with the cycle of Homeric legend which an upstart nation valued, as an upstart family with us values a pedigree which shows that it came over with the Conqueror.

All this seems a little childish to us now, and indeed the chief work of a modern enquirer is to unwind that which Cassiodorus wound together so carefully, to disentangle what ‘hoar antiquity ' told him (the only thread that is of any value) from the flimsy and rotten threads which he collected from various authors in his library. But, for the man and the age, the work was doubtless a useful and creditable one. Many a Roman noble may have accepted a little more readily the orders of the so-called barbarian, who turned out to be not so great a barbarian after all, now that Cassiodorus, nearly the most learned man of his day, had proved that Goths fought against the Greeks at the siege of Troy, and that possibly even Theodoric might be the remote descendant of Telephus. And the great King himself, who from those early days at Byzantium had always half-loved and admired the Roman State, though he felt that his rude Goths had in them something nobler;—to him this reconciling history of his clever secretary, which showed that he might be a true-hearted Goth and yet listen with delight to the verses of Homer, and gaze with rapture on the statues of Praxiteles, since these too were kinsmen of his forefathers, must have been a welcome discovery, and must have given him fresh courage to persevere in his life-work of conveying the blessings of civilitas to both nations of his subjects.

Strange is it to reflect that, after all, there was a truth underlying this odd jumble of Scytho-Geto-Gothic-Greek traditions,—a truth which scarcely till the beginning of this century was fully brought to light. Philology has now made it clear that Goth, Roman, and Greek were not really very distant relations, and the common home of the Aryan nations in the Asiatic highlands or elsewhere is something like a scientific compensation for the lost belief that all European nations were represented by their progenitors at the siege of Troy.

If Cassiodorus, with a true conviction that he was thus best serving his country, brought his loyal service to Theodoric, there can be no doubt that the heart of Theodoric also warmed towards him. He found in him the very minister whom he needed, to help him in fashioning his own great ideas of government, and to put them in the most acceptable shape before the Roman people. Often, we may be sure, in the ‘gloriosa colloquia' which the subject so lovingly commemorates, did King and Quaestor talk over the difficulties of the state, the turbulent freedom of the Goths, the venality and peculation of the Roman officials, the want of any high aim among the nobles or great purpose among the citizens, still proud of the name of Romans, but incapable of being stirred by anything nobler than a chariot-race, a battle between the Blues and Greens, or at best a contested Papal election. Often too would the remedies for these evils be discussed. Cassiodorus, like so many fluent rhetoricians, would perhaps think that it only required a sufficient number of his eloquent essays to establish civilitas in the new state, to make the Romans honest and the Goths law-abiding. Theodoric, with the Northern patience and the Northern melancholy, would refuse to accept any such optimist view of the situation; and sometimes, while feeling that the work was long and his life was shortening, would heave a sigh at the remembrance that Providence, so gracious to him in all else, had denied him the gift of a son, strong and valiant, to carry on his great enterprise.

Amalasuntha, the only legitimate child of Theodoric, was a woman endowed with much of her father’s courage and strength of will, and more than her father's love for the civilisation and literature of Rome. Possibly foreseeing that this tendency to copy the manners of the less war-like people might bring her into collision with the martial Goths after his decease, Theodoric determined to marry her to no Roman noble, but to a Goth of the purest blood that he could meet with. He already had one daughter (the child of a concubine) married to a Visigothic king and living in Spain. From his connection with that country he heard that there was dwelling there a scion of the old Ostrogothic house, Eutharic son of Wideric, grandson (or more likely great-grand-son) of King Thorismund the Chaste, and therefore a lineal descendant of the mighty Hermanric, who once ruled all the lands between the Baltic and the Euxine. Eutharic was well reported of for valour and prudence and comeliness of person.

The King summoned him to his court, gave him his daughter's hand in marriage, and four years later conferred upon him the honour of the consulship. The Gothic prince-consort visited Rome in order to celebrate his assumption of the consular trabea with becoming magnificence. Senate and people poured forth to meet him. The games which he exhibited in the amphitheatre were on a scale of surpassing magnificence. The wild beasts, especially those from Africa, amazed and delighted the mob, many of whom had seen no such creatures before. Even Symmachus the Byzantine, who was present at the time in Rome on an embassy from the Eastern Emperor, was obliged to confess his stupefied admiration of the scene. When his sojourn in Rome was ended, Eutharic returned to Ravenna, and there exhibited the same shows, with even greater magnificence, in the presence of his father-in-law.

Of the prince thus romantically brought into the family of Theodoric we know very little, but that little makes us believe that he might have been found a useful counterpoise to the Romanising tendencies of Amalasuntha. The Anonymus Valesii, in the extract before quoted, calls him ‘a man of harsh disposition and an enemy to the Catholic faith.' This perhaps means no more than that he stood firmly by the customs of his Arian forefathers, and was not inclined to bandy compliments with the priests and prefects whom he found standing round the throne of his father-in-law. But, whatever were his good or bad qualities, he died, before the death of Theodoric gave him an opportunity of making his mark on history. Amalasuntha was thus left a widow, with a son and a daughter, Athalaric and Matasuentha, the former of whom must have been born in 518, as we are told by Procopius that he was eight years old at the death of his grandfather.

From the family of Theodoric we return to the description of his ministers and friends. The elder Cassiodorus seems to have retired from office soon after his son had entered public life, and to have spent the rest of his years in the ancestral home in Bruttii, which was dear to four generations of Cassiodori. For some years the great office of Faustus, Praetorian Prefect was administered by Faustus, Prefect, to whom a large number of letters in the Variarum tire addressed. An act of oppression, however, against a neighbour in the country alienated from him the favour of the just Theodoric and caused his downfall. A certain Castorius, who seems to have got into debt, perhaps into other kinds of trouble, had his farm unjustly wrested from him by the all-powerful Prefect. On making his complaint to the King and proving the justice of his cause, he obtained a decree for the restitution of his own farm and the addition of another, of equal value, from the lands of the wrong-doer. ‘Grimoda the Saio' and ‘Ferrocinctus the Apparitor,' apparently one Goth and one Roman officer, were charged with the execution of this decree, which further declared that if ‘that well-known schemer' should attempt anything further against Castorius he should be punished with a fine of fifty pounds of gold (£2000). With some allowable complacency Theodoric was hereupon made by his quaestor to exclaim, ‘Lo a deed which may henceforward curb all overweening functionaries! A Praetorian Prefect is not allowed to triumph in the spoliation of the lowly, and on the cry of the miserable his power of hurting them is taken from him at a blow.'

The Illustrious Faustus received leave of absence from the sacred walls of Rome for four months : and it may be doubted whether, when he returned thither, he any longer wore the purple robes of the Praetorian Prefect.

Soon after this signal display of the King's justice an invitation was sent to the elder Cassiodorus, inviting him, in very flattering terms, to return to Court, where probably he would have been asked to reassume the great office which he had previously held. Apparently, however, the hill of Squillace had greater charms for him than the palace of Ravenna. We have no evidence that he again took any active part in public affairs.

A pleasing contrast to the rapacious and trigging Faustus was afforded by one who had been faithful through good and evil fortune, the King's friend Artemidorus. This man, one of the nobles of Byzantium, a friend and relation of the Emperor Zeno, had been strangely attracted by the young barbarian, to whom he was sent as ambassador, on the eve of his march into Epirus. He left, for his sake, the splendid career which awaited him in the Eastern Empire, followed him through all his campaigns, and sat, an ever-welcome and genial guest, at the royal table. Not aspiring to high dignity, nor desirous to burden himself with the cares of State, he found for several years sufficient occupation for his artistic, pleasure-loving nature, in arranging the great shows of the circus for the citizens of Ravenna. At length, however (in 509), Theodoric persuaded him to undertake the weightier charge of Prefect of the City, and sent him in that capacity to Rome to govern the capital and preside over the Senate. The light-hearted Byzantine seems to have discharged the duties of this serious office more creditably than might have been expected.

Very different from this brilliant, joyous Greek was the other close friend of Theodoric, the rugged Gothic soldier Tulum. Sprung from one of the noblest Gothic families, he mounted guard as a stripling in the King’s antechamber. His first experience in war was earned in the campaign of Sirmium, and here he showed such vigour and courage, and such a comprehension of the art of war, as procured for him in early manhood the place of chief military counsellor to Theodoric. A marriage with a princess of Amal blood still further consolidated his position. He was admitted to the friendly conversation of the King in his moments of least reserve, and, surest mark of friendship, often dared to uphold against his master the policy which he deemed best for that master's interests. In the Gaulish campaign of 509, in the campaign, or rather the armed neutrality, of 524, he was again conspicuous. Returning from the last by sea he suffered shipwreck, probably somewhere on the coast of Tuscany. The ship and crew were swallowed up by the waves. Tulum, with his only child, took to an open boat, and he had to depend on his own strength and skill to save them both by rowing. Theodoric, who was awaiting his arrival, saw with agony the imminent danger of his friend. The aged monarch would fain have rushed into the waves to rescue him, but, to his delight, Tulum battled successfully with the billows, and soon leaping ashore received his master's affectionate embrace.

We may perhaps conjecture that at the close of Theodoric's reign Tulum and Cassiodorus stood in friendly rivalry, the one at the head of the Gothic, the other at the head of the Roman party, among the nobles who were loyal to the new dynasty.

Of two other names by which the Court of Theodoric was rendered illustrious, Symmachus the orator and historian, with his son-in-law Boethius, the Marquis of Worcester of his age, it will be well to speak later on, when we have to discuss the melancholy history of their end. Enough to say here that, during the greater part of this period, they appear to have been on friendly terms with the King, though not zealously and continuously engaged in his service like Cassiodorus and Liberius.

The usual residence of Theodoric was Ravenna, with which city his name is linked as inseparably as those of Honorius or Placidia. The letters of Cassiodorus show his zeal for the architectural enrichment of this capital. Square blocks of stone were to be brought from Faenza, marble pillars to be transported from the palace on the Pincian Hill: the most skilful artists in mosaic were invited from Rome, to execute some of those very works which we still wonder at in the basilicas and baptisteries of the city by the Ronco.

The chief memorials of his reign which Theodoric has left at Ravenna are a church, a palace, and a tomb. Of the last it will be the fitting time to speak when the great Amal is carried thither for burial.

The marvellous basilica which now bears the name of S. Apollinare Nuovo was originally dedicated to St. Martin, and from its beautiful gold-inlaid roof received the title S. Martinus in Caelo Aureo. An inscription under the windows of the tribune, still visible in the ninth century, recorded that King Theodoric had built that church from its foundations in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ. Notwithstanding the words of the ecclesiastical biographer, who ascribes the work to an orthodox bishop, Agnellus, it is difficult not to believe that to Theodoric's order are due those great pictures in mosaic which give the church its peculiar glory. On the opposite sides of the nave, high attics above the colonnades are lined with two long processions. On the north wall, the virgin martyrs of the Church proceed from the city of Classis, each one bearing her crown of martyrdom in her hand, to offer it to the infant Christ, who sits on Mary's lap, attended by four angels. Between the virgin martyrs and the angels intervene the three wise men from the East, who, with crowns on their heads, run forward with reverent haste to present their offerings to the holy Child. The star glows above them in the firmament. On the south wall a corresponding procession of martyred men, also bearing crowns in their hands, moves from the palace at Ravenna onwards to the Christ in glory, who sits upon his judgment-seat and is also guarded by four angels. The dignity of both groups is their most striking characteristic. Not all the quaint stiffness of the mosaic can veil the expression of solemn sadness in the faces of the martyrs, who look like men who have come out of great tribulation and have not yet seen the face of Him for whom they suffered. Nor does the same deficiency in the mode of representation prevent our seeing the look of radiant triumph on the faces of the virgins. Here are Agnes with her lamb, the child-martyr Eulalia of Merida, Lucia of Syracuse, Agatha of Catana, all the most celebrated maidens who suffered for the faith in the terrible days of Diocletian. No wrinkled and faded convent-dwellers are these. Fresh, young, and beautiful, apparelled like the daughters of a king, they move on with a smile of triumph upon their lips to see the wondrous Child for whose sake they, scarcely yet emerged from childhood, gave up their tender bodies to torture and to death.

Besides the human interest of these figures, there - is the local interest derived from the fact that we have here contemporary views of the Ravenna of the sixth century. Ciassis is represented as a walled city, with colonnades, domes and pediments. Hard by, three ships, one with sails fully spread, the others under bare poles, are entering the narrow lighthouse-guarded passage from the sea. The palace of Theodoric, as represented on the other side, consists of four tall Corinthian columns with arches springing from their capitals, a pediment above, and in a horizontal space of white the word PALATIUM. On one side of this, the main entrance, is a long low colonnade with an upper storey over it. The objects which most catch the stranger's eye are the curtains between the pillars. Looped up half-way, and with large square patches of purple upon them, they have a singularly modern aspect, but are no doubt a pretty faithful representation of the veil which guarded the privacy both of the Eastern Emperor and the Gothic King.

The palace itself, as we learn from local records, occupied a large space on the eastern side of the town. It adjoined the beautiful church of S. Martinus in Caelo Aureo, which was perhaps used as a royal chapel. Only one fragment of it, but one of pretty well-ascertained genuineness, exists to the present day. It is a high wall, built of the square brick-tiles with which we are so familiar in Roman work, and with eight marble pillars in the upper part supporting nine arched recesses, one of them of considerable width. It is the mere shell of a ruin : the house behind it is entirely modern. A porphyry vase, or rather high trough, let into the lower part of the wall used to be shown as the former coffin of Theodoric, but this notion is now generally abandoned, and the prevalent idea seems to be that it was once a bath. The palace we are told was surrounded with colonnades, and had many dining apartments (triclinia) within it. We learn from the Anonymous Valesii that this edifice, which no doubt took many years to build, was completed but not ‘dedicated' at the time of Theodoric's death.

Here then, on the eastern side of his capital, dwelt for more than thirty years the great Ostrogoth, looking forth towards the dark Pineta where he had had that terrible night of battle with Odovacar, and seeing, it may be, from some high tower in his palace, the blue rim of the Hadriatic. Beyond that sea, but of course invisible, lay his own fair province of Dalmatia; beyond that again those, wasted plains of Moesia, where he had wandered so often, the fugitive lord of a brigand people.

Statues in abundance were reared in his honour, at Rome, at Ravenna, at Ticinum, in all the chief cities of Italy. We hear of one statue made by Boethius with so much art that it ever turned towards the sun, and hence was called Regisol; but this is probably a mere legend of the Middle Ages. In another sculptured group, erected on a pinnacle of his palace, and conspicuous to mariners from afar, Theodoric, grasping shield and spear and clothed in a coat of mail, sat on a brazen horse covered over with gold. The two cities Rome and Ravenna completed the group. Rome was apparently standing, guarding him in calm dignity, with shield and spear; while Ravenna seemed gliding rapidly forward to meet her lord, her right foot passing over the sea and her left resting on the land. The statues of the horse and his rider, Charles the Great, after his coronation in Rome, carried across the Alps to Aix-la-Chapelle, declaring that he had seen nothing like them in his whole realm of Francia.

Pavia and Yerona were also places honoured with the occasional residence of Theodoric. At both he built a palace and public baths. Of neither of these two palaces is any remnant now to be seen. A grim square fortress of the fifteenth century, much injured by the French Republicans, stands (it is believed) on the site of Theodoric's palace at Pavia. So too at Verona: the palace, of which there were still some noble remains incorporated into the castle of the Viscontis, was blown up by the French in 1801, and an absolutely modern building stands upon its site. This, like the castle at Pavia and so many buildings in Italy of great historic name, is now occupied as a barrack.

It seems probable that Theodoric's residence at both these places depended on the state of Transalpine politics. When the tribes of the Middle Danube were moving suspiciously to and fro, and the vulnerable point by the Brenner Pass needed to be especially guarded, he fixed his quarters at Verona. When Gaul menaced greater danger, then he removed to Ticinum. It was apparently the fact that Verona was his coign of vantage, from whence he watched the German barbarians, which obtained for him from their minstrels the title of Dietrich of Bern. Thus strangely travestied, he was swept within the wide current of the legends relating to Attila, and hence it is that the really grandest figure in the history of the migration of the peoples appears in the Nibelungen Lied, not as a great king and conqueror on his own account, but only as a faithful squire of the terrible Hunnish king whose empire had in fact crumbled into dust before the birth of Theodoric.

 

CHAPTER IX.

THEODORIC'S RELATION’S WITH GAUL.