Pay close attention to Theoderic’s role

This ecclesiastical power struggle resembles many others, but we should pay close attention to Theoderic’s role. The reader who knows something—anything—of this history will have been puzzled until now at the omission of some important words regarding him and his followers: Goths, Ostrogoths, barbarians, invasion, tribes, even hordes, Arians, heretics. Theoderic’s life conventionally takes up part of the history of the barbarian invasions of Europe, the Volkerwanderung or “migration of peoples.” This standard tale has as its centerpiece a group of insensate, unfeeling brutes who insidiously overthrew civilization, little understanding what they had done. We must learn to do without that story.

Theoderic was ever remarkable. The story you have just read of him, whatever labels you might wish to put on various people and their deeds, is as exact as I can make it, carefully adjusted (I hope) for the exaggerations and prettifications with which loyal and disloyal narrators over time varnished their accounts. Theoderic’s truth at the moment I have tried to capture him, robed in imperial splendor in 500, is complex and not to be reduced to stereotypes, labels, or slogans. He was brought up in the imperial court, and that exposure to monument and ceremony strongly shaped his ambitions for the Italian cities he made his own, including Rome itself. He had to be fluent in Latin, probably knew a fair amount of Greek, and also knew the Germanic language his troops shared. For the first fifty years through which we can trace him, beginning with his return to the Balkans from Constantinople in the early 470s, when he was in his late teens, until the 520s, his self-presentation and his performances were consistently Roman, citizenly, imperial, and respectful of the old ways of the lands where he dwelled. The few and mild military adventures that made his reputation among his people were exactly comparable to the exploits of generals with impeccably Roman pedigrees who came both before and after him.

Christian religious traditions

He was Christian by birth. His father was brought up in the Christian religious traditions of the Danube armies, whom missionaries from Constantinople had converted 150 years earlier. Those armies were faithful to the Christianity they had been taught, but in the meantime doctrinal fashion had changed at Constantinople. The dominant orthodox clergy at court now condemned what had been orthodox under Constantine, calling it Arianism. Theoderic’s followers had a Bible that Ulfilas, a bishop trained in Constantinople, translated into Gothic10 in the fourth century under the influence of Constantine’s version of orthodoxy. But this Bible translation was barely intelligible, although it was probably the first serious attempt ever to render Greek into a language with almost no written tradition. That official Christianity and this Bible quickly became the possession of peoples deeply integrated in the Latin Roman world balkan tours, even when they found themselves rebuked as Arian heretics by followers of contemporary doctrinal fashion at court.11 Rome’s military leaders from 459 onward were all Arians of that kind, and they built and maintained half a dozen churches at Ravenna and at least one in Rome. We have a collection of Latin sermons copied in 500 that comes to us from an Arian preacher in Verona. A little after that date, a monk at Naples—Eugippius, whom we will meet again—wrote to a colleague with a theological question for an ongoing debate with a “count of the Goths” who was pressing Arian points of view on him. That debate captures a relationship between two communities marked simultaneously by disagreement and civility. No one in Theoderic’s Italy thought of burning anyone else at the stake.

Theoderic’s father’s family was Arian, but his mother, Erelieva, was orthodox, taking the name Eusebia (meaning “pious”) in baptism, and Theoderic’s own experience of Christianity when he was a youngster in Constantinople must have been mainly if not exclusively orthodox. He and his army stayed faithful to the creed and clergy that they brought with them to Italy, and so on Sunday found themselves in different church buildings from most of the native population. Theoderic, though, was repeatedly called on to arbitrate the business of the orthodox church of Rome during his reign. Some of his authority came with his role as the legitimate imperial ruler of the province, and some came easily owing to the religious amphibiousness of his childhood and youth.