Date: Dec 17, 2005 - 16:35

[Warning: This is the result of an afternoon of muddled thinking, repeated false starts, a throat-ache, the obsession of RL work to do, the pleasant distraction of Saturnalia, two glasses of Mirto di Sardegna and writing by heart. I guess I owe a lot to John Moorhead, “Theoderic in Italy”. I really wanted to show why I have this romantic notion of celebrating Saturnalia together with the Romans in Ravenna. Cheers!]

Goths and Romans in Italy did not get along especially well between 476 and 555 AD. After the fall of the Western Roman Empire, the Goths were the masters in Italy. Even the frequent expression “Goths and Romans” used to describe the inhabitants of Italy in contemporary writings shows that the Goths were meant to be the ruling class. [Hey, I too have to write something, I’m using alphabetical order...] Actually, Goths were a tiny minority and had to control a vastly superior and hostile people. They were mostly concentrated in garrisons and military posts, and even in Ravenna they lived in their own area and had their own public and religious buildings. Even during Theodoric’s rule, the longer and most peaceful of Gothic reigns in Italy, Gothic units patrolling the peninsula inflicted lots of damage, and the king was forced to call repeatedly for civilitas in his letters to officers (Cassiodorus, Variae). The difference in religion did not help: the Romans were Catholics, believing in the Trinity, while the Goths followed the Arian doctrine, which claimed that Christ had been created by the Father and thus was inferior to him. The radical opposition of most of the Church, supporting the Byzantine Empire, would eventually bring down the Gothic domination in Italy.

In this panorama, however, not everything was so bleak. During most of his reign, Theodoric was a fair ruler. He kept out of religious questions and gave total freedom of religion to all his subjects. Having grown up in Constantinople, he admired and defended Roman culture. He saw himself like one of the ancient, most enlightened emperors, and did act like one, restoring and enriching Roman architecture. His idea was that Goths and Romans should have been separate but equal, with recognition given to the Romans’ intellectual superiority. “The poor Roman imitates the Goth, the rich Goth imitates the Roman”, he is quoted as having said (Anonymous Valesianus). Goths formed the army; Romans took care of the civil administration.

To maintain this status quo, intermarriage was discouraged, and Goths were forbidden to go to school. But as usual, what happened in reality was quite different from theory. We have many gravestones of married couples where one name was Gothic and the other Roman. We know that even in Theodoric’s family there were extremely learned Goths, first of all his daughter Amalaswintha. So the laws of nature were prevailing – winners and losers tended to become one thing. And in this case, the result would have been in favour of the Romans: Goths were converting to Catholicism, learning Latin, even changing their names into Latin ones. And if Romans resented Gothic domination, to the point of welcoming the Byzantine intervention, they loved Theodoric, so says a fairly neutral chronicler, Procopius (The Gothic War). On his deathbed, Theodoric instructed his followers to always love the Senate and Roman people (Jordanes, Getica).

It was a love story doomed to failure. Theodoric’s stubbornness in adhering to his plan, and his bad luck in not having a strong successor, never gave the two peoples the long-term chance to become one. The Byzantines arrived first. Place and objects names still survive in the Italian language, to remind us of the brief time where Goths and Romans lived side by side.