Theodoric

AFTERWORD

The true measure of Theoderic’s stature lies, perhaps, not so much in his transmutation from semi-nomadic warlord to the enlightened ruler of Italy, as in his feat of successfully balancing and controlling two diametrically opposed social systems. He had, on the one hand, to govern his own people — a shame-and-honour Iron Age society based on personal allegiance to a warrior-leader — and, on the other, to rule what in some ways was almost a modern capitalist state, held together by a complex web of laws, bureaucratic institutions and property rights, geared to the acquisition of wealth. Two such differing regimes could never be synthesized, and Theoderic did not try. But the fact that he succeeded throughout most of his long reign (despite allowing himself to be distracted by imperialist dreams) in maintaining a benevolent apartheid between these powerful centrifugal forces, was a very great — indeed, a unique — achievement. As Robert Browning (in Justinian and Theodora) says, quoting an unnamed scholar, ‘he was certainly one of the greatest statesmen the German race has ever produced, and perhaps the one who has deserved best of the human race’.

In the end, however, the experiment was a failure, though a noble one. His feeble successors, with the possible exception of Totila, could never hope to emulate his example, and the ‘Ostrogothic century’ (from the emergence of the tribe into the light of history as allies of Attila at the Catalaunian Fields in 451 to its political extinction by Justinian’s generals in 554) ended in the Amals’ defeat and their disintegration as a people.