Theodoric

AUTHOR’S NOTE

For anyone attempting to write a story based on the life of Theoderic, it is extraordinarily fortunate that his lifespan covers a period rich in contemporary or near-contemporary sources. Cassiodorus, quaestor and Theoderic’s Master of Offices after Boethius, provides the most significant material, a vast collection of official correspondence on behalf of the Gothic administration, which was published under the title Variae. Another, less-known author is Ennodius, a bishop, whose numerous letters, mainly to clergy, throw considerable light on Theoderic’s reign. Perhaps the most interesting writer, from a human and dramatic point of view, is the splendidly named Anonymous Valesianus. The sonorous appellation is not, alas, that of some distinguished scholar of late antiquity, but was coined to designate an unknown Roman author whose work (the second part of an anonymous document) was edited by Henri de Valois in 1636. Another useful source touching on Theoderic is Gothic History, an abridged version of a lost work by Cassiodorus, written in the mid sixth century by Jordanes, a Romanized Goth living in Constantinople. Procopius, a Greek writer who accompanied Justinian’s general Belisarius on part of his Italian campaign, provides an account of Theoderic in the opening pages of his Gothic War.

Regarding modern sources, I am greatly indebted to my publisher Hugh Andrew for kindly lending me the following: Theoderic in Italy by John Moorhead, The Goths by Peter Heather, A History of the Ostrogoths by Thomas Burns, History of the Goths by Herwig Wolfram, and Robert Browning’s Justinian and Theodora. Other sources I found useful were Gibbon’s matchless Decline and Fall, Peter Heather’s The Fall of the Roman Empire, Richard Rudgley’s Barbarians and Theoderic the Goth: The Barbarian Champion of Civilization by Thomas Hodgkin, a Victorian scholar who wrote about his subject with insightful empathy. Details about chariot-racing and beast-hunts in the arena were quarried from a racily written but absorbing little book, Daniel P. Mannix’s Those About to Die, crammed with fascinating facts and colourful vignettes.

In the interests of drama and clarity, I have (as mentioned in the relevant sections in the Notes) gone in for some telescoping and abridging of events, hopefully without distorting essential historical truth. Anyone who has ever wrestled with the arcane complexities of the Laurentian Schism, or the Ostrogoths’ tangled Volkerwanderung throughout the Balkans, will understand my reasons for doing so.

Bar some minor characters and the obvious example of Timothy, the Dramatis Personae are based on real people. Many — such as Rufius Cethegus, who features as an arch-schemer — needed considerable fleshing-out to make them come alive. This hardly applied in the case of Theoderic, whose richly complex character was able to speak for itself in almost every situation. The tension between his natural tendency to furor Teutonicus and desire to achieve Roman dignitas and civilitas generated much of whatever claim to drama the story possesses.