Why are we (Homoousian) Christians? Part 6

“for no other reason than to destroy the people there.”

Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5

In 461, eight-year-old Theoderic, from the Gothic Amal dynasty, was sent as a royal hostage to Constantinople—a common and efficient guarantee for the respect of treaties in the ancient world. Theoderic’s uncle was the king of the Goths settled in Pannonia, allied to the Romans as a foederatus (from foedus, “treaty”). He had just forged a new diplomatic agreement with the then Eastern emperor Leo, which included a foreign aid of 300 pounds of gold a year in exchange for military service. Theoderic grew up close to the imperial court for the next ten years, and received the best education that was the essence of Romanitas (which in Constantinople meant Hellenism). In 471, he succeeded his uncle as king of the Pannonian Goths, with Roman approval, and occasionally led his troops (approximately ten thousand warriors) in military campaigns against Rome’s enemies. In 475, he helped restore the emperor Zeno to his throne after he had been deposed by a “usurper”. The following year, a grateful Zeno made Theoderic high military commander (magister militum), proclaimed him a friend (amicus) of the Romans, and adopted him personally as is son-in-arms. There were occasional tensions between Romans and Theoderic’s Goths, but in 484, Zeno granted Theoderic the supreme honor of the consulship. In 488 he sent him to depose Odoacer in Italy.

Odoacer was a German military commander who had deposed the child emperor Romulus Augustus in 476 and sent to Constantinople the imperial ornamenta (the symbols of the emperor’s power, including scepter and purple mantle), with an embassy informing Zeno that he recognized him as sole emperor over East and West. Some historians therefore argue, quite logically, that 476 marked not the “fall of the Roman Empire”, but its reunification.[1] However, if Odoacer had no need for a Western emperor—especially a child—it was because he intended to rule over Italy as king (rex) or commander (dux) with as little imperial interference as possible. After twelve-years and many complaints from the Roman Senate, Zeno had had enough of him, and sent Theoderic’s army against him.

Theoderic’s restoration of the Western Roman Empire

Unlike Odoacer, Theoderic took possession of Italy as a legitimate representative of the Eastern emperor. Yet Theoderic’ administration was so successful, and so “Roman”, that he became much more than a governor in the eyes of his subjects: “within less than a decade of his triumph over Odoacer, Theoderic would be hailed as a new Trajan and Valentinian; would honor the Senate and people; and would begin a series of massive renovation projects hailed by contemporary Italo-Romans as ‘surpassing ancient wonders.’”[2] So writes Jonathan Arnold in Theoderic and the Roman Imperial Restoration, published in 2014.

Theoderic waited until Zeno’s death in 491 to declare himself rex Italiae, a title he held until his death in 526. He made Ravenna his capital and enriched it with splendid buildings, including the Sant’Apollinare Nuovo cathedral (top picture). His relationship with the new Eastern emperor Anastasius went through a period of trial. But a source known as the Anonymus Valesianus claims that an embassy sent by Rome’s Senate to Constantinople in 497 won the emperor’s favor for Theoderic: “Peace was made with Emperor Anastasius, and he returned all the ornamenta of the palace which Odoacer had sent to Constantinople.”[3] The Western Empire was officially back.

It had not really disappeared during the 21 years of absence of the ornamenta. As far as Italo-Romans were concerned, “the Roman Empire, reduced to Italy, simply languished from one fifth-century ruler to another, until Theoderic, a kind of savior, assumed command.”[4] By 511, some fifteen years after the beginning of Theoderic’s rule, “the western Roman Empire appeared to be resurging and reclaiming its rightful place.”[5] Theoderic ruled over most of the Roman West north of the Mediterranean, directly over Italy and indirectly over the South of Gaul, as regent for his Visigothic son-in-law Eutharic. The king of Burgundy was also his son-in-law, and the king of the Vandals in Carthage was his brother-in-law, making Theoderic the most powerful man in all of Western Europe, with his influence extending over Central Europe. In 493, Theoderic had contracted a diplomatic marriage with the sister of the king of the Franks, Clovis, but the relationship deteriorated as Clovis’s expansionism became more aggressive (more on the Franks in the next chapter).

Jonathan Arnold’s book, on which much of this article is based, exemplifies a revisionist perspective on Late Antiquity that has now gained wide acceptance. Arnold presents his book as “a study of Romanness and the Roman Empire that fully accepts Theoderic’s reign (489/93-526) as a continuation of Roman history,” and explains “the continuities and changes, all overwhelmingly Roman and imperial in nature, of the Theoderican era.” According to Arnold,

“Ostrogothic Italy” … is a misnomer, an unfortunate but convenient inaccuracy that renders “barbarian” an Italy that remained proudly Roman in its self-identification, regardless of external perceptions. … Theoderic and his Goths not only fit within these understandings of Romanness and a Roman Empire, but were also essential to it, their unique roles contributing to the contemporary beliefs of imperial resurgence, blessedness, and a golden age already encountered earlier. Theoderic’s Italy, then, was not a mistake; nor were the Romans of Italy yearning to be liberated by the only real Roman Empire, based in Constantinople. It was a true Roman Empire that presented itself as such and exceeded the expectations of many of its Roman inhabitants; and it would have persisted in its Roman identity, had it not been for the unforeseeable intervention of the east Roman state.[6]

The paradigm shift is so radical that it makes us wonder how our traditional historiography could be so wrong. The answer is simple: history is written by the winner, as a continuation of his war propaganda. The winner, in this case, was Justinian, who destroyed the Ostrogothic kingdom with his Gothic War (535-554) against Theoderic’s successors Theodahad, Vitiges and Totila. Justinian was a fervent Nicene Christian and the first emperor to organize a global and systematic persecution of heretics, the alleged Ariani in particular. Theoderic and his Goths were heretics, and as such enemies of God, who needed to be destroyed at any cost (we’ll get to the cost). The winner’s historiography is what our Catholic tradition has handed us.

The loser doesn’t get to write history, if he survives at all—and the Ostrogoths didn’t survive as a people or as a political entity. However, modern historians like Jonathan Arnold can still use the detailed testimony of a couple of Italo-Romans living under Theoderic’s rule: Magnus Felix Ennodius, a north Italian churchman, and Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator, a southern Italian bureaucrat.

The same year as Cambridge University Press published Arnold’s book, Oxford University Press published Peter Heather’ book titled The Restoration of Rome: Barbarian Popes & Imperial Pretenders, that draws on the same sources. Like Arnold, Heather emphasizes that Theoderic was perceived as fully Roman:

Ennodius’ panegyric … observed that ius and civilitas presided in Theoderic’s palace, ius designating the fundamentals of Roman law, civilitas, as we have seen, the state of higher civilization that written law generated. … A whole battery of means was deployed, then, to get over the message that Theoderic’s regime was ‘Roman’ in that most fundamental of ideological senses: it was in tune with God’s plans for humankind. Panegyrics, official letters, coinage (some of Theoderic’s coins proclaimed invicta Roma), visual representations and buildings were all used to sustain this claim and its supporting pillars: reverence for Roman law and classical education.[7]

Not long after his death, Cassiodorus, one of the chief officers of Theoderic’s later years, penned the portrait of one who, “by his diligent investigations into the nature of things, seemed to be a philosopher wearing the purple”—somewhat like Marcus Aurelius.[8]

While claiming full participation in Romanitas, Theoderic’s Goths were also jealous of their Gothic identity. Unlike many peoples incorporated into the Empire before them, they were proudly unconquered. How they balanced their Gothicness and their Romanness could vary. Disputes arising after Theoderic’s death concerning the education of his young grandson and heir suggest that there were Gothic identitarians hostile to assimilation.

Romans also had diverging views of the Ostrogoths. Because they kept their language and traditions—down to their long hair and moustache—they remained Barbarians. But in their barbarity, paradoxically, “Goths and Gothicness represented martialism, the old Roman virtue of virtus, … meaning ‘manliness’ or ‘courage’.”[9]

And then, there was the religious divide. Most ethnic Romans shared the faith of the emperor, the Nicene creed, and therefore were under the spiritual care of the bishop of Rome, one of the five patriarchates with Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch, Jerusalem. The Goths had their own church, which some official documents refer to as “the church of Gothic law”.[10] They had their Gothic Bible, and their Gothic liturgy. They were Homoians, and their enemies in the East called them “Arians”.

However, contrary to the Vandal kings who sporadically persecuted Catholics in North Africa, Theoderic extended his full protection to the Catholic Church, and the Catholic Church, in return, fully recognized his authority. Peter Heather writes:

For the vast majority of his reign, Theoderic and the Catholic establishment treated one another with the greatest respect. On his great ceremonial adventus into Rome in 500, for instance, Theoderic greeted the Pope ‘as if he were St Peter himself’. The compliment was duly returned. The king’s good offices were sought by the Church of Rome itself when it was divided down the middle by a disputed papal succession: the so-called Laurentian schism, named after Laurentius, one of the participants (along with Pope Symmachus) and the eventual loser, destined to go down in history therefore as an antipope. … the best and most recent scholarly study of the dispute (from which extensive documentation survives) has come to the conclusion that the king went out of his way to operate evenhandedly and according to established procedures, and to do his best to bring about a speedy and conciliatory resolution. The dispute still took eight years to work its way to a conclusion, but it remains a striking testimony to the level of de facto recognition given by the Catholic Church to Theoderic’s legitimacy.[11]

In other words, there was no religious war between the Gothic church and the Nicene church headed in the West by the pope. “The religious divide only became an issue, however, when the regime of Justin and Justinian chose to make it so.”[12]