Cassiodorus was Theoderic’s man

Even out of office, Cassiodorus was Theoderic’s man. In 519, on the occasion of the great consular celebration of Eutharic’s role as heir to the throne, Cassiodorus delivered public addresses in praise of the regime and wrote two important books in courtly, impeccable Latin. His Chronicle was a traditional account of kings, consuls, and emperors from darkest antiquity to the present, easily and naturally showing Theoderic’s regime as the continuation of all that was Roman and ancient. The Gothic History, now lost and a subject of much speculation, was a more ambitious attempt to write of the Goths and Theoderic’s Amal family as full participants in the history of the ancient world going back many centuries. They embody the ambivalence of Eutharic’s moment in the spotlight, asserting Gothic identity as a way to ensure Roman authority.

Cassiodorus then vanished from the stage for a few years, until he was called back to court to be master of the offices following the downfall of Boethius, his predecessor. If we are supposed to believe that Boethius was a great man and nearly a saint, then Cassiodorus sometimes looks a little shady to his biographers for advancing at the cost of the martyr. If Boethius really had to die, then Cassiodorus was the kind of loyal servant brought back to court in a crisis.

Theoderic died in 526

Cassiodorus was still at work as master of the offices when Theoderic died in 526. The air was full of crisis and threat—how real we cannot tell, but Cassiodorus is credited with some bold action of a military nature. Most likely, he looked after the Adriatic fleet based in Ravenna, against the possibility that a direct visitation from Constantinople would attempt to influence, control, or terminate the young Athalaric’s succession.

Cassiodorus went out of office again after writing for young Athalaric, then returned in 533, this time to the highest civil office in the land, that of praetorian prefect. He still wrote letters for Amalasuntha, Theodahad, and then Witigis, because he was so good at it, but he had higher responsibilities than wordsmithing—effectively those of prime minister. From this period we have official letters in his own voice. He was in office when the Belisarian invasion began, and he held on for three years, through the coup of Witigis and through the dismal time of the first siege of Rome private tour bulgaria.

The latest date when we see him in office in Italy is 538. The Variae were published about then, a monumental presentation of 440 letters that show the years of Theoderic and his successors in a bright, dignified Roman light—a publication, in other words, of undoubted relevance and even controversy at a moment when Constantinople’s forces were fighting to destroy and replace what Cassiodorus had served all his life. By not mentioning the disasters crashing down on his country from all sides, Cassiodorus makes his most eloquent commentary on Justinian’s ambitions.

Constantinople along with the defeated Witigis

When Ravenna fell in 540, Cassiodorus was one of those taken from there to Constantinople along with the defeated Witigis, but his dignity doubtless spared him having to be paraded as a prisoner in Belisarius’s triumphal parade. He became instead one of those emigre Roman dignitaries of learning, leisure, and a keen interest in church and public affairs who by now had no choice but to side with Justinian in seeking the reconstitution of Italy on a Byzantine—that is, no longer a Roman—basis.

He devoted himself to theological writing, producing a commentary on the Psalms meant to introduce to a devout audience not only that text but a finer knowledge of language and rhetoric. Learned retirement was a very old, even Ciceronian, model for Roman gentlemen who did not quite let go of their interests in the great world, but churchly pursuits would sometimes make such retirement more serious and permanent. He appears on the periphery (but was perhaps also discreetly active in the back rooms) of ecclesiastical controversy in Constantinople in the years of the wretched Vigilius (whose story we still defer, poor man). With the “Pragmatic Sanction” of 554, he returned to Italy, to Squillace, and to the ruins left by Justinian’s awful war.

Theoderic’s grand arrival from Ravenna

Let us start from the moment of Theoderic’s grand arrival from Ravenna. What crowds the diminished city could muster were there to greet him. The old phrase SPQR (senatus populusque romanus, “senate and people of Rome”) still described the city’s unity, however paltry and factional the crowd actually was. Pope Symmachus waited with the crowd to meet Theoderic outside the walls. Peter’s tomb was on the northwest side of the walled city on the Vatican hill and the procession from Ravenna could well have visited there before it made its way down the Via Cornelia, past Hadrian’s tomb and across the Aelian bridge into the city proper. Crossing that bridge, the procession would recall Christian emperors of old, as it passed the arch of those late-fourth-century colleagues Valentin- ian and Theodosius, and then the arch of the sons of Theodosius: Honorius and Arcadius. Swelling now, the procession entered the campus Martius, the “field of Mars,” formerly an open expanse that had seemed almost suburban in earlier Roman times, but that was now the clotted heart of the remaining city. The most reasonable route from there wound past the Pantheon, the monument to “all the gods” built originally by Augustus’s son-in-law Agrippa in the earliest days of the principate, then destroyed in a fire 100 years later, and finally rebuilt in the form that survives today by Hadrian around 125 CE, with various later repairs nestinarstvo bulgaria tour.

We would love to know how the Pantheon appeared at this moment. The astonishing dome had protected an imperial audience hall that honored traditional planetary gods such as Mercury and Venus, while offering a literal microcosm of the spherical universe, with earth at the center. After official neglect and then suppression of the old religious rites, this building once full of gods had probably already suffered depredations and neglect, but surely at the same time its magnificence would draw to it some of that past respect. I imagine it as a slightly spooky place back then, quieter than it had ever been, unsure of its future. Not until fully a century later did an emperor deed it over to a pope and have it turned into the church it still is.

Procession passed the porticoed courtyard

A little farther along, the procession passed the porticoed courtyard and theater of Pompey, the great building that initiated urban development on this side of the city and demonstrated the power and presence of its builder. (Pompey indeed might have been Rome’s savior if a Gauish ax had found Julius Caesar’s skull before the two great men fell into the ruinous civil war of 49 BCE.) Finally, Theoderic would have enjoyed his first view of the Roman forum coming from the riverside, up between the Capitoline and Palatine hills, by just the route that Vergil said the old Greek colonist Evander used to show the rustic future site of Rome to Aeneas long before in legendary memory. From there, after a brief visit to the senate house, Theoderic made a public address to the people in which the king promised that he would unfailingly preserve what all the principes of Rome before him had ordained.

What did the audience see when they looked on their ruler for the first time? He was a man of nearly fifty, fair-haired, and probably beardless, as emperors now usually were. His clothing was doubtless also in the current vein, with the slightly raffish and dangerous look of frontier military wear that had been in fashion among leaders for the last century, but he affected the imperial purple as well. There was a lot of mixing of styles and fashions in Italy in those days, so we should be careful about assuming that we could tell who was who in Theoderic’s court just by costume or hairstyle. One hostile source tells us that Theoderic was illiterate, requiring a stencil to trace the word LEGI (“I have read it”) onto documents, a story we begin not to believe when we come on it again in a different hostile source, which says the emperor Justin I used the same device to sign his name. There is reason to think that Theoderic at least was considerably better educated than this.