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.