one young female. . called ‘Spicy’
One of the charges brought against Pope Symmachus (who seems, like some of his Renaissance successors, to have been as much worldly politician as spiritual leader) by his opponents, was that he consorted with loose women, especially one who rejoiced in the nickname ‘Conditaria’, which translates as ‘highly seasoned’, or indeed ‘spicy’, as Chadwick renders it in his Boethius.
Laurentius, must. . retire
For the sake of dramatic clarity I have telescoped Theoderic’s confirmation of Symmachus as Pope, his fiat concerning Church lands, and his decision as to the fate of Laurentius, into a single incident. In fact, final settlement of these matters was not reached till some time after 500.
he was able to back his claim
Displaying a breathtaking combination of inventiveness and lack of scruple, Symmachus produced a formidable battery of forged documents to support his claim: Synodi sinuessanae gesta; Constitutio Silvestri gesta Liberii; Gesta de Xysti purgatione; Gesta Polychronii. Anyone interested in their contents will find them admirably summarized in Chapter 4 of Moorhead’s Theoderic in Italy.
the five hundred and first
Our present system of dating from the birth of Christ, devised by Dionysius Exiguus, was only officially adopted in 527, the year after Theoderic’s death. However, it’s not unreasonable to suppose its periodic use for some time prior to that date. Official acknowledgement of any important change often lags behind a ground-swell of popular usage or opinion; e.g., the adoption in Scotland of Christmas Day as a public holiday, which, for four hundred years following its prohibition as a pagan festival by John Knox, it had not been.
The beautiful discs
This is the famous Senigallia medallion, named after the town near which a surviving example was discovered in 1894. The medallion has generally been dated to 500 and associated with Theoderic’s visit to Rome on the occasion of his tricennalia. However, my old tutor Philip Grierson has argued for a date of 509 (see ‘The Date of Theoderic’s Gold Medallion’, Hikuin, 1985).
yet were themselves still here
And, in some cases, still are: the Massimo (Maximus), Colonna and Gaetani families have pedigrees stretching back to the Roman Republic. (The consul Fabius Maximus was famous for adopting ‘Fabian’ tactics against Hannibal.)
Chapter 24
the bowels of the amphitheatre
Like one of those clever cutaway models designed to show the inner workings of the human body or the internal structure of a building, the Colosseum, in its present plundered state, shows clearly the honeycomb of passages under the arena where the animals were caged and then transported to the surface by means of a complex system of lifts and ramps.
Thrasamund’s. . hunters
The excavated Roman villa at Piazza Armerina in Sicily boasts a magnificent series of mosaics, dating from c. AD 300, showing how animals for the Roman Games were captured and transported. There are mounted men driving stags into a circle of nets; men loading elephants onto a galley; a Roman animal-catcher directing Moorish assistants to surround and net a lion; an ox-drawn cart with a shipping-crate containing one of the big cats; etc.
he strained to twist the creature’s horns
I hold my hands up; the incident’s a shameless crib from a scene in the film Quo Vadis?.
can have terrible consequences
There is ample evidence that seditio popularis (the expression surely needs no translation) at this time caused Theoderic considerable concern. The Liber pontificalis paints an alarming picture of fighting between Laurentian and Symmachan mobs (egged on, respectively, by Festus and Probinus, and by Faustus niger); of clergy put to the sword, and nuns taken from convents and clubbed; and fighting in the streets of Rome a daily occurrence. Pope Gelasius (492-96) reported that two successive bishops were murdered in Scyllaeum (Squillace), and the Fragmentum Laurentianum uses the expression ‘bella civilia’ to describe the rioting in Rome. Things got so bad that on 27 August 502 Theoderic wrote to the bishops assembled in Rome to use their influence to curb the prevailing disorder.
Chapter 25
to hold administrative posts
Under Theoderic, the administration of Italy continued virtually unchanged from imperial times. There were a few (a very few) deviations from his principle whereby the bureaucracy would be manned by Romans, the army by Goths. Count Colosseus, in charge of Pannonia Sirmiensis with troops under him, Servatus Dux Raetiarum, and one Cyprian, who served Theoderic in a military capacity, were all Romans; while Wilia the Comes Patrimonii, Triwila the Praepositus Sacri Cubilici, and the senator Arigern, were all Goths. They were, however, exceptions. To a contemporary, unless they lived in the Gothic heartland of north-east Italy with its capital at Ravenna, it would have been difficult to tell that the country was no longer part of the Roman Empire.
a panegyric. . welcoming refugees
Who were these people? Priscian is not specific, but Zachariah of Mytilene (Historia ecclesiastica) wrote of one Dominic ‘who had a quarrel with the tyrant [Theoderic] and took refuge with King Justinian’. The reference to Justinian (who was not, of course, emperor in Theoderic’s lifetime, but who might loosely be described as ‘king’ in his capacity of virtual co-ruler with Justin) means that the event occurred towards the end of Theoderic’s reign, when the label ‘tyrant’ might be held to have had some justification. Priscian however (as mentioned by Ennodius in Panegyricus dictus Theoderico), was writing at the very beginning of the sixth century, when Theoderic’s popularity was (with the exception of the Laurentian senators disgruntled by the alienation of Church lands) as yet undimmed. Perhaps it was this senatorial clique (expanded by wishful thinking into a larger and more representative group) that Priscian had in mind.
send him an expert harpist
As elsewhere, for the sake of clarity and conciseness, I’ve gone in for some telescoping of events — without, I think, compromising essential historical truth. The Alamanni were defeated by Clovis twice — in 497 and again in 506, when they sought refuge with Theoderic. A little later, we find Theoderic writing to Clovis warning him against attacking the Visigoths: ‘Put away your iron, you who seek to shame me by fighting. I forbid you by my right as a father and as a friend. But in the unlikely event that someone believes that such advice can be despised, he will have to deal with us and our friends as enemies’ (Cassiodorus, Variae). As Theoderic had already warned Clovis not to prosecute his war against the Alamanni any further, it seemed opportune to represent these events as happening more or less simultaneously, and to refer to them in a single letter, with Clovis’s appeal for a harpist thrown in for good measure.
the diptych. . presented to him