The third grandee, Festus, we have seen already, the most senior of the ex-consuls in all these years, having given the year his name in 472 and won his seat in the Colosseum afterward. By 490, he was already the senior surviving consul, when Theoderic sent him to Constantinople to represent his claims as the legitimate Roman ruler in Italy. Although Festus was unsuccessful then, he returned to Constantinople more successfully on the same mission in 497. He was loyal to Theoderic by choice rather than necessity, securely independent in his seniority. When he returned to Italy, he became the moving force behind the election of the alternative pope Laurentius. Rumor had it that Festus promised the emperor an end to schism. Emperor Zeno signed a decree of church union called the Henotikon in 584, but that only made the divided parties dig in their heels, confirming the break between Rome and Constantinople. Pope Anastasius II (r. 496-498) was a promising candidate for leading a rapprochement and signing the Henotikon, but he died too soon, and so (the most common interpretation goes) Festus scattered bribes to ensure Laurentius’s election and did everything in his power to advance the Laurentian cause, to the point of giving Laurentius lifetime asylum on his estates when the tide went against them in the end. Festus managed this intrigue without losing Theoderic’s favor, and he is last seen as an object of worthy praise in 513, having by then become a man of very advanced years by Roman standards tour packages bulgaria.
To an important extent
We should not think that these men were representative of their class. To an important extent, they were their class, that is, they were the undoubted leaders of a shrunken and diminished senate. Could there have been as few as thirty or fifty real senators by now, bravely meeting in the traditional senate house and keeping up the order among the echoes? At Rome in those days, genealogists of taste and learning could tell you the fates of old families, as many disappeared and some merely degraded into obscurity. Without them, it became a little lonelier at the top.
There were other Italies. Even the richest of these men had to have their roots somewhere, their power and their lands in some province. Liberius came from Liguria and was buried in Rimini, but the more traditional senators had at least a foot in the city of Rome, and land between there and Naples. Theodahad, a relative of Theoderic’s whom we will meet later, settled in Tuscany, where he became a local tyrant, more than once rebuked publicly by Theoderic and forced (or at least Theoderic ordered that he be forced) to give up property that he and his private army had illegally seized. Meanwhile, Sicily, long a bastion of senatorial wealth and land, only latterly came back under Italian control when Odoacer retrieved it from Vandal rule. The days of great estates spreading across the African highlands and sending produce to Rome and wealth to a few Romans were now long gone.
So where were the Goths? They are the invisible men of Theoderic’s Italy. We have seen that their numbers fell far short of a horde, and that they settled mainly in the north and down to Rome. They and all their predecessors and all their successors among the barbarians who supposedly invaded poor, defenseless Italy ended by disappearing, and the language spoken in Milan, Rome, and Palermo to this day is a direct and astonishingly uncontaminated descendant of Latin. Where did the supposedly mighty Goths and Lombards go?
We must give some credit to the powerful urge to go native—to roman- ize—that newcomers in Italy felt for many centuries. The priest-poet Ennodius made fun of a contemporary, Jovinian, who couldn’t decide what part he wanted to play, for he wore a Goth’s beard and a Roman’s winter cloak. Was he Goth or Roman? Or was Jovinian the sort that Cassiodorus had in mind when he observed drily that it was poor Romans who imitated the Goths, just as rich Goths imitated the Romans? Imitation is the first step toward assimilation.
Read More about Theoderic and regent of Italy
