Theoderic, the Goths, and the Restoration of the Roman Empire by Jonathan J. Arnold A ...

304 Pages·2008·2.48 MB·English

by  Jonathan Arnold

Theoderic, the Goths, and the Restoration of the Roman Empire

by

Jonathan J. Arnold

A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment
of the requirements for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy
(History)
in The University of Michigan
2008

Doctoral Committee:

Professor Raymond H. Van Dam, Chair
Professor Bruce W. Frier
Associate Professor Diane O. Hughes
Associate Professor Paolo Squatriti
© Jonathan J. Arnold
All rights reserved
2008
For Raven, for everything, forever and always.
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Contents

Dedication…………………………………………………………………………………ii
List of Abbreviations……………………………………………………………………..iv
Introduction………………………………………………………………………………..1
Chapter 1: A World Turned Upside-down……………………………………………….10
Chapter 2: Restoring the Republic ………………...……………………………………50
Chapter 3: Romans and Goths: The Other Techniques of Accommodation…..………...99
Chapter 4: Italia Felix …………………..……………………………………………...152
Chapter 5: Restoratio Imperii: Gaul...…………………………………………………..205
Epilogue…………………………………………………………………...…………....275
Bibliography………………………………………………………………………........277

iii
Abbreviations

AA Auctores Antiquissimi.

AnonVal Anonymi Valesiani pars posterior.

CassChron Cassiodori Senatoris Chronica ad a. DXIX.

CassOratReliquiae Cassiodori Orationum Reliquiae.

CCSL Corpus scriptorum ecclesiasticorum latinorum.

CIL Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum.

CTh Codex Theodosianus.

Ep. Epistulae.

Fiebiger, vol. 1 Inschriftensammlung zur Geschichte der Ostgermanen.

Fiebiger, vol. 2 Inschriftensammlung zur Geschichte der Ostgermanen. Neue
Folge.

Fiebiger, vol. 3 Inschriftensammlung zur Geschichte der Ostgermanen. Zweite
Folge.

Fr. Fragmenta.

HA, DAur Historia Augusta, Divus Aurelianus.

HA, TT Historia Augusta, Tyranni Triginta.

Hist. Goth. Isidori Iunioris episcopi Hispalensis historia Gothorum
Wandalorum Sueborum ad. a. DCXXIV.

ILS Inscriptiones Latinae Selectae.

LHF Liber Historiae Francorum.

LTUR Lexicon topographicum urbis Romae.
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Marc. Com. Marcellini v.c. comitis Chronicon ad a. DXVIII.

MGH Monumenta Germaniae Historica.

NMaj Novellae Maioriani.

NVal Novellae Valentiniani.

PanTh Ennodius, Panegyricus dictus clementissimo regi Theoderico.

PL Patrologiae cursus completus, series Latina.

PLRE The Prosopography of the Later Roman Empire.

SRL Scriptores rerum Langobardicarum et Italicarum Saec. VI-IX.

SRM Scriptores rerum Merovingicarum.

VE Ennodius, Vita Epiphanii
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Introduction

The end of Roman rule in the West was a complicated process that lasted the
better part of a century. Ironically, it began in the East in 376 when a population of
Goths, later known as Visigoths, appealed to the eastern emperor Valens for admission
and settlement within the Roman Empire. Valens, seeing an opportunity for new recruits,
agreed, settling these Goths along the Danube as federate allies with the task of defending
portions of the frontier. Famine and profiteering, however, led to a rather different
outcome. The Goths revolted, winning a decisive victory at the Battle of Adrianople in
378. Valens’ army was obliterated and Valens himself lost his life. Such an outcome
was a serious blow to Roman prestige, yet within just a few years Valens’ successor,
Theodosius I, had reestablished good relations with the Goths and was even using them
in a major campaign against a western usurper, Eugenius. Theodosius would die in 395,
but by then the Visigoths, led by their strong king Alaric, were becoming a force to be
reckoned with in the Balkans. Played by both halves of the Empire in the aftermath of
Theodosius’ death, they soon set their eyes on Italy, making an initial foray in the
opening years of the fifth century. By 408 they had surrounded Rome and, having been
denied their requests for land and booty, they infamously sacked the Eternal City two
years later, much to the outrage and dismay of the Roman world.
It was within this same context that other barbarians had likewise begun to pick
apart the western Empire. In the winter of 405/6 a massive invasion of Gaul was
launched by a number of barbarian peoples, the most noteworthy being Sueves, Alans,
and Hasding and Siling Vandals. These participants in what has been dubbed the “Great
Rhine Crossing” soon picked up momentum, laying waste to the regions of Gaul in their
wake. By 409 they had made their way to Hispania, divvying up its provinces and
intending to settle there permanently. It was at this point, however, that the western
emperor Honorius appealed to the Visigoths, who had recently relocated to Gaul, and
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promised them a legal settlement in this province should they defeat the barbarians in
Hispania. The Visigoths agreed and proved successful in this enterprise, annihilating
both the Alans and the Siling Vandals in the process. But their victory would come at a
serious price for the western Empire, laying the seeds for the barbarian kingdoms that
would soon supplant it in the West.
In 428/9, no longer checked by the Visigoths, the Hasding Vandals and the
remnants of the Alans crossed the Straits of Gibraltar into North Africa, seizing Carthage
by 439. From there, as pirates, they harassed the Mediterranean Sea, even going so far as
to sack Rome in 455. The western Empire’s hold on the Mediterranean had been broken,
and Vandal North Africa would persist, largely unopposed, for generations. In Gaul, on
the other hand, the Visigoths were granted their promised reservation in southwestern
Aquitania following their return from Spain; but the Great Rhine Crossing had had other
consequences, effectively dissolving the Rhine frontier and allowing those barbarians
settled within that region to filter slowly into the Empire. By the time of the Vandal sack
of Rome, southeastern Gaul was fast becoming the land of the Burgundians, while the
northwest was slowly being transformed into a series of Frankish kingdoms. Though the
Visigoths would continued to serve as allies of the Empire into this period, even backing
a Gallic emperor in 455, they too would eventually abandon the imperial cause. Under
Euric (r. 466-488) the Visigoths rapidly assumed possession of central and Mediterranean
Gaul, bringing most of Spain under their sway as well.
By 476, then, the western Roman Empire had become unrecognizable as a
territorial entity. Barbarians had wrested away nearly all its provinces and its boundaries
had been reduced to the Italian peninsula. This was a Roman Empire in name alone, and
so it was fitting that in this year yet another barbarian strongman, Odovacer, took a
decisive step by deposing the last western emperor and declaring himself king. Italy, like
the rest of the West, had devolved into a barbarian kingdom. And though Odovacer
himself would be deposed, the fate of this Italian kingdom would remain in the hands of
barbarians, ruled by Theoderic and his Ostrogoths until the Justinianic reconquest
initiated in 535. A long process, it had taken a century for the western Empire to fall.
A rather traditional (and somewhat intentionally anachronistic) political overview
like the one just provided should make clear why the “barbarians” tend to dominate
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modern studies of the late antique and early medieval West. Peoples like the Visigoths
and Vandals played significant roles in the transformations witnessed over the course of
the fifth century, at times acting as the primary agents of imperial decline, but also, at
times, casting their lots with the Empire and attempting to forestall what seems, with
hindsight, to have been inevitable. In the process and in the immediate aftermath of
Roman rule, the cultural impact of these same peoples was also of fundamental
importance, contributing to the forging of those new, post-Roman identities that would
define the societies of early medieval (Latin) Christendom and by extension the modern
nations of western Europe.
Scholars generally agree on these basic points, but their interpretations of this
period, emphases, and overall tones have indeed varied greatly over the years. The most
traditional of narratives, rather extreme elaborations of the political overview provided
above, envision this period from the perspective of a unified Roman Empire and Roman
civilization. Privileging both, they offer a crisis or conflict model, where the
stereotypically savage barbarians of Greco-Roman literature are imagined as inserting
themselves into the Roman world by violent means, disrupting and dismantling the
Empire as a political institution and, at their very worst, even destroying Roman
civilization itself.1 Here, as is expected, Romans appear as victims, the Empire
completely falls, and a decisive break rather depressingly ushers in a dark Middle Ages.
If there is any continuity beyond the fifth century, it is dismal and fails to live up to the
greatness of the preceding era.
Such “disruption” models have endured for centuries and even witnessed a mini
revival in recent years.2 But the last three decades have also provided a number of
attractive alternatives. The most extreme of these replace an emphasis on Romanness
and the Roman Empire with an emphasis on barbarians and barbarian kingdoms,
endeavoring to “liberate the barbarians” from unfair Roman (and modern) biases.
Members of the so-called “Vienna School,” for example, have utilized ethnogenesis
theory in an attempt to shed further light on the origins of barbarian peoples,

1 See, for instance, Musset (1965) or, most recently, Ward-Perkins (2005). The title of the latter, The Fall
of Rome and the End of Civilization, is almost as gloomy as its contents.
2 Indeed, the “barbarian conquest” model has its roots in the early sixth century, flowering in the lead-up to
and aftermath of the Justinianic reconquest. For discussions, see Croke (1983) and Goffart (2006), 51-4.
For examples of this recent revival, see Ward-Perkins (2005) and, a bit less negatively, Heather (2006).
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investigating the process whereby once disparate tribes coalesced and formed into the
larger confederacies of late antiquity.3 Ethnogenesis informed and created the “tribal”
memories and identities of peoples like the Goths, memories and identities that
accompanied so-called barbarians when they entered Roman soil and that ultimately
contributed to the new, “national” identities of early medieval Europe. Ethnogenesis, in
other words, helped to forge medieval Europe.
Other scholars, while still privileging barbarian ethnicity or identity, have
criticized ethnogenesis models, questioning both the written sources that supposedly
recorded tribal memory and, ironically, the (apparently) nationalistic motivations of their
modern advocates.4 These scholars propose, instead, that the barbarians of late antiquity
were by and large the products of the Roman frontier and a mixed Romano-barbarian
military aristocracy. They treat the frontier as a zone, imagining that it fostered
interaction, cooperation, and even synthesis between “barbarians” and “Romans” long
before the political transformations of the fifth century.5 In their view, in other words,
the coming of the barbarians may have had political repercussions, but the cultural seeds
of the Middle Ages had already been sown.
A final model combines certain elements of all of the above, while focusing
primarily on accommodation narratives. Here, reverting to a more Romano-centric
approach, scholars generally emphasize either the legal and constitutional mechanisms
that allowed for barbarian rule in the West or the socio-cultural mechanisms that
provided Roman elites with alternatives to Romanness and Roman political rule. Such
legal and constitutional analyses often stress the ordered settlement of barbarians on
Roman soil, challenging models of “disruption” and demonstrating greater and lesser
degrees of political continuity within the barbarian kingdoms.6 The socio-cultural
analyses, on the other hand, tend to focus on the reactions of individual Romans to the
coming of the barbarians. Here, fifth-century Gaul generally serves as the model, with
Gallo-Roman elites becoming truly “post-Roman” and then “medieval” through mass-

3 The classic work is Wenskus (1961). Wolfram and Pohl are currently the most prolific representatives of
the Vienna School.
4 See, most recently, Goffart (2006) and the collection of rather hostile essays in Gillett (2002).
5 For this view of the frontier, see Whittaker (1994) and Burns (2003). For the military aristocracy,
Demandt (1989) and Goffart (2006), 188-92.
6 For legal settlement based on taxation, see Goffart (1980) and (2006), chp. 6. For constitutionality,
Barnwell (1992). Both treat developments in the West broadly.
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