Theodoric (24 page)

Again, rage threatened to overwhelm the king. Was he to be balked at every turn by this arrogant aristocrat? With a huge effort, he controlled his anger. ‘Free her,' he ordered, forcing himself to speak evenly.

Seated to his right, Symmachus turned to speak. The great senator's face was furrowed in concern and sympathy. ‘Serenity, would that be wise?' he cautioned. ‘Your instinct is a noble one; it does you great credit. But to free the woman would be to disappoint the crowd. That might be' – he paused, searching for the right word – ‘let us say, impolitic.'

‘Impolitic?'

‘Serenity,
seditio popularis
is easily aroused and can have terrible consequences.' The patrician's voice held a note of urgency. ‘Only last year the Pope himself was injured in a riot, and several priests were killed. And many present can remember the lynching by an angry mob of the emperor Petronius Maximus.'

All Theoderic's nature, with its German sense of honour and reverence for women, rose in revolt against the idea of having to appease the Roman mob. Now he could see clearly what that snake Probinus' game was: to box him into a corner, forcing him to act against his nature, in a demonstration that it was the Senate, not the king, who held the reins of power. Well, he was Theoderic, the warrior king of a heroic race, who ruled by right of conquest. He would show these Romans who was master. Then something tugged at his memory, cooling his indignation. Symmachus had addressed him as ‘Serenity', a title used for emperors alone! Conflict raged within the king: desire to act honourably, according to his principles and conscience, versus a new emotion, a heady exaltation that his dream, acceptance by the Romans as their emperor, could be on the point of being realized. But that acceptance was conditional, he knew; an emperor must please his people.

Meanwhile, the clamour of the crowd had risen to a rhythmic, thunderous chant: ‘
Ad bestias! Ad bestias! Ad bestias!
'

Like an enormous weight, Theoderic seemed to feel the force of fifty thousand wills pressing against his own. Guilt and shame welled up within him – to be suppressed by the promptings of ambition. Again, his fist came forward, but this time the thumb turned down, in the gesture of
pollice verso
. A roar of triumphant approval burst from the throats of the mob.

A great spotted cat padded into the arena.

 

*
See Appendix III: Romans and Barbarians.

†
Senatus populusque romanus
– The Senate and people of Rome.

*
i.e., the Colosseum – a popular name, bestowed not on account of the building's size but because of its propinquity to a colossal statue of Nero.

Whatever deceives seems to exercise a kind of magical enchantment

Plato,
The Republic, c.
350
BC

Concerned about his master's growing obsession with what was bound to be a mirage, Timothy decided to find out for himself what the Romans thought of the idea of Theoderic as emperor. With his richly varied background, which had seen his career progress from streetwise gangster to royal minder to
agens in rebus
with an imperial commission, Timothy was well placed to move freely between the different strata of Roman society – from its dregs in the Subura, the city's poorest quarter, to the rarified world of Domitian's Palace populated by (menials apart) civil servants,
silentiarii
, and a select band of senatorial aristocrats who constituted a kind of unofficial council for Theoderic while he was in Rome. (The king's permanent council in Ravenna consisted of Roman officials of middle-class background, along with high-ranking
duces
or army commanders – almost all Goths – and a very few Goths of proven ability, sufficient to enable them to hold administrative posts.)

Timothy commenced his research beneath the arches of the Circus Maximus, the vast U-shaped stadium where chariot races were held. Known as ‘Under-the-Stands', this was an amazing world of its own, a labyrinth of interlocking passages formed by the hundreds of arches supporting the tiers of seats above, and populated by a colourful under-class of fortune-tellers, astrologers, ready-meal vendors, souvenir sellers, pimps, prostitutes, jugglers, conjurers . . . The answers to Timothy's question about Theoderic as emperor, though varied in style of expression, were remarkably consistent in content: ‘A Jerry emperor? You've got to be joking!' ‘We don't want none o' them Tedesci
*
bastards wearing the diadem.' ‘Theoderic's all right – gives us bread and circuses
don't he? But emperor? Nah, wouldn't be right, would it? 'E's German, see.' He got similar responses in the stinking alleys of the Subura, in Chilo's Tavern near the Porta Appia – famous as an emporium of news and gossip – and in the crowded flats of that monstrous tenement the Insula of Felicula, Rome's tallest building, home to the families of tradesmen living just above the poverty line.

From the top of the great high-rise building – which had become almost as famous a tourist attraction in Rome as the Pyramids were in Egypt – Timothy looked down two hundred feet to the vast city sprawling away to the confining circuit of Aurelian's Wall. Northwards, to his left, between the Tiber and that great arrow-straight artery the Via Flaminia, stretched the level expanse of the Campus Martius; to his right, on the spurs of the Quirinal and Viminal hills, reared the Baths of Constantine and Diocletian. To the south, between the Baths of Trajan and Domitian's Palace, rose the mighty oval of the Colosseum with, beyond, the pale oblong of the Circus Maximus, fully half a mile in length. Directly below, a forest of pillars extending from the foot of the Capitol to the Sacred Way, lay the city's venerable heart, the Forum Romanum. In all directions, striding on tall arches above the roof-tops and the new basilicas everywhere replacing the ancient temples, marched the aqueducts, a network of stone suspended above the huge metropolis. Once again, Timothy found himself wondering how it was that a race capable of creating such marvels had been laid low by primitive tribesmen from the northern forests.

From comments gleaned in the palace, Timothy got the impression that the prejudice against the idea of a German emperor was even stronger among the middle and upper classes than among the plebs, although articulated with more sophistication and some attempt at reasoned argument. Germans were irredeemably wild, treacherous and unpredictable, unfitted by blood to hold the most prestigious office of all. Properly led, they could admittedly make good soldiers; some had even risen to the highest ranks of the army – witness Stilicho, the great Vandal general. But even he had proved untrustworthy, his Teutonic heritage showing through when, having spared his fellow German Alaric, Rome's great enemy, and preoccupied with plans to invade the Eastern Empire, he failed to stop a huge German confederation crossing the Rhine and overrunning Gaul and Spain.

So ran the special pleading. Timothy, however, suspected that the real reason was much more atavistic. Barring the wastes of Caledonia and Scandia,
*
Germania was the only part of Europe that Rome had failed to conquer. Her one attempt to do so had ended in disaster – three legions slaughtered in the depths of the Teutoburger Forest. The horror of that event had inflicted an enduring trauma on the collective mind of Rome, something never to be forgotten – or forgiven. And in the end, Rome had endured the ultimate humiliation: being conquered by the very German tribes she feared and hated above all. Small wonder, then, that, alone of almost every race within the empire and beyond, Germans had never been permitted to wear the imperial diadem.

Although his rank of
agens in rebus
enabled him to mingle on the fringes of the upper class, Timothy could hardly approach the senatorial aristocracy directly. But from conversations with the
silentiarii
, the highest rung of the social ladder he had access to (and one that did have contact with blue-blooded patricians), he discovered some disturbing facts. Boethius and Symmachus, the very pair who commanded most influence with the king, were the leading lights of a coterie of intellectuals centred in both Rome and Constantinople. The circle also included the Greek-speaking Petronius Cethegus, son of the Probinus who led the Laurentian faction and a major thorn in Theoderic's flesh; the young senator and historian Cassiodorus; and Priscian, a Constantinopolitan member of the African diaspora that had followed the Vandal invasion. (Priscian had met and befriended Symmachus when the latter visited the Eastern capital. He was also an enthusiastic apologist for the Eastern Emperor, Anastasius, whom he described in a panegyric as welcoming refugees from old Rome to his court in new Rome.) These were men, in constant touch through letters and mutual visits, whose views counted throughout the Roman world (rather as, three or four generations previously, had those of Augustine, Jerome, Ambrose and their circle), to the extent of being able to influence the attitude of leading Romans in both Italy and the Eastern Empire. What worried Timothy was the suspicion, ground out by the busy rumour mill of palace intrigue, that these men, all champions of Nicene orthodoxy, were strongly anti-Arian – the branch of Christianity to which Theoderic belonged.

Even more disturbing was the suggestion that they regarded a barbarian king of Italy as merely the head of a caretaker government, until, in the words of Priscian, ‘both Romes would come to obey the emperor alone'. This might be nothing more than windy rhetoric, Timothy thought, an intellectual nostalgia for the days when the empire had had a Western as well as an Eastern half. Or, taken out of context, it could be interpreted as highly treasonable. That word ‘refugees' in Priscian's panegyric implied that some Romans, at least, were unhappy with Ostrogothic rule, and therefore might in the future challenge Theoderic's authority. Understanding (and caring) nothing about the theological aspects of the Laurentian Schism, Timothy nevertheless knew that its effect had been to cool relations between Rome (and by extension, Italy) and Constantinople. Therefore anything which fervently extolled the rule of Anastasius, as Priscian's panegyric had done, could, by implication, almost be held to denigrate that of Theoderic.

Unwelcome though he felt the news would be, Timothy knew he would be wanting in his duty if he failed to lay his findings before Theoderic. It was with a heavy heart that he approached the king's quarters in the palace.

Theoderic had never been so happy. Sequestered in a small
tablinum
or study-cum-library which he used as a council chamber, he began discussing the schedule for the day with his two new friends and chief advisers, Symmachus, the wise and cultured senator, and young Boethius, a brilliant scholar whose mind displayed the grasp and judgement of someone far beyond his years. Thanks to the assistance of this gifted pair, those early years of consolidating his rule following the overthrow of Odovacar, were being crowned by ambitious plans which were already beginning to spread his fame and influence far beyond the confines of Italy, and bidding fair to make Theoderic the mentor and unofficial leader of all the German peoples. And when the business of the day was done, it was an unalloyed pleasure to discuss, sometimes in Greek, the literature and philosophy of Greece and Rome: something for which his soul had hungered ever since he had been forced to abandon his studies in Constantinople.

Already accepted by other barbarian kings (even the ferocious Vandals) in the former Western Empire as a ruler too powerful to tangle with,
Theoderic had only one real problem: his brother-in-law, the Frankish monarch, Clovis. Twelve years younger than Theoderic, the ambitious Clovis, whose marriage to a Catholic princess, Clotilda, was followed by his own conversion from Arianism, had embarked on plans to extend his rule over the whole of Gaul – plans which threatened Theoderic's Visigothic kinsmen and allies in Aquitania, and had led to a pre-emptive strike by Clovis against the Alamanni on Gaul's eastern border. The cynical cover for these aggressive moves was a professed desire to bring the light of Catholicism to those benighted heretics living in Arian darkness – a ploy which had succeeded with the late Pope Anastasius, leading him to confer on Clovis the title of ‘Most Christian King'. Boethius and Symmachus were at present engaged in helping Theoderic devise a policy aimed at curbing Clovis' expansionist designs.

‘A firm but tactful stance might be the best approach, Serenity,' suggested Symmachus; ‘a hint of iron hand in velvet glove.'

‘Reinforced with a “sweetener” perhaps,' added Boethius with an innocent-seeming smile. ‘The man loves music, especially songs accompanied by the harp. Why don't we send him an expert harpist, one who can make up songs extolling Clovis' martial feats? That's sure to go down well; our Frankish friend is not impervious to flattery.'

‘Excellent,' laughed Theoderic, clapping the young man on the shoulder. ‘Quintus,' he said to Symmachus, ‘time to put your epistolary skills to use.'