THEODERIC THE GREAT: King of Goths, Ruler of Romans, by Hans-Ulrich Wiemer. Translated by John Noël Dillon.
Some haters remember Theoderic the Great for a single event. In the 520s, the Goth king of Italy, paranoid about a conspiracy in the Roman Senate, committed the “original sin” of executing the Roman aristocrat Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius.
Boethius was a towering intellectual figure whose erudite writings on logic and music, interlaced with Platonic and Aristotelian ideas, became foundational medieval texts. Today the “Consolation of Philosophy,” which he wrote during his lengthy imprisonment, is often characterized as the last major work of classical civilization. If the death of Boethius marked the end of an era, was Theoderic a benighted barbarian who kick-started the Middle Ages?
Or was he the last great custodian of antiquity? After all, the king had governed so adeptly for most of his three decades in power that many modern historians came to see his reign as a “golden age” — a time of prosperity made possible by a leader who apparently respected Roman culture more than many earlier Roman emperors did.
The German historian Hans-Ulrich Wiemer’s tenacious biography, “Theoderic the Great,” in a new translation by John Noël Dillon, bats aside both versions of the king and largely eschews grand historical categories in favor of a panoramic view of Theoderic’s rule.
Theoderic (or Theodoric, as he’s usually known) was able to master the middle ground, in part because of the circumstances of his youth. As a Gothic prince born in the Roman province of Pannonia in 453 or 454, Theoderic was the resident of a state that made chauvinistic distinctions between Romans and barbarians. The Goths were neither citizens nor foreigners in an empire that both needed and resented them.
From the age of 7 to 17, as a condition of a treaty brokered by his father, Theoderic was a royal hostage in Constantinople, the capital of the Eastern Roman Empire. Later, as the leader of the Goths, he cultivated a tenuous relationship with the Eastern Roman emperor Zeno, whose own vulnerabilities made him vacillate between calling on the Goths for military service and waging war against them.
One of Zeno’s problems was a former imperial general named Odoacer, who deposed the Western Roman emperor Romulus Augustus in 476. Textbooks tend to pinpoint this moment as the end of that half of the empire, whereas Zeno saw it as his chance to rule as the sole emperor over the whole thing, with Odoacer as his deputy. Odoacer seemed reluctant to cooperate and Zeno grew increasingly irritated as the years wore on. In 488, he sent Theoderic on a mission to oust Odoacer, one imperial frenemy against the other.
When Theoderic succeeded in 493, slaying Odoacer by his own hand, he became more than the premier general of the Roman military. He became king of Italy, governing a region that was delicately described as part of the Roman Empire but also apart from it, a separate republic.
Some five million of Theoderic’s subjects in Italy were Romans. Around 100,000 of them were Goths, most of whom had long ago adopted many elements of Roman culture. They were Christian. They drank Roman wine, used Roman tableware and spoke some Latin. But they had also come to Italy with their own shared histories and values, and Theoderic was keen to give them land and payouts to ensure their continued loyalty.
The challenge was to reward his fellow Goths, who had spent over a century in a state of geopolitical limbo, while appeasing the Romans who outnumbered them and had become accustomed to the deep apparatus of Empire. Theoderic waived their taxes after volcanic eruptions; rewarded old rich Roman families with the titles they expected; repaired their aqueducts; and drained their swamps, literally.
Theoderic treated Goths and Romans as parallel populations who owed different things to the kingdom and required different forms of support. Wiemer describes the result as a “dual state,” but it was also a shared state and Theoderic ruled it as both warlord and wonk, Goth and Roman, keenly attuned to the porous and evolving nature of identities and allegiances.
Readers may well be stunned by how deep Wiemer’s history goes, for a period that is so skimpily represented in pop culture and Wikipedia. His text is academic, but rich. It expertly reveals the constraints that governed different strata of late antique society, and in revealing the sinews of Theoderic’s state, it captures the unassuming side of social change and the subtle workings of mutual adaptation. Life in Gothic Italy was shaped as much by the push and pull between luxury sarcophagus manufacturers and government price caps meant to keep the wealthy from getting overcharged, as it was by the singers who devised musical arrangements to suit courtly audiences of varying cultural tastes.
Wiemer prefers this granular scale because it captures the experiences that slip through our epochal frameworks. Big-picture historicizing inevitably reflects what Wiemer calls the “cultural imprints” of each reader’s time and place. During the Italian Renaissance, when Machiavelli turned to Theoderic’s kingship as an example of good governance, he was primarily interested in asking how the Goth general shifted tactics so effectively between times of war and peace. Today, American and European writers wonder if there are any lessons for our quagmires of multiculturalism.
As Wiemer shows, the ancients were less interested in these abstract quandaries than in more pressing realities: busting corrupt officials, fattening their cattle, rebuilding their synagogues. But they were also not without a sense of historical sweep. Some of them felt Theoderic’s kingship was the start of something “modern” and others, thinking of Rome in its heyday, leaned on the language of “restoration.” Theoderic, who found himself without an heir in old age, was concerned enough about his legacy that the mere suspicion that the senators were plotting behind his back with the emperor in Constantinople was enough to set him against Boethius when the philosopher tried to defuse the situation.
In surveying the political playing field and “the conglomeration of subjects” who populated it, Wiemer isn’t so sure we can pin Theoderic down as a ruler. Depending on one’s perspective, his reign was inspiring, disappointing or the same old stuff. Trickiest of all, he had built his kingdom in the image of his ambiguous era — both fused and bifurcated — only for that kingdom to be reconquered, 26 years after his death, by another Roman emperor. Maybe that’s why the mustachioed king is nowhere to be found on the book’s cover: He was, and will always be, a shape-shifter.
Jamie Kreiner is a historian of late antiquity and the early Middle Ages and the author of “The Wandering Mind: What Medieval Monks Tell Us About Distraction.”
THEODERIC THE GREAT: King of Goths, Ruler of Romans | By Hans-Ulrich Wiemer | Translated by John Noël Dillon | Illustrated | 635 pp. | Yale University Press | $45