The girl had not a particle of modesty, nor did any man ever see her embarrassed, but she undertook shameless services without the least hesitation, and she was the sort of a person who, for instance, when being flogged or beaten over the head, would crack a joke over it and burst into a loud laugh; and she would undress and exhibit to any who chanced along both her front and her rear naked.2
Even Belisarius, whom Procopius praises in History of the Wars, comes in for criticism, notably for being in thrall to his unfaithful, devious, sorceress wife, Antonina, who was a close friend of empress Theodora. Overall, though, the impression left by the History of the Wars and The Secret History together is that Belisarius was resourceful, brave and, when compared to other imperial commanders of the time, ungrasping.
Procopius tells us how, after her son died, Amalasuntha tried to shore up her political position. She invited her ambitious cousin, Theodohad, who had a power base in Tuscany, and a bad reputation for illegally seizing people’s lands, to become her co-ruler. One can guess at her thinking. By ruling alongside Theodohad she would counter Ostrogothic unease at having a female ruler, and she would ease the resentments of her greatest political rival. It proved to be a bad miscalculation. Procopius claims Amalasuntha had Theodohad swear a secret oath that she would remain the real power in the land but if she did, the oath had little effect. Theodohad used his new position to move against her. Within months his followers seized her, took her from Ravenna to the island of Martana where, some weeks later, Theodohad had her killed.
According to Procopius, Amalasuntha had been a friend and ally of the Eastern Emperor, Justinian, and, when he heard of her killing, he was so angry that he ordered Belisarius to prepare for an invasion of Theodohad’s kingdom. Justinian’s real thinking probably involved less emotion and more devious calculation. His wife, Theodora, had kept up a secret correspondence with king Theodohad’s wife, Gudelina, and Procopius claims that – promising Byzantium would turn a blind eye – Theodora had Gudelina persuade her husband to execute Amalasuntha. The claim is made in Procopius’ poisonous Secret History, and he gives empress Theodora a suitably malevolent motive, writing that she wanted the regent dead because she feared that Amalasuntha – who was known for her beauty and intelligence – might steal away Justinian. It is an unlikely story, and yet it may contain an element of truth. Emperor Justinian may have encouraged Amalasuntha’s murder, as it would give him an excuse to attack the Ostrogothic kingdom. He needed an excuse as, in theory, he was attacking his own territory, which was ruled by his viceroy. He may also have felt that Theodohad would prove a less dangerous opponent than Amalasuntha.
If this was his thinking, he was soon proved right. In many ways Theodohad made an unlikely Ostrogothic king. Germanic people in this era were suspicious of learning, especially in their leaders, as they felt it undermined their warlike instincts. Theodohad was not only literate but highly educated in Plato and Latin literature, and he considered himself a philosopher. In his case, Germanic prejudices were proved correct. In 535 Belisarius seized Sicily. The following year he landed in mainland Italy and captured Naples, which he did by sneaking soldiers into the city through an aqueduct, and where his troops went on a spree of killing and plunder. Theodohad did nothing, remaining in Rome, frozen with indecision. It seemed that Italy would fall even more easily than Africa. But then the Ostrogoths, disgusted at their philosopher king, cut his throat and acclaimed a new and more warlike leader: Witigis.
As with Alaric and Brennus before him, we know disappointingly little about Witigis. He was born into the Ostrogothic elite, served in King Theodoric’s bodyguard and led Ostrogothic forces with success in the western Balkans. He was not a skilled tactician, yet his first decisions as king were shrewd enough. As well as Belisarius’ army in the south, he faced war bands of Franks, who Justinian had encouraged to raid from across the Alps. Witigis decided to deal with the Franks first. He marched north, leaving a garrison of several thousand Ostrogoths in Rome in the hope that the Romans would prove loyal. The Romans, though, had no risk of suffering the sort of killings and plundering that the Neapolitans had just endured at the hands of Belisarius’ soldiers. They sent a delegation to Belisarius inviting him into the city. Cannily, they also managed to persuade the Ostrogothic garrison to leave. So, on 9 December 536, as the Ostrogoths filed out through the city’s northern Flaminian Gate, Belisarius’ troops marched in through the Asinarian Gate to the south. The Romans could hardly have arranged matters more tidily. They had switched sides without so much as a scuffle. It seemed their war was over.
A late nineteenth-century depiction of Belisarius entering Rome, from Cassell’s Illustrated Universal History by Edward Ollier, 1890.
But it would not be quite so easy as that. King Witigis quickly made peace with the Franks. Hearing that Belisarius’ army was far smaller than he had thought, he determined to crush this puny invasion and turned his forces southwards. Unlike Alaric’s horde more than a century earlier, this was not a whole tribe on the move – the warriors’ wives and children remained in the north and central Italy, where they had settled – but an army. In other respects, though, it resembled Alaric’s forces. Some Ostrogoths would have been on foot, others on horseback or riding in the back of wagons. They would have carried a variety of weapons, though, like the Visgoths, an aristocratic minority would have been noticeably better equipped than their underclass helpers. As ever, they all would have stunk and been infected with lice. And they were many. Procopius claims Witigis’ army totalled 150,000 men and though his figure is almost certainly much exaggerated there is no doubt that it was a huge force. In March 537, only three months after the Romans had believed they had saved themselves, the Ostrogoths came in sight of Rome’s walls.
II
As to what kind of Rome awaited them, if a Roman had been transported there from the previous century, just before before Alaric’s sack, he or she would have been shocked at the state of the city. Most of all they would have found it eerily empty. It has been estimated that by 530 the city’s population was in the tens of thousands, or a tenth or twentieth of what it had been in 408. Streets once teeming with people would have felt almost deserted. Blocks of flats that had been packed with Romans had become desolate, with families camped out on ground floors, as upper levels were now a chaos of rotting timbers, fallen stairways, leaking roofs and birds’ nests. Many buildings would have been wholly abandoned.
Rome was also more parochial. Long gone were the days when one could hear a dozen languages in a single street. In 537 most Romans would have spoken one language only: a crude Latin that was already tending towards an early form of Italian. A few would have spoken a little Gothic German, but the bilingualism of the grand days of Empire was long gone and only the most highly educated Romans would have had a good knowledge of Greek. Though, as Belisarius’ army marched into the city, some Romans were doubtless brushing up on their Greek grammar as fast as they could. They would have needed it. More than a century earlier Latin had ceased to be the official language of the Eastern Empire, and now few high officials spoke anything but Greek.
Something had gone very badly wrong for Rome. When last seen, it was in good shape, recovered from Alaric’s sack-lite to the extent that its inhabitants were behaving as if nothing had happened. The answer lay on the Capitoline Hill. The temple to Jupiter Best and Greatest that had dominated the city’s skyline for a thousand years was now in ruins, its roof stripped of its bronze tiles. More clues could be found in the main Forum, which had been crowded with statues but was now filled with empty marble plinths. In June 455, four decades after Alaric’s attack, the city was sacked again, and far more brutally, by a war band of Vandals from Africa led by Genseric. The Vandals stayed in the city for two weeks, during which time, among other destructive acts, they made off with the temple of Jupiter’s roof tiles and heaved away statues by the cartload. The city suffered again seventeen years later when it became a battleground in one of the Western Empire’s l
ast civil wars, in which the military chief Ricimer hunted down Emperor Anthemius, whom he had beheaded in one of Rome’s churches. It was no wonder that most Romans had voted with their feet and abandoned their city.
Rome was not only damaged by war. Sources of the time describe how it suffered also at the hands of its own inhabitants. In 458 Emperor Majorian, who was the latest in a long line of emperors to issue ineffective decrees intended to halt Rome’s decay, complained that the city’s ancient buildings were being torn down and their fabric used for minor repairs elsewhere. Rome’s antiquities were often desecrated with the connivance of the city authorities, and even Majorian accepted that some were now so far gone that they might as well be scavenged. In the decades before Witigis’ arrival the bronze elephants on the Via Sacra were decrepit. Aqueducts were being misused – their water was probably being siphoned off – and decorative bronze and lead were regularly stolen from public buildings. The old granaries used to distribute food to the Romans were in a bad way, as was an elegant curved portico in the old Forum, which was only saved by being turned into private housing.
Archaeology confirms the bleak picture. After Alaric’s sack, the area around the Crypt of Balbus, between the theatres of Pompey and Marcellus, became a waste ground of collapsed porticoes, fallen columns and robbed paving. For a time it seems to have been used as a depot for looted marble. As well as being pillaged by Romans, the area was also damaged by earthquakes, of which there were a number at this time, and which would have had a doubly destructive effect on buildings that had been robbed of stone, and also of the metal clamps that held their stonework together. As the fifth century wore on, houses and apartment blocks became filled with rubbish. Parks and squares turned to empty wilderness. Belisarius found there was enough grassland within the city walls to graze all of his cavalry’s horses. From this collapse emerged one of Rome’s few growth industries of the era. In the Forum and elsewhere lime kilns were built, where marble columns, plinths, statues and parts of buildings were baked and destroyed to be sold as plaster.
Yet however wrecked Rome was, it was still in a better state than most other Italian cities. It still had functioning aqueducts and baths and it could still amaze and impress visitors. Cassiodorus, who served as chief minister under Ostrogothic rulers, wrote that, ‘It can be truly said that the whole of Rome is a marvel,’ and described it as ‘a wonderful forest of buildings’ with, ‘baths built as large as provinces, the huge Colosseum whose top is almost beyond human vision; the Pantheon with its lofty and beautiful dome as large as a whole region of the city’.3 It was probably also a little less unhealthy than it had been. Malaria will have been as prevalent as ever but with the city’s population reduced and the streets far less crowded, diseases such as measles would no longer have been endemic.
And the city still had admirers who sought to preserve its wonders. The most determined of these, a little surprisingly, was the barbarian leader who had led the Ostrogoths into Italy and who sliced his rival in two over dinner: Theodoric. During Theodoric’s three-decade rule he came to Rome at least once, probably twice, staying in the old palace on the Palatine for six months, which was longer than any imperial visit for two centuries. It seems it was not a comfortable visit and he afterwards set aside 200 pounds of gold to have the palace repaired. He also had 25,000 tiles made to repair other buildings in the city, including the Baths of Caracalla, the remnants of the burned-out Basilica Aemelia in the main Forum, Emperor Domitian’s old athletic stadium in the Campus Martius, and even the Temple to Vesta, which had been empty of virgins for more than a hundred years. He ordered that the city’s sewers should be cleaned and repaired, the aqueducts too, and gave Rome an architect to supervise the upkeep of the city’s old buildings.
Theodoric was not only interested in the architecture. He also sought to preserve the city’s ancient traditions. He revived the corn dole and ordered a million litres of wheat to be distributed to the inhabitants along with rations of pork. Though he had no liking for the games, which he considered morally repugnant, he nevertheless revived them to bring the Romans a little pleasure, and hired acrobats, who offered a new and economical form of entertainment: rather than killing wild animals they would taunt them and leap out of their way, in an early form of bullfighting. Finally, Theodoric honoured the Roman Senate in a way that had not been seen for a long time. On coins and official inscriptions he used the old abbreviation SC, meaning Senatus Consulto, or ‘by decree of the Senate’, and Res Publica, keeping alive the five-hundred-year-old fiction that Rome was still a Republic. He even referred to Invicta Roma, or ‘Unconquered Rome’: a rather optimistic claim, seeing as by this time it had already endured two sackings.
It is doubtful Theodoric’s good intentions had much effect. Twenty-five thousand tiles would have made little difference to the city’s decaying monuments while reviving ancient titles could not make Rome what it had been. As ever, the city’s traditions were kept alive by its aristocratic class and this was in a poor way by the sixth century. A wealthy Christian noble from 408 would have found their cosy social world had all but vanished. The Senate, which in their time had included 2,000 members, was now reduced to between 50 and 80, many of whom probably struggled to meet the required property qualifications. Most of the city’s great families had fled to Sicily or Constantinople after the Vandals’ sack, and their town houses were closed up or ruined. The city was now dominated by a single family, the Anicii – the family of Proba, who was blamed for opening the city’s gates to Alaric’s Visigoths – which now formed an international clan, with highly placed cousins from Gaul to Constantinople.
Rome’s traditions declined with her aristocrats. The last time that we hear of a senator spending lavishly on games is in 424, a decade after Alaric’s attack. After the Vandal sack expensive games were beyond anyone’s budget. Besides, with the Vandals occupying North Africa it was hard to procure exotic animals. By the end of the fifth century even cheap games were so rare that senators no longer bothered to have their names carved on their seats in the Colosseum. The ancient republican positions that included responsibility for holding games likewise vanished. We know of no consular games after 523 and no consuls after 534.
Yet even in these difficult days, when much of Rome was decaying, there was also new growth. Several of Rome’s finest churches were created at this time. The vast Santa Maria Maggiore was built in the 430s, the elegant church of Santa Sabina on the Aventine Hill was completed about the same time and the circular Santo Stefano Rotondo on the Caelian Hill was built later in the same century. The satellite settlements around the great martyrs’ churches to Peter, Paul and Lawrence expanded, with new monasteries and hostels for pilgrims, who were plentiful during the four decades of Ostrogothic peace. Around the year 500, a large public latrine was set up in front of San Pietro for their needs.
This brings us to another great change in the city. Our Christian aristocrat from 408 would have found Rome in 537 almost free of paganism. Christianity was on the verge of achieving absolute triumph. Sadly this did not mean the city was religiously unified, and in many ways it was more divided than before, though tensions were now among Christians. From 498 to 506, the Church in Rome experienced one of its worst schisms between rival papal candidates, which was all the more divisive because it had both class and international dimensions. At this time the stability of the Byzantine Empire was threatened by the passionate struggle of two rival Christian movements, the Monophysites and Dyophysites, who disagreed as to the human and divine natures of Jesus. The Byzantine emperor Anastasius tried to heal the split by imposing a compromise dogma, Henotoikon, and backed a papal candidate, Laurentius, who would cooperate. Ordinary Romans resented Anastasius’ interference, which they saw as a challenge to their pope’s primacy above Constantinople. Class warfare broke out, as the city’s aristocrats and high clergy supported Laurentius and low clergy and the poor supported his rival, Symmachus. Even the city’s chariot teams became involved, with fans
of the populist Green team backing Symmachus and the aristocratic Blues, Laurentius. The greatest violence came from the city’s aristocrats who had their slaves attack Symmachus’ followers and drive them from the city centre. Street battles were fought, priests were murdered and nuns were flung from their convents, stripped and beaten. The dispute was so protracted that it affected Rome’s buildings. As Symmachus was barred from central Rome he embarked on construction in the suburbs, where new churches sprang up, such as San Pancrazio on the Gianicolo Hill. St Peter’s, which was also outside the city at this time, gained a grand new stairway, a new fountain and its new public latrine.
The only figure who remained scrupulously neutral throughout the dispute was King Theodoric, yet even he was eventually drawn into religious conflict. Like Alaric’s Visigoths, he and most of the Ostrogoths followed Homoean Christianity – now usually referred to as Arianism – which held yet another view of the nature of the human and divine natures of Jesus, and was regarded as heretical by Monophysites and Dyophysites alike. Theodoric had a rather modern, relaxed attitude towards religion and never sought supremacy for his form of Christianity, yet he did expect it to be tolerated. Towards the end of Theodoric’s reign, Emperor Justinian’s uncle and predecessor, Justin, began a campaign of persecution in the Byzantine Empire against Arian Christians and also Jews. To make matters worse, intolerance then spread west. In 523 the pope in Rome, John, tried to rededicate Rome’s several Arian churches, and mobs burned synagogues in Ravenna, Verona and Rome. In reprisal Theodoric had those responsible lashed and a church in Verona burned. The dispute soured the last years of what had been an otherwise highly successful period of rule, causing an ugly rift between Theodoric and many Romans.
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