Christian culture sprouted some wings

In the years between the sieges, Christian culture sprouted some wings. Arator, a sometime lawyer and public servant—and therefore a beneficiary of the old education—took up the churchly life, and Pope Vigilius made him subdeacon in the church of Rome. In 544, with the city under siege, he presented Vigilius with a grand poem, in two books, of the Acts of the Apostles. The pope prevailed on him to offer a reading there and then in Saint Peter’s church on the Vatican hill, after which the poem would be deposited in the church’s archives. The sample was so effective and so well received that the pope immediately made arrangements for a com¬plete reading in the church of Saint Peter in Chains a few days later. That reading lasted four days (a few hundred lines of Latin a day), proceeding slowly because the audience continually interrupted the poet with requests to reread particularly delightful bits.

Here’s how it began

When Judea, polluted by the blood of its crime, had dared to perpetrate wickedness, and when the creator of all things had given back, to redeem the human race, the body he had taken in human form without stain of sin, then he deigned to touch the very bottom of hell without leaving the heights of heaven.

From Jesus’s crucifixion to Paul’s arrival in Rome (a fitting ending for a poem created there), Arator colors and tones the Acts in traditional solemn hexameters, and cuts no slack for Jews in this context. For a tasteful audience accustomed to showing mild learned distaste for the roughness of biblical language, such a version did not erase the authoritative text from their minds, but it produced the equivalent of a modern video dramatization: untrue to the original in any number of ways, but faithful to the audience’s tastes and therefore unlikely to draw criticism. No wonder the poem was a success. If we did not know the circumstances, we would read Arator’s lines exalting the eternity of the city, the glorious claims of the papacy, and the merits of Vigilius as without a sense of irony or, more to the point, as admiration for the stubbornness with which Christian structures and ideals were now integrated into old Roman ones and able to survive even the city’s most lugubrious misfortunes.

In 545, Justinian’s doctrinal maneuverings convinced him that he needed the figurehead of the papacy to support him in Constantinople, and so shortly before the second siege of Rome, he had Vigilius shanghaied from the city, abducting him in the very act of presiding at the Eucharist. Intention crossed with ineptitude, and Vigilius was held for a year of humiliation and impotence in Sicily before finally being taken to Constantinople, where he arrived just as news came from Italy that Totila had captured Rome. We will follow his misfortunes in Constantinople on later pages, but we may note now that whatever leadership the church might have offered in the abysmal times of the late 540s was crippled by his absence customized tours balkan.

The church lived on

Nevertheless, the church lived on, and more besides. In a footnote to history, in 549, when Totila was again in Rome, the circus races were held for the last time. Through the vicissitudes of these years, the active damage of military attack and capture, the running sores of times of siege, and the inattention and lack of resources at other times conspired to do to Rome (at the hands of both sides of the conflict, both of which could make a persuasive claim to being “Roman”) what no one had done in more than 900 years, since the Gauls’ seizure and sack of the city in 390 BCE.

The Visigoths of 410 and the Vandals of 455 had been shortterm visitors, plundering rather than systematically destroying, and were soon gone. Under leaders like Aetius, Odoacer, and Theoderic, the city had survived, endured, and even been restored to some of its former glories, while its aristocratic leadership remained in control. But now the depredations were widespread, continuing, and (as it proved) irreversible. The destruction of the aqueducts left the city, for one thing, without the means to support anything like the population it had held in antiquity. Most of the damage done to the ancient city and its splendors, the damage that left it a malarial wasteland for most of the middle ages and its heart a ruin long after, was done in this war between Romans and Romans seeking the preservation of whatever they thought valuable in Roman civilization.

Christian culture sprouted some wings

In the years between the sieges, Christian culture sprouted some wings. Arator, a sometime lawyer and public servant—and therefore a beneficiary of the old education—took up the churchly life, and Pope Vigilius made him subdeacon in the church of Rome. In 544, with the city under siege, he presented Vigilius with a grand poem, in two books, of the Acts of the Apostles. The pope prevailed on him to offer a reading there and then in Saint Peter’s church on the Vatican hill, after which the poem would be deposited in the church’s archives. The sample was so effective and so well received that the pope immediately made arrangements for a com¬plete reading in the church of Saint Peter in Chains a few days later. That reading lasted four days (a few hundred lines of Latin a day), proceeding slowly because the audience continually interrupted the poet with requests to reread particularly delightful bits.

Here’s how it began

When Judea, polluted by the blood of its crime, had dared to perpetrate wickedness, and when the creator of all things had given back, to redeem the human race, the body he had taken in human form without stain of sin, then he deigned to touch the very bottom of hell without leaving the heights of heaven.

From Jesus’s crucifixion to Paul’s arrival in Rome (a fitting ending for a poem created there), Arator colors and tones the Acts in traditional solemn hexameters, and cuts no slack for Jews in this context. For a tasteful audience accustomed to showing mild learned distaste for the roughness of biblical language, such a version did not erase the authoritative text from their minds, but it produced the equivalent of a modern video dramatization: untrue to the original in any number of ways, but faithful to the audience’s tastes and therefore unlikely to draw criticism. No wonder the poem was a success. If we did not know the circumstances, we would read Arator’s lines exalting the eternity of the city, the glorious claims of the papacy, and the merits of Vigilius as without a sense of irony or, more to the point, as admiration for the stubbornness with which Christian structures and ideals were now integrated into old Roman ones and able to survive even the city’s most lugubrious misfortunes.

In 545, Justinian’s doctrinal maneuverings convinced him that he needed the figurehead of the papacy to support him in Constantinople, and so shortly before the second siege of Rome, he had Vigilius shanghaied from the city, abducting him in the very act of presiding at the Eucharist. Intention crossed with ineptitude, and Vigilius was held for a year of humiliation and impotence in Sicily before finally being taken to Constantinople, where he arrived just as news came from Italy that Totila had captured Rome. We will follow his misfortunes in Constantinople on later pages, but we may note now that whatever leadership the church might have offered in the abysmal times of the late 540s was crippled by his absence customized tours balkan.

The church lived on

Nevertheless, the church lived on, and more besides. In a footnote to history, in 549, when Totila was again in Rome, the circus races were held for the last time. Through the vicissitudes of these years, the active damage of military attack and capture, the running sores of times of siege, and the inattention and lack of resources at other times conspired to do to Rome (at the hands of both sides of the conflict, both of which could make a persuasive claim to being “Roman”) what no one had done in more than 900 years, since the Gauls’ seizure and sack of the city in 390 BCE.

The Visigoths of 410 and the Vandals of 455 had been shortterm visitors, plundering rather than systematically destroying, and were soon gone. Under leaders like Aetius, Odoacer, and Theoderic, the city had survived, endured, and even been restored to some of its former glories, while its aristocratic leadership remained in control. But now the depredations were widespread, continuing, and (as it proved) irreversible. The destruction of the aqueducts left the city, for one thing, without the means to support anything like the population it had held in antiquity. Most of the damage done to the ancient city and its splendors, the damage that left it a malarial wasteland for most of the middle ages and its heart a ruin long after, was done in this war between Romans and Romans seeking the preservation of whatever they thought valuable in Roman civilization.

Christian culture sprouted some wings

In the years between the sieges, Christian culture sprouted some wings. Arator, a sometime lawyer and public servant—and therefore a beneficiary of the old education—took up the churchly life, and Pope Vigilius made him subdeacon in the church of Rome. In 544, with the city under siege, he presented Vigilius with a grand poem, in two books, of the Acts of the Apostles. The pope prevailed on him to offer a reading there and then in Saint Peter’s church on the Vatican hill, after which the poem would be deposited in the church’s archives. The sample was so effective and so well received that the pope immediately made arrangements for a com¬plete reading in the church of Saint Peter in Chains a few days later. That reading lasted four days (a few hundred lines of Latin a day), proceeding slowly because the audience continually interrupted the poet with requests to reread particularly delightful bits.

Here’s how it began

When Judea, polluted by the blood of its crime, had dared to perpetrate wickedness, and when the creator of all things had given back, to redeem the human race, the body he had taken in human form without stain of sin, then he deigned to touch the very bottom of hell without leaving the heights of heaven.

From Jesus’s crucifixion to Paul’s arrival in Rome (a fitting ending for a poem created there), Arator colors and tones the Acts in traditional solemn hexameters, and cuts no slack for Jews in this context. For a tasteful audience accustomed to showing mild learned distaste for the roughness of biblical language, such a version did not erase the authoritative text from their minds, but it produced the equivalent of a modern video dramatization: untrue to the original in any number of ways, but faithful to the audience’s tastes and therefore unlikely to draw criticism. No wonder the poem was a success. If we did not know the circumstances, we would read Arator’s lines exalting the eternity of the city, the glorious claims of the papacy, and the merits of Vigilius as without a sense of irony or, more to the point, as admiration for the stubbornness with which Christian structures and ideals were now integrated into old Roman ones and able to survive even the city’s most lugubrious misfortunes.

In 545, Justinian’s doctrinal maneuverings convinced him that he needed the figurehead of the papacy to support him in Constantinople, and so shortly before the second siege of Rome, he had Vigilius shanghaied from the city, abducting him in the very act of presiding at the Eucharist. Intention crossed with ineptitude, and Vigilius was held for a year of humiliation and impotence in Sicily before finally being taken to Constantinople, where he arrived just as news came from Italy that Totila had captured Rome. We will follow his misfortunes in Constantinople on later pages, but we may note now that whatever leadership the church might have offered in the abysmal times of the late 540s was crippled by his absence customized tours balkan.

The church lived on

Nevertheless, the church lived on, and more besides. In a footnote to history, in 549, when Totila was again in Rome, the circus races were held for the last time. Through the vicissitudes of these years, the active damage of military attack and capture, the running sores of times of siege, and the inattention and lack of resources at other times conspired to do to Rome (at the hands of both sides of the conflict, both of which could make a persuasive claim to being “Roman”) what no one had done in more than 900 years, since the Gauls’ seizure and sack of the city in 390 BCE.

The Visigoths of 410 and the Vandals of 455 had been shortterm visitors, plundering rather than systematically destroying, and were soon gone. Under leaders like Aetius, Odoacer, and Theoderic, the city had survived, endured, and even been restored to some of its former glories, while its aristocratic leadership remained in control. But now the depredations were widespread, continuing, and (as it proved) irreversible. The destruction of the aqueducts left the city, for one thing, without the means to support anything like the population it had held in antiquity. Most of the damage done to the ancient city and its splendors, the damage that left it a malarial wasteland for most of the middle ages and its heart a ruin long after, was done in this war between Romans and Romans seeking the preservation of whatever they thought valuable in Roman civilization.

Preoccupied by dreams of Romanness

What must it have been like to be in the Italy that suffered these waves of war back and forth for seventeen years? Many people, away from the beaten path, were spared direct experience of savagery and loss, though even those who saw no battles saw soldiers and worse coming to seize what they needed by the brutal informal taxation of wartime. Famine in Emilia and Etruria in 549, Procopius tells us, left men desperate enough to grind acorns into a kind of wheat and bake bread from them, and there were rumors of cannibalism.10 A few people, most of them probably among the wealthy elite whom we know, preoccupied by dreams of Romanness and very likely power, may have wished or even schemed for a Justinianic invasion, but none can have taken any satisfaction in the melancholy sequence of events that unfolded or in the devastation of society and landscape that came afterward. No good thing came from this war. Most people simply suffered, dreaded, and hoped for release.

Totila risked a pitched battle

Belisarius was gone by the time it ended, and Totila was dead. Unable to resist the temptation to achieve a lasting victory, Totila risked a pitched battle at Busta Gallorum in 552, and there defeat and death caught up with him. Procopius gives us a rousing picture of the wild war dance the king performed on the threshold of battle, but for a man whose whole experience of war had come fifty years after Theoderic’s settlement in Italy, anything that risked attracting such a parody must have been a gesture rather than a living tradition, like a modern army officer carrying a sword with his dress uniform. The Amalization and gothicization of the army and regime in Italy during Theoderic’s last years could have encouraged such posturing, but the almost instantaneous evaporation of Gothic culture in Italy when the war was finally over suggests how little could now be credited to barbarian vitality.

The eunuch general Narses had replaced Belisarius a few months before Busta Gallorum, coming from the Balkans, up the coast from Salona, making his way to Ravenna by June 552 with an army of 30,000. Fresh troops, they faced Totila and defeated him. Only a fragment of resistance faded away into the lands north of the Po, there to go to ground and disappear. Procopius says the Goths were expelled, but his successor in the writing of semiofficial history, Agathias, says not. It may have made no difference.

Military occupation was now the formal means of Roman governance in the land that had known the oligarchic liberty of the Roman republic. Narses would remain in Ravenna off and on until 568, and Byzantine rule would continue there until the eighth century, always based in the cowards’ capital—marsh-girt for defense—with a port nearby offering the most direct boat route to Constantinople. (Narses’s departure coincided with the Lombards’ arrival in Italy, leading later generations to tell an improbable story about Italians who were unhappy with his rule complaining to the emperor Justin II, and Narses retiring in a snit to Naples as a result. It is just as likely that Narses thought the Lombards would make useful soldiers and so invited them in, then lost control of them customized tours balkan.)

A quarter century

Justinian’s response to the victory—after a quarter century on the throne, at the end of a dispiriting decade—was to try, ever the man of legal codification, to define and shape the society he controlled by writing a prescriptive text. In this case, the text was legal, not ecclesiastical: the “Pragmatic Sanction,” issued in 554 .

The document is not without fantasy. It annuls all of Totila’s acts, a dangerously destabilizing decision, tearing open wounds that would otherwise have begun to heal. Those who had sold property under duress in Totila’s time could now recover it by refunding the price they had collected for it. It restored exiles, prisoners, slaves, and indentured farmworkers to the status they had enjoyed before Totila, on the assumption that the state of affairs in the early 540s, after Belisarius’s first victory, was legal and Roman.

Preoccupied by dreams of Romanness

What must it have been like to be in the Italy that suffered these waves of war back and forth for seventeen years? Many people, away from the beaten path, were spared direct experience of savagery and loss, though even those who saw no battles saw soldiers and worse coming to seize what they needed by the brutal informal taxation of wartime. Famine in Emilia and Etruria in 549, Procopius tells us, left men desperate enough to grind acorns into a kind of wheat and bake bread from them, and there were rumors of cannibalism.10 A few people, most of them probably among the wealthy elite whom we know, preoccupied by dreams of Romanness and very likely power, may have wished or even schemed for a Justinianic invasion, but none can have taken any satisfaction in the melancholy sequence of events that unfolded or in the devastation of society and landscape that came afterward. No good thing came from this war. Most people simply suffered, dreaded, and hoped for release.

Totila risked a pitched battle

Belisarius was gone by the time it ended, and Totila was dead. Unable to resist the temptation to achieve a lasting victory, Totila risked a pitched battle at Busta Gallorum in 552, and there defeat and death caught up with him. Procopius gives us a rousing picture of the wild war dance the king performed on the threshold of battle, but for a man whose whole experience of war had come fifty years after Theoderic’s settlement in Italy, anything that risked attracting such a parody must have been a gesture rather than a living tradition, like a modern army officer carrying a sword with his dress uniform. The Amalization and gothicization of the army and regime in Italy during Theoderic’s last years could have encouraged such posturing, but the almost instantaneous evaporation of Gothic culture in Italy when the war was finally over suggests how little could now be credited to barbarian vitality.

The eunuch general Narses had replaced Belisarius a few months before Busta Gallorum, coming from the Balkans, up the coast from Salona, making his way to Ravenna by June 552 with an army of 30,000. Fresh troops, they faced Totila and defeated him. Only a fragment of resistance faded away into the lands north of the Po, there to go to ground and disappear. Procopius says the Goths were expelled, but his successor in the writing of semiofficial history, Agathias, says not. It may have made no difference.

Military occupation was now the formal means of Roman governance in the land that had known the oligarchic liberty of the Roman republic. Narses would remain in Ravenna off and on until 568, and Byzantine rule would continue there until the eighth century, always based in the cowards’ capital—marsh-girt for defense—with a port nearby offering the most direct boat route to Constantinople. (Narses’s departure coincided with the Lombards’ arrival in Italy, leading later generations to tell an improbable story about Italians who were unhappy with his rule complaining to the emperor Justin II, and Narses retiring in a snit to Naples as a result. It is just as likely that Narses thought the Lombards would make useful soldiers and so invited them in, then lost control of them customized tours balkan.)

A quarter century

Justinian’s response to the victory—after a quarter century on the throne, at the end of a dispiriting decade—was to try, ever the man of legal codification, to define and shape the society he controlled by writing a prescriptive text. In this case, the text was legal, not ecclesiastical: the “Pragmatic Sanction,” issued in 554 .

The document is not without fantasy. It annuls all of Totila’s acts, a dangerously destabilizing decision, tearing open wounds that would otherwise have begun to heal. Those who had sold property under duress in Totila’s time could now recover it by refunding the price they had collected for it. It restored exiles, prisoners, slaves, and indentured farmworkers to the status they had enjoyed before Totila, on the assumption that the state of affairs in the early 540s, after Belisarius’s first victory, was legal and Roman.

Preoccupied by dreams of Romanness

What must it have been like to be in the Italy that suffered these waves of war back and forth for seventeen years? Many people, away from the beaten path, were spared direct experience of savagery and loss, though even those who saw no battles saw soldiers and worse coming to seize what they needed by the brutal informal taxation of wartime. Famine in Emilia and Etruria in 549, Procopius tells us, left men desperate enough to grind acorns into a kind of wheat and bake bread from them, and there were rumors of cannibalism.10 A few people, most of them probably among the wealthy elite whom we know, preoccupied by dreams of Romanness and very likely power, may have wished or even schemed for a Justinianic invasion, but none can have taken any satisfaction in the melancholy sequence of events that unfolded or in the devastation of society and landscape that came afterward. No good thing came from this war. Most people simply suffered, dreaded, and hoped for release.

Totila risked a pitched battle

Belisarius was gone by the time it ended, and Totila was dead. Unable to resist the temptation to achieve a lasting victory, Totila risked a pitched battle at Busta Gallorum in 552, and there defeat and death caught up with him. Procopius gives us a rousing picture of the wild war dance the king performed on the threshold of battle, but for a man whose whole experience of war had come fifty years after Theoderic’s settlement in Italy, anything that risked attracting such a parody must have been a gesture rather than a living tradition, like a modern army officer carrying a sword with his dress uniform. The Amalization and gothicization of the army and regime in Italy during Theoderic’s last years could have encouraged such posturing, but the almost instantaneous evaporation of Gothic culture in Italy when the war was finally over suggests how little could now be credited to barbarian vitality.

The eunuch general Narses had replaced Belisarius a few months before Busta Gallorum, coming from the Balkans, up the coast from Salona, making his way to Ravenna by June 552 with an army of 30,000. Fresh troops, they faced Totila and defeated him. Only a fragment of resistance faded away into the lands north of the Po, there to go to ground and disappear. Procopius says the Goths were expelled, but his successor in the writing of semiofficial history, Agathias, says not. It may have made no difference.

Military occupation was now the formal means of Roman governance in the land that had known the oligarchic liberty of the Roman republic. Narses would remain in Ravenna off and on until 568, and Byzantine rule would continue there until the eighth century, always based in the cowards’ capital—marsh-girt for defense—with a port nearby offering the most direct boat route to Constantinople. (Narses’s departure coincided with the Lombards’ arrival in Italy, leading later generations to tell an improbable story about Italians who were unhappy with his rule complaining to the emperor Justin II, and Narses retiring in a snit to Naples as a result. It is just as likely that Narses thought the Lombards would make useful soldiers and so invited them in, then lost control of them customized tours balkan.)

A quarter century

Justinian’s response to the victory—after a quarter century on the throne, at the end of a dispiriting decade—was to try, ever the man of legal codification, to define and shape the society he controlled by writing a prescriptive text. In this case, the text was legal, not ecclesiastical: the “Pragmatic Sanction,” issued in 554 .

The document is not without fantasy. It annuls all of Totila’s acts, a dangerously destabilizing decision, tearing open wounds that would otherwise have begun to heal. Those who had sold property under duress in Totila’s time could now recover it by refunding the price they had collected for it. It restored exiles, prisoners, slaves, and indentured farmworkers to the status they had enjoyed before Totila, on the assumption that the state of affairs in the early 540s, after Belisarius’s first victory, was legal and Roman.

Such as Gundila

This disposition still favored the rich, such as Gundila—those who had something left—over those who had been forcibly uprooted and fobbed off with a pittance. Someone who could keep a low profile, however, could very often succeed in hanging on to what he had owned, especially if he and his family had remained in a particular place for all the years since Odoacer and Theoderic entered Italy. A man like that who had been calling himself a Goth under Theoderic’s successors may just have forgotten to answer to this label any longer.

One windfall came to the church, naturally, when Arian church lands were confiscated and made over to the orthodox church. We know of surprisingly few such Arian churches—especially if one considered Theoderic’s Italy an Arian, Gothic kingdom—but they faded away quickly at this moment.

Power began to fragment. Provincial governors—there would be a dozen in Italy at one moment now—could be nominated locally by the traditional local luminaries, but also by bishops. Tax collection, moreover, now devolved away from Ravenna and fell to the hands of the governors. Troops were to be provided for gently, as it were, by purchases of food and goods at market prices, not by tax, confiscation, or forced sale; and it was stipulated that in the toe and heel of Italy’s boot, such purchases could be made only at the regular public markets. Civil law was to be restored, but in the absence of a strong central administration, this meant effectively the drumhead justice of local potentates, in some places generous and wise, in others doubtless extortionate and cruel.

On a bridge over the Anio River

The city of Rome was to be brought back to life. On a bridge over the Anio River not far outside the city’s walls, an inscription made in 56512 speaks of “the restoration of the liberty of the city of Rome and the whole of Italy.” When Boethius was executed for hoping for “liberty for Rome,” he could scarcely have had this in mind. Free grain for the citizenry and subsidies for the fine professors of the liberal arts were ensured at Rome, as well as funds for the repair of public buildings and aqueducts. We know that the old schools in which those professors taught were on their last legs by now. Of other restorations, there is not much evidence customized tours balkan.

Ravenna told a different story. There, an infusion of energy and subsidy from the east kept the city’s golden age alive a little longer. Theoderic’s capital had seen art and architecture of substance and value, but it was now Bishop Maximian, placed in power in the church there under Belisarius in 546 and remaining until 556, who became the senior churchman in Italy in the absence of Vigilius and brought the new capital to architectural glory. Maximian was the first bishop of Ravenna to be called archbishop, and his rise is a sign of Constantinople’s willingness to turn away from the city of Rome, which was socially messy, indefensible, and (from Constantinople) hard to reach. Ambitious building had continued past Theoderic’s death, and his tomb and the great church of San Apollinare Nuovo reflect the wealth and very Roman taste and style of that generation. We wish Theoderic’s palace, an elaboration of what he found on arrival, had survived as more than a faint rumor. A banker, Julian, dedicated a new church to Saint Michael the archangel and finished it before Maximian became bishop.

Gervase and Protase

At the same time, a greater church had been abuilding from 526, dedicated to Saint Vitale, a bogus patron of the local church. Vitale was the father of saints Gervase and Protase, who had been martyred under the last of the bad emperors before Constantine. Their bodies had been conveniently discovered by Saint Ambrose in the 380s and played a dramatic role in solidifying the authority of the Nicene bishop in Milan when Arian forces seemed destined to prevail.13 According to the legend in Ravenna, all three had been martyred on the site there where the church in honor of the father would be built. The astonishing church, still intact and richly adorned with famous mosaics continuing the tradition that had flourished under Theoderic, was completed and dedicated on May 17, 548, when the empress Theodora lay dying in Constantinople. Anyone who thinks he knows what Theodora and Justinian looked like draws his ideas from the mosaic procession here, which shows them and their retinues at the moment of ritual entrance to a church they never saw. Maximian finished a second new church in Ravenna, San Apollinare in Classe, in 549, after a visit to Constantinople.

Then funding slacked off, and Ravenna settled into its destiny as a provincial capital. No emperor ever set foot there again.

Such as Gundila

This disposition still favored the rich, such as Gundila—those who had something left—over those who had been forcibly uprooted and fobbed off with a pittance. Someone who could keep a low profile, however, could very often succeed in hanging on to what he had owned, especially if he and his family had remained in a particular place for all the years since Odoacer and Theoderic entered Italy. A man like that who had been calling himself a Goth under Theoderic’s successors may just have forgotten to answer to this label any longer.

One windfall came to the church, naturally, when Arian church lands were confiscated and made over to the orthodox church. We know of surprisingly few such Arian churches—especially if one considered Theoderic’s Italy an Arian, Gothic kingdom—but they faded away quickly at this moment.

Power began to fragment. Provincial governors—there would be a dozen in Italy at one moment now—could be nominated locally by the traditional local luminaries, but also by bishops. Tax collection, moreover, now devolved away from Ravenna and fell to the hands of the governors. Troops were to be provided for gently, as it were, by purchases of food and goods at market prices, not by tax, confiscation, or forced sale; and it was stipulated that in the toe and heel of Italy’s boot, such purchases could be made only at the regular public markets. Civil law was to be restored, but in the absence of a strong central administration, this meant effectively the drumhead justice of local potentates, in some places generous and wise, in others doubtless extortionate and cruel.

On a bridge over the Anio River

The city of Rome was to be brought back to life. On a bridge over the Anio River not far outside the city’s walls, an inscription made in 56512 speaks of “the restoration of the liberty of the city of Rome and the whole of Italy.” When Boethius was executed for hoping for “liberty for Rome,” he could scarcely have had this in mind. Free grain for the citizenry and subsidies for the fine professors of the liberal arts were ensured at Rome, as well as funds for the repair of public buildings and aqueducts. We know that the old schools in which those professors taught were on their last legs by now. Of other restorations, there is not much evidence customized tours balkan.

Ravenna told a different story. There, an infusion of energy and subsidy from the east kept the city’s golden age alive a little longer. Theoderic’s capital had seen art and architecture of substance and value, but it was now Bishop Maximian, placed in power in the church there under Belisarius in 546 and remaining until 556, who became the senior churchman in Italy in the absence of Vigilius and brought the new capital to architectural glory. Maximian was the first bishop of Ravenna to be called archbishop, and his rise is a sign of Constantinople’s willingness to turn away from the city of Rome, which was socially messy, indefensible, and (from Constantinople) hard to reach. Ambitious building had continued past Theoderic’s death, and his tomb and the great church of San Apollinare Nuovo reflect the wealth and very Roman taste and style of that generation. We wish Theoderic’s palace, an elaboration of what he found on arrival, had survived as more than a faint rumor. A banker, Julian, dedicated a new church to Saint Michael the archangel and finished it before Maximian became bishop.

Gervase and Protase

At the same time, a greater church had been abuilding from 526, dedicated to Saint Vitale, a bogus patron of the local church. Vitale was the father of saints Gervase and Protase, who had been martyred under the last of the bad emperors before Constantine. Their bodies had been conveniently discovered by Saint Ambrose in the 380s and played a dramatic role in solidifying the authority of the Nicene bishop in Milan when Arian forces seemed destined to prevail.13 According to the legend in Ravenna, all three had been martyred on the site there where the church in honor of the father would be built. The astonishing church, still intact and richly adorned with famous mosaics continuing the tradition that had flourished under Theoderic, was completed and dedicated on May 17, 548, when the empress Theodora lay dying in Constantinople. Anyone who thinks he knows what Theodora and Justinian looked like draws his ideas from the mosaic procession here, which shows them and their retinues at the moment of ritual entrance to a church they never saw. Maximian finished a second new church in Ravenna, San Apollinare in Classe, in 549, after a visit to Constantinople.

Then funding slacked off, and Ravenna settled into its destiny as a provincial capital. No emperor ever set foot there again.

Such as Gundila

This disposition still favored the rich, such as Gundila—those who had something left—over those who had been forcibly uprooted and fobbed off with a pittance. Someone who could keep a low profile, however, could very often succeed in hanging on to what he had owned, especially if he and his family had remained in a particular place for all the years since Odoacer and Theoderic entered Italy. A man like that who had been calling himself a Goth under Theoderic’s successors may just have forgotten to answer to this label any longer.

One windfall came to the church, naturally, when Arian church lands were confiscated and made over to the orthodox church. We know of surprisingly few such Arian churches—especially if one considered Theoderic’s Italy an Arian, Gothic kingdom—but they faded away quickly at this moment.

Power began to fragment. Provincial governors—there would be a dozen in Italy at one moment now—could be nominated locally by the traditional local luminaries, but also by bishops. Tax collection, moreover, now devolved away from Ravenna and fell to the hands of the governors. Troops were to be provided for gently, as it were, by purchases of food and goods at market prices, not by tax, confiscation, or forced sale; and it was stipulated that in the toe and heel of Italy’s boot, such purchases could be made only at the regular public markets. Civil law was to be restored, but in the absence of a strong central administration, this meant effectively the drumhead justice of local potentates, in some places generous and wise, in others doubtless extortionate and cruel.

On a bridge over the Anio River

The city of Rome was to be brought back to life. On a bridge over the Anio River not far outside the city’s walls, an inscription made in 56512 speaks of “the restoration of the liberty of the city of Rome and the whole of Italy.” When Boethius was executed for hoping for “liberty for Rome,” he could scarcely have had this in mind. Free grain for the citizenry and subsidies for the fine professors of the liberal arts were ensured at Rome, as well as funds for the repair of public buildings and aqueducts. We know that the old schools in which those professors taught were on their last legs by now. Of other restorations, there is not much evidence customized tours balkan.

Ravenna told a different story. There, an infusion of energy and subsidy from the east kept the city’s golden age alive a little longer. Theoderic’s capital had seen art and architecture of substance and value, but it was now Bishop Maximian, placed in power in the church there under Belisarius in 546 and remaining until 556, who became the senior churchman in Italy in the absence of Vigilius and brought the new capital to architectural glory. Maximian was the first bishop of Ravenna to be called archbishop, and his rise is a sign of Constantinople’s willingness to turn away from the city of Rome, which was socially messy, indefensible, and (from Constantinople) hard to reach. Ambitious building had continued past Theoderic’s death, and his tomb and the great church of San Apollinare Nuovo reflect the wealth and very Roman taste and style of that generation. We wish Theoderic’s palace, an elaboration of what he found on arrival, had survived as more than a faint rumor. A banker, Julian, dedicated a new church to Saint Michael the archangel and finished it before Maximian became bishop.

Gervase and Protase

At the same time, a greater church had been abuilding from 526, dedicated to Saint Vitale, a bogus patron of the local church. Vitale was the father of saints Gervase and Protase, who had been martyred under the last of the bad emperors before Constantine. Their bodies had been conveniently discovered by Saint Ambrose in the 380s and played a dramatic role in solidifying the authority of the Nicene bishop in Milan when Arian forces seemed destined to prevail.13 According to the legend in Ravenna, all three had been martyred on the site there where the church in honor of the father would be built. The astonishing church, still intact and richly adorned with famous mosaics continuing the tradition that had flourished under Theoderic, was completed and dedicated on May 17, 548, when the empress Theodora lay dying in Constantinople. Anyone who thinks he knows what Theodora and Justinian looked like draws his ideas from the mosaic procession here, which shows them and their retinues at the moment of ritual entrance to a church they never saw. Maximian finished a second new church in Ravenna, San Apollinare in Classe, in 549, after a visit to Constantinople.

Then funding slacked off, and Ravenna settled into its destiny as a provincial capital. No emperor ever set foot there again.

A COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN

Some men survived in ravaged Italy and even came to prosper again. Three of the senate’s dignitaries from the days of Theoderic lived past their ninetieth birthday and remained atop the greased pole of public life—or rather, leaped from one greased pole to another, deftly and just in time. Least known to us of the three is Cethegus, sole consul of the year 504, master of the offices not long after, and patrician from 512 until his death almost half a century later in 558.

Ennodius praised him in writing as a younger contemporary in his little work on the best way to educate young gentlemen; and Cassiodorus addressed a puzzling document to him consisting partly of family boasting, partly of social climbing, and partly of a biographical index of a few famous contemporaries. Cethegus persisted and persisted in Italy, holding out until 547 or so, after the fall of Rome to Totila in 546. He was by now caput senatus (“head of the senate” by dignity and seniority). He fled Rome before it fell because he was suspected of pro-Gothic sympathies, as many of the veterans of Theoderic’s time would be suspected. When he came to Constantinople, he was regularly seen around and with Pope Vigilius, supporting doctrinal rapprochement and a more vigorous prosecution of the war at home. He seems to have stayed in Constantinople until the last dog had been hung back in Italy and the war finally ended, but we glimpse him one last time at home, now in Sicily, receiving a letter from Pope Pelagius I in about 558.

Liberius, the patrician who had been praetorian prefect in Italy before Theoderic, then served him and his successors in that role in Gaul for a quarter century, appeared in Italy in 535; there, Theodahad put him in a delegation sent to Constantinople to make peace. The sources we have credit him as the one voice who spoke up in Constantinople to report the murder of Amalasuntha, the deed that more than any other gave a pretext for Justinian’s invasion. Liberius was unable, as a result, to return to any Italy not ruled from Constantinople, and so stayed on in the east, where his long experience won him appointment at an advanced age (he must have been well over seventy by then) as Augustal prefect in Alexandria, effectively Justinian’s representative to and governor over Egyptian society.

Sent from Constantinople

In Egypt, Liberius was the grand avenging inquisitor, sent from Constantinople to bring a restive province to civil and ecclesiastical heel. He did as well as could be expected—which is to say, he left no lasting result. Justinian soon turned on him and sent out a replacement without bothering to recall Liberius. Remarkably, Liberius prevailed in an unfair fight, sending his would-be supplanter home in disgrace. Officially recalled shortly thereafter, Liberius still succeeded in defending himself before a court of inquiry on his return to Constantinople in the early 540s. There we must imagine him as part of the circle of western adventurers that also included Cassiodorus and Cethegus, eyes wide open for the main chance.

Even then, his career was not over. When Justinian prepared to send his nephew Germanus west to complete the war in Italy, Liberius was variously the stand-in and deputy as preparations dragged on, eventually going on in command ahead of Germanus, who then died before he could undertake the campaign. Justinian is said to have had second thoughts about the elderly general, but too late to stop his last success. He arrived at Syracuse to find the city under siege by Totila’s forces. Undismayed, he forced his way through the barbarian lines, sailed into the harbor, and got his entire force into the city customized tours balkan.

Armenian named Artabanes

While this was going on, Liberius’s appointed successor, an erratic Armenian named Artabanes, was trying to catch up with him to relieve him of command. But Artabanes encountered a terrific storm off the coast of Calabria and wound up, temporarily, on Malta. Liberius, meanwhile, was in the beleaguered Syracuse. Procopius reports that he found himself unable to carry out successful military actions while constricted by Totila’s siege forces, and that this military impotence made his troops an unwelcome burden on the limited supplies of the besieged city; so he once more embarked his troops and slipped out of Syracuse for a better encampment at Palermo—all this, while Totila was plundering Sicily at will.

Artabanes finally caught up with Liberius in Palermo in 551 and relieved him of command. One story has Liberius going on a last mission to command Justinian’s forces in Spain, but we find his tombstone in northern Italy, near Rimini, with a fine inscription in eight elegiac couplets, suggesting either that he retired to Italy directly from Sicily or that he made his way back into Italy after the “Pragmatic Sanction” to live in the shadow of the new regime from Constantinople. He was about ninety when he died. There is a hint that a descendant was still wealthy and well connected as late as the 590s.