KADISH LEMASHIAJ
REGRESO DEL SEFER TORAH AL ARCA
Almost exactly sixty years ago, Arnaldo Momigliano gave a highly influential paper to the British Academy. It cemented into academic consciousness the certainty that Italian political life under Theoderic was marked by a deep divide between ‘proper’ senators belonging to ancient Roman families and the parvenu bureaucrats of Ravenna, mostly of provincial gentry origins. This was not a new idea. Sundwall’s study, published in 1919, had argued that most political struggles of the final decades of the western Empire could be explained in terms of such a fault line. But it was Momigliano who made it live. In the Ravenna corner, he gave us Cassiodorus, the would‑be senator, who managed to find some excuse to claim kinship ties to the great senatorial clan of the Anicii, but who was ‘of no heroic character and of no towering intelligence’. It was his job to give ‘Roman dignitas to the orders of his Barbarian masters’. In the Roman corner, we had Symmachus and his son‑in‑law Boethius, genuinely senatorial (in Momigliano’s view) to their Anician fingertips, with strong intellectual and political ties to their peers in Constantinople, and devoted to classical learning. ‘No doubt Boethius and Symmachus followed with anxious attention the daily movements of their Gothic masters, but they studied and wrote to forget them’; until, in the early 520s, Boethius was lured out of his study to attempt, as he puts it, to apply philosophy to the practicalities of government, but was ambushed by corrupt bureaucratic ‘palatine dogs’. Compromised by his eastern connections, he fell from power and was executed for treason, along with his father‑in‑law, while Pope John, just back from a mission to
Constantinople, died in Theoderic’s gaol.1
The essay is beautifully written and the overall picture – surely inspired by memories of World War II – so vivid that it has become a fixture in subsequent contributions to the history of the Ostrogothic kingdom, including the recent full‑scale monograph of Shane Bjornlie who traces
1 A. Momigliano, ‘Cassiodorus and the Italian culture of his time’, Proceedings of the
British Academy, xli (1955), 207–45 (reprinted in Secondo contributo all storia degli studi classici
(Rome, 1960), pp. 191–229; and Studies in Historiography (New York, 1966), pp. 181–210); J. Sundwall, Abhandlung zur Geschichte des Ausgehen Rőmertums (Helsinki, 1919), ch. 3.
– à la Sundwall – tensions between blue‑blooded senators and parvenu bureaucrats back into the period prior to Theoderic’s arrival. At the same time, there has been a clear recognition in some of the stronger of these contributions (including Bjornlie’s) that the model has its limitations, being unable easily to account for the careers of certain important individuals such as the patrician Liberius. Perhaps from an originally eastern family, his branch of it at least was Italian and both very rich and decidedly senatorial by the second half of the fifth century, and Liberius himself served Odovacer and Theoderic with distinction, occupying a series of prominent posts for lengthy periods, either side of Boethius’s great disaster, before finally switching his allegiance to Justinian in the mid 530s. Where does this career trajectory fit
into Momigliano’s vision of a deep divide between Rome and Ravenna?2
Against this historiographical background, the purpose of this chapter is straightforward. It will argue that the full run of the evidence suggests that there are better models for understanding the interrelations of the grandees of Rome and Ravenna in the time of Theoderic than the intractable divide identified by Momigliano, and that these also provide a more satisfactory basis for understanding the fate of Boethius and Symmachus.
Rome in the fifth century
The place to begin is with Ravenna and Rome in the last decades of the western Roman Empire. Contrary to long‑held views, it has recently been shown that fifth‑century emperors did not all run and hide behind the marshes of Ravenna. Honorius did shift his political headquarters to the city in the second decade of the century and it was the main centre of operations for the court of the then boy emperor Valentinian III in the later 420s and 430s. And in these decades, major improvements were made to the walls, waterworks, churches and physical amenities of the city, and a brand new palace was constructed. But in the years of his increasing maturity, in the 440s, Valentinian divided his time more or less equally between Ravenna and Rome, before devoting himself to the latter more or less exclusively from about 450 until the end of his life. Of his imperial successors, most
2 Strongly influenced by Momigliano are the recent studies of S. Bjornlie, Politics and
Tradition between Rome, Ravenna and Constantinople: a Study of Cassiodorus and the Variae, 527–554 (Cambridge, 2013), ch. 5, but see also pp. 35–8 on Liberius; D. Deliyannis, Ravenna in Late Antiquity (Cambridge, 2010), ch. 4. For marked but less strong influence, see, e.g.,
H. Chadwick, Boethius: the Consolations of Music, Logic, Theology, and Philosophy (Oxford, 1981), pp. 50–61; J. Moorhead, Theoderic in Italy (Oxford, 1992), pp. 219–32; J. O’Donnell,
The Ruin of the Roman Empire (New York, 2008), pp. 115–20, 164–7; J. Arnold, Theoderic and the Roman Imperial Restoration (Cambridge, 2014), pp. 134, 296–9. These studies retain the
spent far more time at Rome than Ravenna, though the latter remained an important secondary centre, because of its strategic location, both in relation to the army groups of northern Italy, and to the main routes into the peninsula both by land and (from the east) by sea. Only in the post‑Roman period, under Odovacer and Theoderic, did Ravenna (as in the early years of Valentinian III) re‑emerge as the dominant centre of government and
administration within the Italian peninsula.3 Looking at the fifth century as
a whole, therefore, Rome and Ravenna emerged respectively from relative and absolute political insignificance – Rome saw only four imperial visits in
the whole of the fourth century and one emperor briefly visited Ravenna4
– to become the twin poles of politics and government in the peninsula. It is not the case, however, that old money and blue blood predominated in Rome, while parvenu bureaucrats presided in Ravenna.
Not only were the functions of government regularly exercised from Rome between c.440 and 476 (hence in these years senior bureaucratic officials are well attested in the city), but any pre‑existing divisions between Roman blue‑bloods and Ravennate palatine that might have existed in the 410s blurred significantly as the fifth century progressed. A striking feature of the final phase of the western Empire was the relative frequency, compared again to fourth‑century patterns, with which members of the old senatorial families of Rome occupied some of the most important positions in the political‑cum‑administrative hierarchies of the western Empire: the consulship, the Praetorian Prefecture of Italy and others posts marked out by the honorific title of illustris. As part and parcel of this renewed political prominence, the fifth century again saw, for the first time in two centuries, emperors and would‑be emperors, such as Petronius Maximus and Anicius
Olybrius, emerge from senatorial ranks.5
A full exploration of this phenomenon is beyond the scope of this chapter. It was related, on one level, to the increasingly marked divide between the eastern and western halves of the Empire, and the west’s losses of territory to outside intruders, both of which reduced the numbers of competitors from other parts of the Empire looking to hold senior positions at the western court. The emergence of the council of the Gauls after 418, as an alternative political focus for surviving Roman provincial landowning elites north of
3 The pattern of imperial residences was established by A. Gillett, ‘Rome, Ravenna and
the last western emperors’, PBSR, lxix (2001), 131–67. Deliyannis, Ravenna in Late Antiquity, ch. 3, discusses the building work.
4 There is an argument that it might have been five, but see J. F. Matthews, The Roman
Empire of Ammianus (1989), p. 235 with references.
5 The phenomenon has long been recognized (J. F. Matthews, Western Aristocracies and
the Alps, likewise, presumably played some role in clearing the field within
Italy for Roman senators.6 Two other factors of more direct bearing on the
subject matter of this chapter, however, were also very much to the point. First, although it is impossible to quantify the losses in numerical terms, many of the old senatorial houses of Rome were struggling in the fifth century with a substantial decline in their family fortunes. Reflecting a deeper past when the empire first came into existence, old Roman senatorial landowning tended to be concentrated not only in Italy, but also in Spain and North Africa, and especially within the province of Proconsularis. This is presumably one of the reasons why Geiseric found it politically expedient to reward his followers with land expropriations which were confined to Proconsularis after the Vandals seized Carthage in 439; the subsequent travails of absentee senatorial landowners just were not his problem (although they certainly made a nuisance of themselves at the court of Valentinian III). Centuries of marriage and inheritance, along with individual political success, meant that Roman senators were likely to have other resources too, but loss of central political control in both Spain and North Africa will have hit senatorial
fortunes particularly hard.7 This was one huge encouragement for them
to leave the sanctuary of their palaces and make an actual or metaphorical journey to court in search of alternative sources of income.
Even more important, a longer‑term trend, which had nothing to do with barbarian incursion, in fact left them with little choice. At the start of the fourth century, there was only one senatorial body of the highest status in the empire: Rome itself. Normally reckoned to have numbered around 600 at that point, its members were distinguished by the rank of clarissimus. In the course of the fourth century, not only was a second such senate established in Constantinople, but so many new clarissimi were created overall, that membership increased to more like 2,000 apiece, and two whole new grades of senatorial rank were established above the standard clarissimus: spectabilis and illustris. In the fifth century, moreover, rules changed again so that while the offspring of any senator were distinguished by the birth rank of clarissimus, a fully functioning senator with rights to sit and speak in the assembly actually had to acquire a higher rank, initially of spectabilis or illustris, until finally, by the mid fifth century, only the rank of illustris actually entitled one to play an active role in the Senate, whether at Rome or Constantinople. At this point, the lesser two ranks were excused
6 Matthews, Western Aristocracies, chs. 11–12.
7 On basic patterns of senatorial landowning, see Matthews, Western Aristocracies, chs.
1–2. Geiseric’s settlement policies are set out in Victor of Vita, History of the Persecution in
Africa, I. 13. Different legal measures were taken to compensate senators, e.g. Nov. Val. III,
the traditional requirement that they be resident in the respective imperial cities.8
This goes a long way towards explaining why Roman blue‑bloods became so prominent among the top office‑holders of the western Empire in the fifth century. The only way for them to maintain long‑established family traditions of senatorial activity was to acquire illustris rank, and the only way to add this extra lustre to their birth rank of clarissimus was to get involved in some way at court, for all routes to this coveted title were in the gift of emperors. Some acquired it by holding high office. Best of all was to be made consul, since consuls ranked highest of all illustres and there was no actual administrative function to perform, but nearly as important were the Praetorian prefects and the chiefs of the main palatine offices (res privata, sacred largess, agentes in rebus, scriniarii, quaestor).9 It was, of course,
emperors who appointed consuls and all these other office holders, so that the office‑holding route to illustris status left the individual with no choice but to become active at court.
The later Roman Empire being what it was, it was also possible to acquire an honorary grant of illustris rank without actually holding office, and there eventually emerged the added refinement that one could acquire a letter which ranked one as an ex‑holder of office even though one had never held office, because there came a time when such letter‑holders outranked purely honorary illustres, and rank decided both where one sat in the Senate, and
priority in speaking.10 Even these latter kinds of promotion did not just
arrive in the imperial post, however, but required either a personal presence at court or the mobilization of chains of connection to generate the requisite imperial codicils. As the senatorial order evolved, therefore, the potential for a clear‑cut divide between court and Senate was becoming blurred from the top, as it were, because senatorial blue‑bloods were forced into at least some kind of activity at court to maintain full senatorial status. Between c.410 and c.450, this brought them regularly from Rome to Ravenna; after 450, the court came to them in Rome.
The divide – if it ever existed – was also being eroded, simultaneously, from the bottom. One key reason why senatorial numbers increased
8 A. H. M. Jones, The Later Roman Empire, 284–602: a Social, Economic, and Administrative
Survey (Oxford, 1964), ch. 15, collects and analyses the evidence. His account of the
narrowing of full membership of the senate was challenged by A. Chastagnol, ‘Sidoine Apollinaire et le sénat de Rome’, Acta Antiqua Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae, xxvi (1978), 58–63, but is unconvincing: S. J. B. Barnish, ‘Transformation and survival in the western senatorial aristocracy, c.400–700’, PBSR, xliii (1988), 120–156, at pp. 121–3.
9 Jones, Later Roman Empire, pp. 528–9. 10 Jones, Later Roman Empire, pp. 533–5.
so dramatically in the late imperial period was that emperors made senatorial rank the ultimate reward for bureaucratic service. From the time of Valentinian I and Valens at the latest, all the different lines of potential reward were brought together into one unified honours system, with senatorial status at the top. Not only did these developments force senators, even from well‑established families, to become active at court, but the ranks of senatorial illustres were constantly being topped up from
below by new men rising to high office and becoming illustres in turn.11
Sam Barnish’s important study of senatorial office‑holding from the late fourth century onwards makes two key points. On the one hand, it confirms that the old families held top positions much more frequently in the fifth and early sixth centuries than they had done in the fourth. On the other, it also shows that the old senatorial families never dominated these posts. The increase in frequency was real, but relative. In other words, even when Roman blue‑bloods were more prominent, this never prevented the rise of former outsiders to illustris rank. Given the education required for a successful political career, these outsiders were only – again – relative outsiders: provincial gentry of the kind who turn up in the letters of the older Symmachus in the later fourth century and Ennodius in the early sixth, graduating from prestigious schools and moving into governmental service. Some of these men were one‑hit wonders, rising fast only to fall extremely hard, but others prospered sufficiently to allow their offspring to maintain a solid upward trajectory until they became permanent fixtures in the senatorial constellation.12
Taken altogether, this means that, as political patterns evolved in the later Empire, there was no longer, and could no longer be, a clear dividing line between court bureaucracy and Roman Senate. There were old families, and everyone knew who they were, but their offspring had to become active at court to maintain status, and successful bureaucrats were topping up the numbers and intermarrying with the blue‑bloods by natural progression. Hence Liberius could be both properly senatorial and a high political administrator. The same kind of blurring even holds true in the case of Boethius himself. His paternal family was provincial gentry in origin,
11 Jones, Later Roman Empire, pp. 547–9, summarizes the evolving picture (some of the
bureaucratic offices received higher rewards at an earlier date); ch. 16 goes through the evidence department by department.
12 Barnish, ‘Transformation and survival’, esp. pp. 124–30. On Symmachus, see J.
Matthews, ‘The letters of Symmachus’, in Latin Literature of the Fourth Century, ed. J. Binns (1974), pp. 58–99 = no. III in J. F. Matthews, Political Life and Culture in Late Roman Society (1985). On Ennodius, see the excellent introduction of S. Gioanni, Ennode de Pavie: Lettres (2 vols., Paris 2006–10).
from Milan, it seems, and as recently as the mid fifth century. Only at that point did his grandfather start on the path of court service to senatorial prominence, a progression that was completed by the grandson’s marriage into a grand senatorial house, though, as Alan Cameron has recently shown, that house was of the Symmachi rather than of the Anicii, as Momigliano supposed.13
This overall picture leaves plenty of room for varying life choices and career trajectories. The sources give us everything from highly ambitious bluebloods, active at court throughout their lives, to others content with one major title or short period of office‑holding (the consulship by preference) to acquire top illustris status, while the famous coliseum seat inscriptions imply that there were other clarissimi from old families who were content
to remain just that.14 But what is very clear, from a late Roman perspective,
is that modelling too sharp a divide between imperial court, whatever its location, and Roman Senate simply does not work. Did similar patterns continue to operate under Theoderic when the centre of government moved definitively back to Ravenna?
Court and Senate under Theoderic
The general pattern of interconnection between Theoderic’s court at Ravenna and the senators of Rome was shaped by the framework of diplomatic relations which operated between Ravenna and Constantinople. Much ink has been spilled over the years in trying to establish Theoderic’s exact constitutional position, but it remains elusive, largely because – as is common in tricky diplomatic agreements – the two parties each held different understandings of the overall meaning of the precise terms agreed. Some points, however, are clear. Theoderic’s move to Italy in the autumn of 488 was above all a means of removing him from the Balkans, where his relationship with the Emperor Zeno had broken down beyond repair. Although he had been consul as recently as 484, neither side could trust the other, and all possibility of a stable agreement between emperor and Gothic king on East Roman soil had disappeared. But whatever the terms of the original agreement, Theoderic clearly abrogated them in the
13 With typical self‑effacement, Barnish makes this point, but only in a footnote
(‘Transformation and survival’, p. 130, n. 41), where it seems to have escaped attention. On Liberius, see above n. 2; on Boethius, see Prosopography of the Later Roman Empire, ed. A. H. M. Jones, J. R. Martindale and J. Morris (3 vols., Cambridge, 1971–92), ii. 231–7 (on