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.
TWENTY-FIVE
Whatever deceives seems to exercise a kind of magical enchantment
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.