Shaking with revulsion, Timothy drew back from the window; death by the sword would at least be mercifully quick. Although liable at times to fits of violent fury, Theoderic was not a cruel or vindictive man. The only explanation for his condemning Boethius to such a dreadful fate must lie in some terrible betrayal on the Roman’s part — a betrayal clearly far more heinous than Timothy’s had been.
Awaking from a brief and troubled sleep on the morning scheduled for his execution, Timothy watched with dread as the window of his cell slowly took on definition as a pale rectangle. The key squealed in the lock and the door creaked open to reveal, flanked by two warders, a tall figure wearing Spangenhelm and military belt — not the official who, ten days ago, had announced his sentence.
‘I see I have arrived in time,’ said the saio; his voice seemed strangely familiar. ‘Good news, Herr Timothy. The warrant for your execution is revoked, and you are a free man.’
‘Saio Fridibad!’ exclaimed Timothy, recognizing him in the growing light. Relief swept through him, making him feel faint and giddy.
‘The king is dying,’ the Goth continued sadly. ‘He would make his peace with you, Herr Timothy. The end is not far off, so we must make haste. I have fresh horses waiting, if you are able to ride.’
On the previous day, as the king sat at dinner, the meal’s main dish was placed before him and the cover removed.
‘Take it away!’ shouted Theoderic, gazing in horror at the thing that confronted him with blank staring eyes, its mouth, fringed with long, sharp teeth, agape in silent accusation. ‘It is the head of Boethius!’
Bowing, the servitor removed the great fish’s head, while the king stumbled from the table and retired to his bed-chamber. Soon, in a recurrence of the aguish fever afflicting him of late, he lay trembling with cold beneath a weight of blankets.
‘If only I could take back the past,’ the king murmured brokenly to his physician, Helpidius, and his daughter, Amalasuntha, in attendance at his bedside. ‘I have cruelly wronged my two most loyal servants, Symmachus and Boethius — both dead at my command. Also Timothy, once my dearest friend, who is to die tomorrow. Their betrayal of me I brought upon myself; I see that now. Too late to save Timothy, alas. If only the cursus publicus were still working, there might have been a chance. .’
As the king drifted into a fitful slumber, Amalasuntha set her powerful intelligence to work. How far from Ravenna was Ticinum? Two hundred miles at most. But still an impossible distance for even the swiftest and most powerful steed to cover in twelve hours, the time remaining before the Isaurian was due to die. Granted, the cursus publicus — the old imperial post service with relay stations every eight miles where fresh mounts were available — had been defunct for years; but there were towns along the Via Aemilia: Bononia, Mutina, Placentia* and others, where horses could be requisitioned. Provided the rider knew his business, at a pinch a good horse could cover twenty miles in an hour — which rate could be maintained throughout the journey, given sufficient changes of mount. She made a swift computation; there was still time — just — for Timothy to be reprieved. When her father died, which must be soon, she would assume the regency for her son, little Athalaric. Was that enough to let her act now in Theoderic’s name? Well, she would soon find out. Unthinkable to wake her dying father; this was something she must manage on her own. Sending for her secretary, for Saio Fridibad (an excellent horseman) and for Cassiodorus, the new Master of Offices, whose countersignature on the documents would reinforce her authority, she began to draft the pardon for Timothy and the requisition orders for fresh horses.
Weakened by dysentry and fever, Theoderic felt the end fast approaching. He had made his final dispensations to the Gothic chiefs and Roman magistrates who filled the chamber, entreating them to keep the laws, to love the Senate and to cultivate the friendship of the emperor. One last thing remained: to be reconciled with the friend who knelt beside his bed.
‘Forgive me, Timothy,’ he whispered, stretching out his hand.
Tears blurring his vision, Timothy took it. He felt its grip tighten, then suddenly relax. Theoderic was dead.
* Not to be confused with Eusebius the City Prefect of Rome.
† 6 a.m., 27 August 526.
* Bologna, Modena, Piacenza.
AFTERWORD
The true measure of Theoderic’s stature lies, perhaps, not so much in his transmutation from semi-nomadic warlord to the enlightened ruler of Italy, as in his feat of successfully balancing and controlling two diametrically opposed social systems. He had, on the one hand, to govern his own people — a shame-and-honour Iron Age society based on personal allegiance to a warrior-leader — and, on the other, to rule what in some ways was almost a modern capitalist state, held together by a complex web of laws, bureaucratic institutions and property rights, geared to the acquisition of wealth. Two such differing regimes could never be synthesized, and Theoderic did not try. But the fact that he succeeded throughout most of his long reign (despite allowing himself to be distracted by imperialist dreams) in maintaining a benevolent apartheid between these powerful centrifugal forces, was a very great — indeed, a unique — achievement. As Robert Browning (in Justinian and Theodora) says, quoting an unnamed scholar, ‘he was certainly one of the greatest statesmen the German race has ever produced, and perhaps the one who has deserved best of the human race’.
In the end, however, the experiment was a failure, though a noble one. His feeble successors, with the possible exception of Totila, could never hope to emulate his example, and the ‘Ostrogothic century’ (from the emergence of the tribe into the light of history as allies of Attila at the Catalaunian Fields in 451 to its political extinction by Justinian’s generals in 554) ended in the Amals’ defeat and their disintegration as a people.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
For anyone attempting to write a story based on the life of Theoderic, it is extraordinarily fortunate that his lifespan covers a period rich in contemporary or near-contemporary sources. Cassiodorus, quaestor and Theoderic’s Master of Offices after Boethius, provides the most significant material, a vast collection of official correspondence on behalf of the Gothic administration, which was published under the title Variae. Another, less-known author is Ennodius, a bishop, whose numerous letters, mainly to clergy, throw considerable light on Theoderic’s reign. Perhaps the most interesting writer, from a human and dramatic point of view, is the splendidly named Anonymous Valesianus. The sonorous appellation is not, alas, that of some distinguished scholar of late antiquity, but was coined to designate an unknown Roman author whose work (the second part of an anonymous document) was edited by Henri de Valois in 1636. Another useful source touching on Theoderic is Gothic History, an abridged version of a lost work by Cassiodorus, written in the mid sixth century by Jordanes, a Romanized Goth living in Constantinople. Procopius, a Greek writer who accompanied Justinian’s general Belisarius on part of his Italian campaign, provides an account of Theoderic in the opening pages of his Gothic War.
Regarding modern sources, I am greatly indebted to my publisher Hugh Andrew for kindly lending me the following: Theoderic in Italy by John Moorhead, The Goths by Peter Heather, A History of the Ostrogoths by Thomas Burns, History of the Goths by Herwig Wolfram, and Robert Browning’s Justinian and Theodora. Other sources I found useful were Gibbon’s matchless Decline and Fall, Peter Heather’s The Fall of the Roman Empire, Richard Rudgley’s Barbarians and Theoderic the Goth: The Barbarian Champion of Civilization by Thomas Hodgkin, a Victorian scholar who wrote about his subject with insightful empathy. Details about chariot-racing and beast-hunts in the arena were quarried from a racily written but absorbing little book, Daniel P. Mannix’s Those About to Die, crammed with fascinating facts and colourful vignettes.