Theoderic, seeing his regime still at risk, immediately sent a delegation from Ravenna to Constantinople, led by Pope John himself, to confirm that assurances of religious peace would be observed and that Arianism would be respected. Theoderic particularly asked that people who had been forced to convert from Arianism to orthodoxy be restored to their original state—but for an emperor eager to be seen as devout, this request was impossible to accept. Pope John refused to carry the message at first, but Theoderic forced him and his delegation of bishops and senators to board ship and make their way to Constantinople.
Once there, the emperor Justin came out to greet them with all respect, welcoming the pope “as if he were blessed Peter himself” and confirming that those who had left Arianism were safe forever and could not be restored to their original error. While they were away, if the Anonymus Valesianus has the sequence right, Theoderic summoned Boethius’s father-in-law, Symmachus, from Rome to Ravenna; tried him on trumped- up charges; and put him to death lest he take any subversive steps out of grief for his dead son-in-law. When the pope returned to Ravenna, the king made his disfavor clear, and within a few days John was dead. No one says there was foul play, but it was at least a foul moment. When a man possessed by a demon attended Pope John’s funeral, he was miraculously and suddenly released from his torment. The crowd saw this as a sign of the pope’s holiness and took him out to burial while making wonderworking relics out of the papal clothes.
There is much debate over the dates of these events, but it is safe to put them all in the years 524-525. If a coup had indeed been in the making, Theoderic had succeeded in putting it down. The line of succession continued in his own family adventure balkan tours.
Theoderic came to his own end in 526, and by then the author of the Anonymus Valesianus is fully against him. So maddened was Theoderic, the story goes, that he issued an edict that the Arians would seize the orthodox basilicas on the very next Sunday. This could not have been more than a token gesture—perhaps a single basilica—a symbolic gesture to protest what Theoderic saw as Justin’s comparable interference. Then Theoderic fell victim to the same power that had destroyed Arius, the teacher for whom Arianism was named. Following the traditional story, just as Arius had died of dysentery, so too Theoderic fell ill of it and died on the third day, the very day he had intended to seize the holy basilicas. He was in his early seventies.
We needn’t believe more than that Theoderic died with rumor and hostility in the air and at least some of his legacy in question. The summer after he died, there appears to have been a fear of a sea invasion from the east, and our source praises Cassiodorus as one of the new king’s ministers for swift action designed to keep a sharp watch on the seafront and protect Italy from invasion. He even paid troops out of his own pocket to ensure obedience.
Theoderic by Eutharic and Amalasuntha
Athalaric, the grandchild of Theoderic by Eutharic and Amalasuntha, was the new king in all but fact. His widowed mother was the effective regent of the state, relying on a cadre of civilian and military officials already at court. We are less well equipped with any narrative of affairs during her regency than for adjacent periods, but it appears to have been mainly stable and a continuation of what had been known under Theoderic. From 526 to 534, the Theoderician era continued without the man who had made it. The terminology of civilitas returned to the royal documents after a few years in abeyance, but was addressed only to civilians, not the army. A Gothic name, Tuluin, appears on the list of senators, while in roughly the same years the Roman name Cyprian belongs to a father whose children were educated to the language and ways of the army The king was at Verona.
Disaster loomed. We should not trust the standard story about Amalasuntha’s son and his end, yet we must tell it. Amalasuntha, we are told, put the boy in the care of three grave, prudent older Goths, but others were unhappy and “because of their eagerness to wrong their subjects, they wished to be ruled by him more after the barbarian fashion.” A dialogue, surely made up long after, recounts how Amalasuntha defended her style of educating her son against Gothic critics, who succeeded in taking control of the boy and giving him over to companions who “as soon as he came of age, enticed him to drunkenness and to intercourse with women, making him an exceptionally depraved youth, and of such stupid folly that he was disinclined to follow his mother’s advice.”34 He plunged in short order into the depths of a wasting disease and died on October 10, 534, still a teenager.
