Raptor (142 page)

The caupo Ewig and numerous other outlanders resident in the city were Arians, ergo “heretics,” and almost all the other lower-class citizens to whom Ewig introduced me, if they professed any faith at all, were still believers in the teeming Roman pantheon of pagan gods, goddesses and spirits. What surprised me more was that the majority of the upper-class folk to whom Festus introduced me, including many of his fellow senators, were also unregenerate pagans. In the ages before Constantine, Rome had recognized—besides its own amorphous pagan faith—what were called the religiones licitae, meaning the worship of Isis imported from Egypt, the worship of Astarte imported from Syria, the worship of Mithras imported from. Persia, and the Jews’ worship of Jehovah. Now it became evident to me that those religions, though frowned upon by the state and violently reprehended by the Christian clerics, were not by any means dead or moribund or neglected.

Not that anyone really
believed
in any of them. As with the upper-class Romans I had known in Vindobona, these of Rome regarded religion only as one more of the diversions they enjoyed in their ample leisure time. They might profess one faith one day and another the next, just to take advantage of the religions’ varying excuses for feasts and convivia. And whichever religion they were observing, the Roman gentry were inclined to like best the indolent or indelicate or even indecent aspects of it. In many dooryards were to be seen statues of the pagan goddess Murtia, and, to emphasize what Murtia was the goddess
of
—laziness and languor—the families’ gardeners would carefully have trained moss to grow over the statues. One of Rome’s senators, Symmachus, who was also Rome’s highest civil officer, its urbis praefectus, a highly respected patricius and illustris, had in his villa’s dooryard a statue of Bacchus. The figure flaunted a massive, uprearing fascinum, and was inscribed “Rumpere, invidia,” suggesting that the onlooker should burst and die of envy.

I was among the guests at a convivium in that villa of Praefectus and Senator Symmachus during which we all engaged in a good-natured game of composing palindromes. Done offhand like that, of course, a palindrome could hardly be of the purest Latin, but what struck me was that these wordplays were scarcely of the purest highmindedness either. The first one, offered by Symmachus’s affinal young son Boethius, I thought inelegant for quotation while we all were eating:
Sole medere pede, ede, perede melos.
The next, concocted by another young man, Cassiodorus, had at least the virtue of being the lengthiest composed that night:
Si bene te tua laus taxat, sua laute tenebis.
But the third,
In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni,
was proposed by an illustrious, patrician, newly wed young woman, Rusticiana by name, daughter of Symmachus and wife to Boethius.

Being no stranger to indelicacy myself, and no priggish objector to it, I quite enjoyed the company of these free and easy nobles. And the three men I have mentioned would become high-ranking officers of Theodoric’s government, close advisers to him—mainly because of their talents, but partly because I liked them and recommended them to him.

Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius, as his name indicates, was a scion of one of Rome’s first families, the Anicii. He was handsome, wealthy, witty, and his wife, Rusticiana, was a beautiful, spirited woman. Though Boethius was only half my age when we met, I easily recognized in him a prodigy of intelligence and capability. He bore out that promise when he served as Theodoric’s chief of all administration, the magister officiorum, and he did many other things besides. In his lifetime he would translate into Latin at least thirty Greek works of science and philosophy, including Ptolemy on astronomy, Nicotnachus on arithmetic, Euclid on geometry, Pythagoras on the theory of music and Aristotle on just about everything in creation. Boethius’s own library was better filled than any other I ever saw (and the big room was walled with ivory and glass, to make it a fitting container for such treasure). But Boethius was no dust-covered drudge of a scholar; he was also a most inventive artisan. To celebrate one occasion or another, he conceived and built and presented to Theodoric an ornate and intricate clepsydra, an ingenious and complex celestial globe and sundial on which a statue of the king, moved by cunning contrivances, turned always to face the sun.

It may be that Boethius had acquired his literary bent from Praefectus and Senator Symmachus, because that man was also an author, having written a seven-volume history of Rome. Boethius, orphaned in childhood, had been brought up in the house of Symmachus, who, as I have said, later became also his affinal father, and was his lifelong friend and mentor. The good Symmachus had held his office as Rome’s urbis praefectum under Odoacer, but, being also of a noble, rich, independent family, he had owed no obligation to that ruler. So Theodoric gladly kept him in that office until, some years afterward, Symmachus was elevated by the Senate to its princeps senatus, or chief member, and so gave his whole time to Senate affairs.

The Cassiodorus whom I have mentioned was one of two men of that name, father and son, and both became valued members of Theodoric’s court. Cassiodorus Pater was another of Odoacer’s appointments in office, and another whom Theodoric retained, for the very good reason that he was the best man for the work. In fact, he held two titles usually entrusted to two different administrators, comes rei privatae and comes sacrarum largitionum, meaning that he was in sole charge of all the government’s finances and tax collections and expenditures.

His son Cassiodorus, exactly the same age as Boethius, was engaged to be Theodoric’s exceptor and quaestor, writing all his official correspondence and published decrees. Cassiodorus Filius was the author of the lengthiest of those three palindromes I have quoted, and that may give some idea of his style of writing—prolix and flowery. But that was precisely what Theodoric wanted. The “non possumus” proclamation regarding religious beliefs, which Theodoric had set forth in his own blunt words, had been so coldly received by so many persons that Theodoric deemed it politic to couch his later pronouncements in more high-flown language.

And Cassiodorus certainly provided that. I remember when Theodoric received a letter from some troop of soldiers somewhere complaining that they had been paid their January acceptum in underweight solidi. Cassiodorus wrote the reply to them, and it began like this: “The pearl-lustered fingertips of Eos, the young dawn, now tremulously unlock the oriental portals of the golden horizon…” and somehow flowed from there into a few reflections on “the sublime nature of Arithmetic, by which both the heavens and earth are ruled…” Where it went from there I do not remember, nor do I remember whether the troopers’ complaint was ever resolved, but I have long wondered what a bunch of hard-bitten soldiers must have
thought
when they got that florid missive.

Anyway, with such good, wise and capable Romans as those seated about the council tables in Rome and Ravenna (and there were many more than the few men I have mentioned), Theodoric commanded a governing body of more intellect, erudition and ability than had ever been convened in the service of the state since the golden days of Marcus Aurelius.

With good Roman administrators and good Gothic men-at-arms attending to the internal concerns of his domain, Theodoric was early able to concentrate his attention on securing the borders of it, by making fraternal alliances with potentially troublesome other kings. In that work he had the assistance of various good women. Already, his daughter Arevagni’s wedding to Prince Sigismund had made Theodoric kin to the Burgunds’ ruling family, and his own wedding to Audefleda had made him affinal brother to the Franks’ King Clovis. Now, in fairly short order, he gave his widowed sister Amalafrida in marriage to King Thrasamund of the Vandals, his younger daughter Thiudagotha to the Visigoths’ Alaric II and his niece Amalaberga to King Hermanafrid of the Thuringi.

It was during my first visit to Rome that Theodoric’s sister arrived there, on her way to take ship from Ostia to meet her new husband, so I was pleased to welcome her and renew my acquaintance with her and see to her comfort during her brief stay in the city. I quartered Amalafrida and her retinue of servants at my newly acquired ambassadorial residence in the Vicus Jugarius, and I introduced her to my new Roman friends (of the Festus circle, not of the Ewig). I also personally escorted her to games at the Colosseum, plays at the Theatrum Marcelli and other such diversions, because I could see that she was not in very high spirits. Eventually, in her prim, auntish way, she confided to me:

“As the daughter of a king, the sister of a king, the widow of a herizogo, I am naturally accustomed to the demands of statecraft. So I go willingly, of course, to wed King Thrasamund. Indeed”—and she laughed shyly—“a woman of my age, mother of two grown children, ought to rejoice at the chance of marrying
any
new husband, let alone a king. But I am leaving my children behind, while I go far away to a totally foreign continent and a city that is reputed to be nothing but a fortified den of sea pirates. From everything else I have heard of the Vandals, I hardly expect to find the Carthage court very cultivated, or Thrasamund the most loving of husbands.”

“Allow me to set you somewhat at ease, Princess,” I said. “I myself have never set foot on the continent of Libya, but I have learned some things right here in Rome. The Vandals are a maritime nation, true, and they are ever ready to fight to keep the seas free for their own fleets. But any merchant will tell you that that is only good business. It has certainly made the Vandals rich. And they spend those riches on things more refined than warships and fortifications. Thrasamund has just completed the construction in Carthage of an amphitheater and a vast therma that, I hear, are the grandest in all Libya outside of Egypt.”

“And yet,” said Amalafrida, “look at what the Vandals did to this very city of Rome, just forty years ago. Why, the rubble is still visible, the evidence of their hacking and tearing at the world’s most glorious buildings and monuments.”

I shook my head. “The Romans
themselves
have done that, in the years since the Vandals’ occupation.” I explained to her about the atrocious quarrying of building materials. “When the Vandals were here, they did plunder a good deal of Rome’s movable wealth, but they were meticulously careful to cause no damage to the Eternal City itself.”

“Can that be true, Thorn? Then why are they known far and wide as wanton destroyers of everything fine and beautiful?”

“Remember, Princess, the Vandals are Arian Christians, like yourself and your royal brother. However, unlike Theodoric, the Vandal kings have never been tolerant of the Catholic Christians, They allow no Catholic bishops anywhere in their lands of Africa. And the Church of Rome has ever been resentful on that account. So, when the Vandals besieged and looted this city, the Romans had their excuse for laying on them a reputation far worse than they deserved. It is the Catholic Christian Church that invented and has perpetuated all those malicious untruths about the Vandals. I confidently expect that, when you get among that people, you will find them no worse than any other Christians.”

I do not know whether she did or not, because I personally never visited Carthage, or any other city in Africa, or, for that matter, any place on the whole continent of Libya. But I do know that Amalafrida remained queen to Thrasamund until his death, fifteen years later, which could be taken as testimony that she found her new life not intolerable.

I was back in Ravenna again at the time Princess Thiudagotha was preparing to ride west to Aquitania for her marriage to King Alaric of the Visigoths. So I asked Theodoric’s permission to ride along with his daughter and her considerable retinue, as far as Genua, just to get my first look at the Ligurian Sea of the Mediterranean. On the way there, Thiudagotha, as she had done in her younger days, confided to me many of her thoughts and feelings, especially her maidenly apprehensions regarding certain aspects of marriage. And I was able, in an avuncular way (or, it might be said, in an auntly way) to give her certain counsels and advices that she could not have got even from her doting father or her attentive female servants (because her father had never been a woman, and her women had never enjoyed my breadth of womanly experience). I heard no thanks afterward from King Alaric, and expected none, but I do hope he properly appreciated the uncommon virtuosity he found his new queen capable of.

By the time I returned from Genua to Ravenna, Theodoric’s niece Amalaberga was making ready to ride to the far northern Thuringian lands for
her
marriage to King Hermanafrid. When her train left, I rode partway with that one too, because I had reasons of my own for traveling in that direction—going for a visit to my Novae farm, neglected by its master for so many years. Since Amalaberga and I were only slightly acquainted, not old friends like Thiudagotha and myself, we exchanged no confidences, so she went into wedlock less well prepared than her cousin had done. But I doubted that Hermanafrid would have appreciated any subtle wifely abilities in his new queen. The Thuringi were only a nomadic people, little civilized, and their capital of Isenacum was really only a village, so I imagined that even their king would be of rustic, dull and untutored tastes.

Anyway, as we went north from Ravenna, Amalaberga and I noted with approval the teams of men working on the formerly decrepit Via Popilia—pouring ironstone, laying rock slabs, troweling mortar and tamping marl—making it what a Roman road should be. From that road we travelers could also see the dust clouds rising inland to the west, showing where other work teams were laboring to rebuild the long-derelict aqueduct, in order to bring fresh water once more to Ravenna.

Amalaberga and I parted company at Patavium. Her train kept on northward and I turned westward there, to retrace the course that had brought me and all the other Ostrogoths into Italia. As I proceeded leisurely through Venetia, I saw still other workmen rebuilding the manufactory of army weapons at Concordia that had been in ruins since Attila’s time. And, at Aquileia, the Grado harbor was full of teams driving the piles and raising the timbers of new shipyard docks and dry docks for the Roman navy. The whole navy, incidentally, had a new praefectus classiarii, or chief commander, recently promoted by Theodoric from that man’s earlier command of just the Hadriatic Fleet. Of course I refer to Lentinus, with whom I happily visited there at Aquileia. His heavier responsibilities had weighted him somewhat with dignity, but when he told me how joyful he was at being “no longer shackled by neutrality,” I could perceive that his characteristic enthusiasms were not all outgrown.