Theodoric the Ostrogoth is one of
those men who did great deeds and filled a large space
in the eyes of their contemporaries, but who, not
through their own fault, but from the fact that the
stage of the world was not yet ready for their appearance,
have failed to occupy the very first rank among the
founders of empires and the moulders of the fortunes
of the human race.
He was born into the world at the
time when the Roman Empire in the West was staggering
blindly to ruin, under the crushing blows inflicted
upon it by two generations of barbarian conquerors.
That Empire had been for more than six centuries indisputably
the strongest power in Europe, and had gathered into
its bosom all that was best in the civilisation of
the nations that were settled round the Mediterranean
Sea. Rome had given her laws to all these peoples,
had, at any rate in the West, made their roads, fostered
the growth of their cities, taught them her language,
administered justice, kept back the barbarians of the
frontier, and for great spaces of time preserved “the
Roman peace” throughout their habitations.
Doubtless there was another side to this picture:
heavy taxation, corrupt judges, national aspirations
repressed, free peasants sinking down into hopeless
bondage. Still it cannot be denied that during
a considerable part of its existence the Roman Empire
brought, at least to the western half of Europe, material
prosperity and enjoyment of life which it had not
known before, and which it often looked back to with
vain regrets when the great Empire had fallen into
ruins. But now, in the middle of the fifth century,
when Theodoric was born amid the rude splendour of
an Ostrogothic palace, the unquestioned ascendancy
of Rome over the nations of Europe was a thing of
the past. There were still two men, one at the
Old Rome by the Tiber, and the other at the New Rome
by the Bosphorus, who called themselves August, Pious,
and Happy, who wore the diadem and the purple shoes
of Diocletian, and professed to be joint lords of
the universe. Before the Eastern Augustus and
his successors there did in truth lie a long future
of dominion, and once or twice they were to recover
no inconsiderable portion of the broad lands which
had formerly been the heritage of the Roman people.
But the Roman Empire at Rome was stricken with an incurable
malady. The three sieges and the final sack of
Rome by Alaric (410) revealed to the world that she
was no longer “Roma Invicta”,
and from that time forward every chief of Teutonic
or Sclavonic barbarians who wandered with his tribe
over the wasted plains between the Danube and the Adriatic,
might cherish the secret hope that he, too, would
one day be drawn in triumph up the Capitolian Hill,
through the cowed ranks of the slavish citizens of
Rome, and that he might be lodged on the Palatine in
one of the sumptuous palaces which had been built
long ago for “the lords of the world”.
Thus there was everywhere unrest and,
as it were, a prolonged moral earthquake. The
old order of things was destroyed, and none could
forecast the shape of the new order of things that
would succeed to it. Something similar has been
the state of Europe ever since the great French Revolution;
only that her barbarians threaten her now from within,
not from without. The social state which had been
in existence for centuries, and which had come to
be accepted as if it were one of the great ordinances
of nature, is either menaced or is actually broken
up, and how the new democracy will rearrange itself
in the seats of the old civilisation the wisest statesman
cannot foretell.
But to any “shepherd of his
people”, barbarian or Roman, who looked with
foreseeing eye and understanding heart over the Europe
of the fifth century, the duty of the hour was manifest.
The great fabric of the Roman Empire must not be allowed
to go to pieces in hopeless ruin. If not under
Roman Augusti, under barbarian kings bearing one
title or another, the organisation of the Empire must
be preserved. The barbarians who had entered
it, often it must be confessed merely for plunder,
were remaining in it to rule, and they could not rule
by their own unguided instincts. Their institutions,
which had answered well enough for a half-civilised
people, leading their simple, primitive life in the
clearings of the forest of Germany, were quite unfitted
for the complicated relations of the urban and social
life of the Mediterranean lands. There is one
passage which has been quoted almost to weariness,
but which it seems necessary to quote again, in order
to show how an enlightened barbarian chief looked
upon the problem with which he found himself confronted,
as an invader of the Empire. Ataulfus, brother-in-law
and successor of Alaric, the first capturer of Rome,
“was intimate with a certain citizen of Narbonne,
a grave, wise, and religious person who had served
with distinction under Theodosius, and often remarked
to him that in the first ardour of his youth he had
longed to obliterate the Roman name and turn all the
Roman lands into an Empire which should be, and should
be called, the Empire of the Goths, so that what used
to be commonly known as Romania should now be ‘Gothia,’
and that he, Ataulfus, should be in the world what
Cæsar Augustus had been. But now that he had
proved by long experience that the Goths, on account
of their unbridled barbarism, could not be induced
to obey the laws, and yet that, on the other hand,
there must be laws, since without them the Commonwealth
would cease to be a Commonwealth, he had chosen, for
his part at any rate, that he would seek the glory
of renewing and increasing the Roman name by the arms
of his Gothic followers, and would be remembered by
posterity as the restorer of Rome, since he could
not be its changer”.
This conversation will be found to
express the thoughts of Theodoric the Ostrogoth, as
well as those of Ataulfus the Visigoth, Theodoric also,
in his hot youth, was the enemy of the Roman name
and did his best to overturn the Roman State.
But he, too, saw that a nobler career was open to
him as the preserver of the priceless blessings of
Roman civilisation, and he spent his life in the endeavour
to induce the Goths to copy those laws, without which
a Commonwealth ceases to be a Commonwealth. In
this great and noble design he failed, as has been
already said, because the times were not ripe for it,
because a continuation of adverse events, which we
should call persistent ill-luck if we did not believe
in an overruling Providence, blighted and blasted
his infant state before it had time to root itself
firmly in the soil. None the less, however, does
Theodoric deserve credit for having seen what was
the need of Europe, and pre-eminently of Italy, and
for having done his best to supply that need.
The great work in which he failed was accomplished
three centuries later by Charles the Frank, who has
won for himself that place in the first rank of world-moulders
which Theodoric has missed. But we may fairly
say that Theodoric’s designs were as noble and
as statesmanlike as those of the great Emperor Charles,
and that if they had been crowned with the success
which they deserved, three centuries of needless barbarism
and misery would have been spared to Europe.