Introduction

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 ime 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[4] 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 Caesar

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.