Raptor (145 page)

But, akh, I need not cite every one of the innumerable achievements and benefices of Theodoric’s reign. They can all be found in the official history of these years. Cassiodorus Filius, in addition to his routine writings, has long been working on that. The exceptor and quaestor has personal experience of everything that has occurred since Theodoric took the throne, and for the time before that, he has relied much on my own manuscript account of the Goths’ past. (I only wish that the writing of the official history had been entrusted to Boethius—it would have proved far more readable—but Cassiodorus’s
Historia Gothorum
assuredly will be nothing if not
voluminous.)

Under the rule and care of Theodoric, the once Roman Empire of the West
has
attained to its finest flowering since that long-ago era of “the five good emperors.” Well before the king’s beard began to turn from gold to silver, he was being called Theodoric the Great, not just by sycophants and flatterers but also by many of his fellow monarchs. Even those not allied with him, or not especially fond of him, have frequently deferred to his sage advice and counsels. As for Theodoric’s subjects… well, the more hidebound Romans never ceased resenting his being an outlander, and the purblind Catholic Christians never ceased despising his being an Arian, and many other people never ceased regarding him with dubiety for the manner of his slaying Odoacer. But not one of those people can deny today that he is living better, and in a better land, thanks to Theodoric.

As I have said, Theodoric did not, in the manner of earlier conquerors, try to impose his own or his people’s standards of morality, custom, culture or religion upon his new subjects. Instead, he did what he could to make the Roman citizens more conscious of their own heritage, and more respectful of it, as when he put an end to the detrition of antique monuments, and encouraged their restoration.

He tampered with Rome’s venerable body of laws only to the extent of making some of those laws more lenient, some more strict.

For example, under the Roman code, whatever the punishment of a convicted criminal, it almost always included the confiscation of his property, wealth and personal belongings—and not just
his;
every remotest relative of his could be similarly stripped of every last possession. Theodoric made that law more merciful, exempting from confiscation all the convict’s relatives beyond the third degree of kinship.

On the other hand, the crime of bribery was only mildly punished—by banishment of the perpetrator—
when
bribery was punished at all. It was so rife among officeholders that none of them ever denounced another. Indeed it was so accepted as a fact of life that the civil servants had formulated a system setting certain perquisites for every level of administration. Say a citizen went to a tabularius to get a license to set up a stall in the market. That clerk, besides taking the citizen’s money for the license fee, would also consult his schedule of bribes to see what sum he could extort for this particular request. However, when Theodoric decreed that the penalty for bribery would henceforth be death, the incidence of such extortions quickly diminished.

Death was already the punishment fixed, by Roman law, for any person found guilty of making false accusation against another. And it would seem that there could be no punishment more draconian than death, but Theodoric felt that this crime deserved one. He considered false accusation so despicably craven an act that he ordered such perjurers to be burned alive.

And Theodoric found in the Roman lands one kind of fraudulence that was unknown in the outlands. Here, both the man who produced a commodity and the man who needed that commodity were long accustomed to being cheated by the intermediary man—the tradesman who bought from the one and sold to the other. That was because every tradesman was so adept at paying for his supplies of merchandise with filed, chipped or cased coins, and equally adept at giving short measure to the customers who bought from him. So Theodoric had the clever Boethius devise new, inflexible standards of coinage and of weights and measures. The moneyers of the mint produced the new coins, and Boethius set overseers in the markets to enforce the new standards.

In undertaking to eradicate Rome’s rampant corruption and favoritism in high circles and the “amicitia” that was only a polite word for complicity in dishonesty, Theodoric spared not even one of his own close relations. His nephew Theodahad was accused of having engaged in questionable practices in acquiring for himself a sizable estate in Liguria. I was not surprised, for this was the son of Amalafrida whom I had found unattractive even in his youth. It was never proved that there really was any fraud involved in the land transaction, so Theodahad was not punished, but the mere suspicion of impropriety was enough to make Theodoric command him to return the land to its original owners.

Theodoric’s determination to provide justice impartially for all his subjects led him to decree another modification of Roman law, though he knew well that it would earn him increased invective from his detractors. It might have seemed a minor alteration, a matter of just a few words—stipulating that the courts must treat with fairness even “those who err from the faith”—but that was enough to excite wrath among both the hidebound Romans and the Church of Rome. “Those who err from the faith” would have included even Theodoric himself, since he was not a Catholic Christian, and every other Arian, heretic and pagan as well. But most particularly, that phrase extended justice even to
Jews.
Not within the memory of the oldest Roman had a Jew been allowed to bring suit in court against anybody but another Jew. And the Church of Rome was infinitely more scandalized, horrified, outraged. “A detestable Jew will now be able to testify against an upright Christian!” roared every one of its priests from every one of its ambos.
“And be believed!”

However, one of Theodoric’s innovations was admired and approved even by those who might be cursing him on other accounts. He and his stern administrator of finances, Comes Cassiodorus Pater, put a new and tight rein on the government’s tax collectors. In the past, those exactores had not been paid by the state for their labors. Their emolument was whatever they could gouge out of a taxpayer
above
what he was legitimately assessed. True, that system had ensured Rome’s collection of every last nummus it was owed, but it also had made the tax collectors wealthy and the taxpayers murderously mutinous. Now the exactores were paid a fixed stipendium and were scrupulously supervised to prevent their abusing their office. It may have made them less rigorous in their collecting, and probably cost Theodoric’s treasury some revenue, but his people were much happier. Anyway, Cassiodorus Pater so ably managed the realm’s finances that there seemed usually to be a comfortable surplus in the treasury, enabling Theodoric sometimes to lessen taxes or rescind them entirely in districts that suffered a poor harvest or some other kind of calamity.

He was always more mindful of the welfare of the commonfolk than of the nobility and the merchant classes, and he angered many of the latter when he set fixed prices on staple foodstuffs and other necessities of life. But the tradesmen were few, compared to the many of the plebecula who benefited from that decree. A family could buy a whole modius of wheat, enough for a week of meals, for just three denarii, and a whole congius of fairly palatable wine for a single sesterce. Only occasionally did Theodoric’s concern for the lower classes make him err in judgment. Probably his least wise move was his forbidding grain merchants to export that product out of Italia in search of better profits abroad. Theodoric’s advisers Boethius and Cassiodorus Pater hastened to explain to him that such a sanction would redound to the ruin of all the grain farmers in Campania, and he immediately revoked the decree. From then on, he was careful always to consult Comes Cassiodorus and Magister Boethius on matters of good intention that could have adverse effects, and they kept him from making too many such mistakes.

In Theodoric’s address to the Roman Senate, he had said that “reverently to preserve the old is even more commendable than to erect the new,” but he did both.

It was not long before, all over Italia and in outlying provinces too, there stood newly erected edifices and lovingly refurbished old ones bearing dedicatory tiles gratefully affixed by the local folk: REG DN THEOD FELIX ROMAE. But whenever some foreign dignitary, newcome to these lands, complimented the king on his having made so many contributions to the felicity of the Roman Empire, Theodoric would relate an ironic little tale:

“There was in ancient times a talented sculptor. He was commanded to raise a monument to the ruling king, and he sculptured a most impressive one. But on the base of it he chiseled a lavish encomium to
himself.
Over that he plastered a layer of ironstone, in which he chiseled the expected encomium to the king. During the course of years, the ironstone flaked away, exposing the original inscription. So the king’s name was forgotten, and the name of the long-dead sculptor meant nothing to anybody.”

I suspect that Theodoric was thinking, and perhaps not too cheerfully, of the subsequence of his own reign.

After the birth of the latest daughter, Amalaswintha, there-were no more children. One might have thought that the king, despairing of
ever
siring a son, had ceased to bed his queen. I knew that was not so, for he and Audefleda were ever tender and loving to one another, and I saw them as often in private as in public. Nevertheless, for whatever reason, the queen never gave birth again. The daughter meanwhile, in one respect, excelled her heritage. The product of two handsome races and of exceptionally handsome parents, Amalaswintha grew up to be more beautiful even than might have been expected. Unfortunately, she being an only child, the
last
child, she was too much catered to and spoiled by her father, mother, nurses, servants and everyone else at court. Inevitably, she grew to be a haughty, demanding, petulant, self-centered young lady, unlikable in spite of her physical charms.

I remember how once, when she was no more than ten years of age, in my presence she gave a vicious tongue-lashing to a palace maid who had committed some trifling error of service.. Since Amalaswintha’s parents were not in the room, and since I was more than old enough to be her parent myself, I presumed to chide her:

“Girl, your royal father would never speak that way to his meanest slave. Certainly not when someone else was present to hear.”

She drew herself up to her tallest and, though she had only a snub nose, managed to look down it at me, and said coldly, “My father may sometimes forget that he is a king, and neglect to demand the respect due him as a king, but I will never forget that I am a king’s daughter.”

When Amalaswintha’s pettiness of nature became apparent even to Theodoric and Audefleda, they were of course grieved and troubled, but by then there was nothing to be done in the way of remolding her. And I think Theodoric might be forgiven, to some degree, for his part in the overcoddling that had made the princess such a virago. His other two daughters were wives of foreign kings, so this one would be his successor, Amalaswintha Regina or even Amalaswintha Imperatrix. She and her eventual consort—and
he
would have to be most painstakingly chosen—would provide whatever royal lineage was to descend from Theodoric the Great.

In some of Theodoric’s farther-flung ventures aimed at developing the produce and trade of his domain, I was his principal agent. I led a troop of legionaries and military fabri south into Campania to reopen a long-abandoned gold mine there and to recruit native workers for it, then led another troop around the Hadriatic into Dalmatia to do the same at three disused iron mines in that province. At each location, I appointed a faber to oversee the workings and left a turma of soldiers to keep order, and I stayed long enough to satisfy myself that the mine
would
produce before I moved on.

Although Rome in its great days had been the center of a network of trade routes spraddled all over Europe, practically the only such channel of trade still in continuous use by the time Theodoric came to rule was the salt trail between Ravenna and the Regio Salinarum. Naturally wishing to revive the once bustling traffic of commerce, Theodoric directed me to start laying out the routes again, and those projects occupied me for several years.

The reopening of an east-west corridor was not top difficult, because all of it lay within the more or less civilized nations and provinces, from Aquitania to the Black Sea. Some of the old Roman roads required repair, but in general they were passable, kept safe for travel by frequent guard posts, sufficiently provided with lodging, eating and resting places for the merchants and their trains. The Danuvius River, providing a water route for those who preferred it, was likewise well guarded by the Pannonian and Moesian fleets of the Roman navy, and was likewise dotted with villages and other stopping places along its banks. Meirus the Mudman was pleased when I appointed him Theodoric’s praefectus in charge of supervising the eastern end of those trails. His own city of Noviodunum was the Black Sea terminus of the river travel, and he scuttled back and forth, as necessary, to the other port cities—Constantiana, Kallatis, Odessus, Anchialus—that were the termini of the overland roads. Not at all to my surprise, Meirus did an irreproachable job of maintaining that end of the line, while never neglecting his own several businesses and his supplying of slaves for my Novae academy.

The reopening of Rome’s north-south trade corridor was much more arduous and took much more time, because the lands north of the Danuvius never
had
been Roman or much civilized by Rome or much inclined to friendship with Rome. But I did get that laid out, with the result that Italia had an access to the Sarmatic Ocean more secure and reliable than the empire had ever had before. To forge the trail itself, I followed pretty much the same route that had brought me and Prince Frido south from the Amber Coast, only seeking paths and roads that would accommodate carts and wagons and spans of draft animals.