Cassiodorus, Theoderic, and the Dream of a Pan-Gothic Kingdom

Abstract

When in the year 511 Theoderic removed Gesalic from the Visigothic throne, he could not have known that his most feared western antagonist, his father-in-law Clovis, would pass away soon afterwards. Theoderic was able to attain an international peace and a general harmony in the western Mediterranean world. This situation was the result of military victories combined with an almost twenty-year policy of matrimonial alliances. The general peace lasted for a decade which ancient authors identified as the peak of Theoderic's long reign. This was also the decade when Theoderic tried to unify Ostrogoths and Visigoths under his kingdom in the largest political experiment of the barbarian West of that time. A few elements of this propaganda survive in sections of the Getica of Jordanes, in the Anonymus Valesianus II, and in some of the Variae. Interestingly, all these vestiges go back to Cassiodorus. In his Gothic History, by abusing traditions and genealogies, revisiting history, and adapting chronologies, he represented Theoderic's aim of unification as a reunification of two peoples who shared the same origins but had been split for more than two centuries. While Cassiodorus's History is lost, we have enough elements to hypothesize that this author wrote the eulogy of Theoderic before the king's dream came to an end. The aim of this paper is to unfold the elements of this largely lost propaganda.