LITMIR.BIZ

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services in this crisis he was rewarded with the dignities of Patrician and Master of the Soldiery, high honours for a barbarian of twenty-four; and probably about this time he was also adopted as "filius in arma" by the Emperor. What the precise nature of this adopted "sonship-in-arms" may have been we are not able to say. It reminds us of the barbarian customs which in the course of centuries ripened into the mediæval ceremony of knighthood, and the whole transaction certainly sounds more Ostrogothic than Imperial. Zeno's own son and namesake (the offspring of a first marriage before his union with Ariadne) was apparently dead before this time; and possibly therefore the title of son thus conferred upon Theodoric may have raised in his heart wild hopes that he too might one day be saluted as Roman Emperor. Any such hopes were probably doomed to inevitable disappointment. Any other dignity in the State, the "Roman Republic", as it still called itself, was practically within reach of a powerful barbarian, but the diadem, as has been already said, could in this age of the world, only be worn by one of pure Roman, that is, non-barbarian, blood.

At this time, and for the next three years, the position of our Theodoric, both towards the Emperor and towards his own people, was sorely embarrassed by the position and the claims of the other, the squinting Theodoric (son of Triarius), whom we met with seventeen years ago, and whose receipt of stipendia from the court of Constantinople, at the very time when their own were withheld, raised the wrath of Walamir and Theudemir. This Theodoric, it will be remembered, was of unkingly, perhaps of quite ignoble, birth, had risen to greatness by clinging to the skirts of Aspar, and had, so far as the Emperor's favour was concerned, fallen with his fall. Shortly before the death of Leo he had appeared in arms against the Empire, taking one city and besieging another, and had forced the Emperor to concede to him high rank in the army (that of General of the Household Troops, ³⁷) a subsidy of; £80,000 a year for himself and his people, and lastly a remarkable stipulation, "that he should be absolute ruler ³⁸ of the Goths, and that the Emperor should not receive any of them who were minded to revolt from him". This strange article of the treaty shows us, on the one hand, how thoroughly fictitious and illegitimate was this Theodoric's claim to kinship; since assuredly neither Alaric, nor Ataulfus, nor Theudemir, nor any of the genuine kings of the Goths, ever needed to bolster up their authority over their subjects by any such figment of an Imperial concession; and on the other hand, as it coincides in date with the time of Theudemir's and his Theodoric's entrance into the Empire, it shows us the distracting influences to which the large number of Gothic settlers south of the Danube, settled there before Theudemir's migration, were exposed by that event. There can be little doubt that the Goths who were minded to revolt from the son of Triarius and who were not to be received into favour by the Emperor, were Ostrogoths, still dimly conscious of the old tie which bound them to the glorious house of Amala, and more than half disposed to forsake the service of their squinting upstart chief in order to follow the banners of the young hero, son of Theudemir.

Footnote 37:(return) Magister Equitum et Peditum Præsentalis.

Footnote 38:(return) αΰτοκράτωρ.

      Then came the death of Leo (478), Zeno's accession and the insurrection of Basiliscus, in which the son of Triarius took part against the Isaurian Emperor. Soon after this insurrection was ended and Zeno was restored to his precarious throne, there came an embassy from the fœderati (as they called themselves) that is, from the unattached Goths who followed the Triarian standard, begging Zeno to be reconciled to their lord, and hinting that he was a truer friend to the Empire than the petted and pampered son of Theudemir. After a consultation with "the Senate and People of Rome", in other words, with the nobles of Constantinople and the troops of the household, Zeno decided that to take both the Theodorics into his pay would be too heavy a charge on the treasury; that there was no reason for breaking with the young Amal, his ally, and therefore that the request of his rival must be refused. Open war followed, consisting chiefly of devastating raids by the son of Triarius into the valleys of Mœsia and Thrace. A message was sent to Theodoric the Amal, who was dwelling quietly with his people by the Danube. "Why are you lingering in your home? Come forth and do great deeds worthy of a Master of Roman Soldiery". "But if I take the field against the son of Triarius", was the answer, "I fear that you will make peace with him behind my back". The Emperor and Senate bound themselves by solemn oaths that he should never be received back into favour, and an elaborate plan of campaign was arranged, according to which the Amal marching with his host from Marcianople, (Shumla) was to be met by one general with twelve thousand troops, on the southern side of the Balkans, and by another with thirty thousand in the valley of the Hebrus (Maritza).

      

      But the Roman Empire, in its feeble and flaccid old age, seemed to have lost all capacity for making war. Theodoric the Amal performed his share of the compact; but when with his weary army, encumbered with many women and children, he emerged from the passes of the Balkans he found no Imperial generals there to meet him, but, instead, Theodoric the Squinter with a large army of Goths encamped on an inaccessible hill. Neither chief gave the signal for combat; perhaps both were restrained by a reluctance to urge the fratricidal strife; but there were daily skirmishes between the light-armed horsemen at the foraging grounds and places for watering. Every day, too, the son of Triarius rode round the hostile camp, shouting forth reproaches against his rival, calling him "a perjured boy, a madman, a traitor to his race, a fool who could not see whither the Imperial plans were tending. The Romans would stand by and look quietly on while Goth wore out Goth in deadly strife". Murmurs from the Amal's troops showed that these words struck home. Next day the son of Triarius climbed a hill overlooking the camp, and again raised his voice in bitter defiance. "Scoundrel! why are you leading so many of my kinsmen to destruction? why have you made so many Gothic wives widows? What has become of that wealth and plenty which they had when they first took service with you? Then they had two or three horses apiece; now without horses and in the guise of slaves, they are wandering on foot through Thrace. But they are free-born men surely, aye, as free-born as you are, and they once measured out the gold coins of Byzantium with a bushel". When the host heard these words, all, both men and women, went to their leader Theodoric the Amal, and claimed from him with tumultuous cries that he should come to an accommodation with the son of Tnarius. The proposal must have been hateful to the Amal. To throw away the laboriously earned favour of the Emperor, to denude himself of the splendid dignity of Master of the Soldiery, to leave the comfortable home-like fabric of Imperial civilisation and go out again into the barbarian wilderness with this insolent namesake who had just been denouncing him as a perjured boy: all this was gall and wormwood to the spirit of Theodoric. But he knew the conditions under which he held his sovereignty--"king", as a recent French monarch expressed it, "by the grace of God and the will of the people", and he did not attempt to strive against the decision of his tumultuary parliament. He met his elderly competitor, each standing on the opposite bank of a disparting stream, and after speech had, they agreed that they would wage no more war on one another but would make common cause against Byzantium.

      The now confederated Theodorics sent an embassy to Zeno, bearing their common demands for territory, stipendia and rations for their followers, and, in the case of Theodoric the Amal, charged with bitter complaints of the desertion which had exposed him to such dangers. The Emperor replied with an accusation (which appears to have been wholly unfounded) that Theodoric himself had meditated treachery, and that this was the reason why the Roman generals had feared to join their forces to his. Still the Emperor was willing to receive him again into favour if he would relinquish his alliance with the son of Triarius, and in order to lure him back the ambassadors were to offer him 1,000 pounds' weight of gold (£40,000), 10,000 of silver (£35,000), a yearly revenue of 10,000 aurei (£6,000), and the daughter of Olybrius, one of the noblest-born damsels of Byzantium, for his wife. But the Amal king, having stooped so low as to make an alliance with the son of Triarius, was not going to stoop lower by breaking it. The ambassadors returned to Constantinople with their purpose unaccomplished, and Zeno began seriously to prepare

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