15-7. The Justice of Theodoric’s Rule
The main outlines of Theodoric's government have now been described, and it will be seen that they were all of Roman origin. We must next inquire in what manner he administered this government. A judicious policy and gentle means had been employed to supplant Odovacar, and at the beginning of his reign he governed by similar methods. He endeavoured to help the Italian officials with whom he had surrounded himself, and to whom he had entrusted the high offices of state, in their task of pacifying and reorganising the country. When Epiphanius described the miserable plight of Liguria to him, and told him in moving terms how the land there lay uncultivated owing to its husbandmen having been carried away captive by the Burgundians, the king replied: "There is gold in the treasury, and we will pay their ransom, whatever it may be, either in money or by the sword." He then suggested that the bishop should himself undertake negotiations for ransoming the captives. Epiphanius accepted this mission; and, the king having placed the necessary funds at his disposal, triumphantly brought home six thousand prisoners, whom he had either ransomed or whose liberty he had obtained by his eloquent pleading in their behalf.
The effect produced in Italy by such an act of liberality, followed by so satisfactory a result, can be imagined. The king's aim, indeed, as he a good government, and to extend the influence of that Roman civilitas upon which he desired to model his own administration.
As ministers, he selected men capable of inspiring confidence, such as Liberius, for instance, whose official work had been attended with such excellent results. In his opinion, fidelity to a vanquished patron was a virtue, nor was he afraid of praising it; indeed, in his administration, the value of a post given to a son would be in proportion to the deserts of the father. He attracted young men capable of making good officers of state to his Court; in a word, he acted like a sovereign who desires to be loved by his subjects, and at the same time to give stability to his rule. As Ennodius remarks, "No man was driven to despair of obtaining honours; no man, however obscure, had to complain of a refusal to his demands provided that they rested on substantial foundations; no man, in fact, ever came to the king without receiving liberal gifts"; but at this point we detect the panegyrist.
As we shall see before long, the end of his reign differed from the beginning, but during the chief part of it, at any rate, he governed with singular prudence. When Laurentius begged Theodoric to pardon some rebellious subjects, the king answered him as follows: "Your duty as a bishop obliges you to urge me to listen to the claims of mercy, but the needs of an Empire in the making shut out gentleness and pity, and make punishments a necessity." Nevertheless, we find that he allowed some mitigation to be made in the punishment of the culprits.
Theodoric could be a just as well as a politic ruler, and he shewed his sense of justice when he had to deal with financial questions. At the request of Epiphanius, he remitted two-thirds of the taxes for the current year to the inhabitants of Liguria; eyeing the remaining third, it is said, "in order that the poverty of his treasury might not impose fresh burdens on the Romans." During his reign, even the Goths were obliged to submit to taxation, and he also made them respect the public finances. At Adria, for instance, he forced them to give back what they had taken from the fiscus; in Tuscany he ordered Gesila, the Sajo, to make them pay the land tax. Moreover, if in any province the servants of the Gothic Count or his deputy behaved violently to the provincials, we find Severianus giving information against them; while in Picenum and Samnium we find him ordering his compatriots to bring grants made to the king to Court, without keeping back any portion of them.
Nevertheless, contemporary chroniclers have all declared that Theodoric, like Odovacar, distributed a third part of the land in Italy among his soldiers. Their statement appears to have been almost invariably accepted by later historians, who have repeated it one from another. A theory, that the barbarians despoiled the conquered people of their estates, is commonly believed, and indeed has hardly ever been contradicted. But in addition to the fact that such a proceeding would certainly have led to some disturbance, of which we can find no evidence in any part of the country, another circumstance renders such a conclusion unreasonable. This is that neither Odovacar's soldiers, nor Theodoric's, were in reality sufficiently numerous to occupy a third part of the land in Italy.
Among the few scholars who have attempted to dispute the current theory, some, like de Roziere, believe that the chronicler's words denote an act of confiscation for which compensation was made to the owners by a tax levied at the rate of one-third of the annual value. Others, like Lecrivain, consider that they mean a surrender of unappropriated land, in return for which a tribute was exacted equal to a third of the annual produce. At no period, not even during the agrarian troubles in the far away days of the Republic, had it ever been the custom to eject legal proprietors from their estates. On the contrary, on every occasion when land had been required for the purpose of making grants to the plebeians, to veterans or praetorians, or even to barbarians, it had invariably been taken from land owned by the community, that is to say from the land around the temples, from unoccupied land, or from the property of the Treasury.
Whenever indeed a distribution of land took place, it was made exclusively from the lands belonging to the Treasury, which, at certain periods, multiplied exceedingly owing to escheated successions or confiscations. In our own opinion, it was a third of these state lands, this ager publicus, that was assigned to the barbarians during the reigns of Odovacar and Theodoric. In addition to the fact that not one of the texts actually contradicts this theory, it appears to be sufficiently proved by the following words, addressed by Ennodius to Liberius, when the latter was ordered to allot the land of Liguria to the Goths: "Have you not enriched innumerable Goths with liberal grants, and yet the Romans hardly seem to know what you have been doing." Even the courtier-like Ennodius would not have expressed himself in this manner in a private letter, or even in an official communication, if private estates had been attacked for the benefit of the conquerors.
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