He assembled the Goths, and marched straight on Constantinople, burning and pillaging as he went. So say, at least, the Greek historians, of whom, all through this strange story, no one need believe more than he likes. Had the Goths had the writing of the life of Dietrich, we should have heard another tale. As it is, we have, as it were, a life of Lord Clive composed by the court scribes of Delhi.
To no Roman would he tell what was in his mind. Five leagues from Constantinople he paused. Some say that he had compassion on the city where he had been brought up. Who can tell? He demanded to speak to Zeno alone, and the father in arms and his wild son met once more. There was still strong in him the old Teutonic feudal instinct. He was ‘Zeno’s man,’ in spite of all. He asked (says Jornandes) Zeno’s leave to march against Odoacer, and conquer Italy. Procopius and the Valesian Fragment say that Zeno sent him, and that in case of success, he was to reign there till Zeno came. Zeno was, no doubt, glad to get rid of him at any price. As Ennodius well says, ‘Another’s honour made him remember his own origin, and fear the very legions which obeyed him—for that obedience is suspected which serves the unworthy.’ Rome was only nominally under Zeno’s dominion; and it mattered little to him whether Herule or Gothic adventurer called himself his representative.
Then was held a grand function. Dietrich, solemnly appointed ‘Patrician,’ had Italy ceded to him by a ‘Pragmatic’ sanction, and Zeno placed on his head the sacrum velamen, a square of purple, signifying in Constantinople things wonderful, august, imperial—if they could only be made to come to pass. And he made them come to pass. He gathered all Teutonic heroes of every tribe, as well as his own; and through Roumelia, and through the Alps, a long and dangerous journey, went Dietrich and his Goths, with their wives and children, and all they had, packed on waggons; living on their flocks and herds, grinding their corn in hand-mills, and hunting as they went, for seven hundred miles of march; fighting as they went with Bulgars and Sarmatians, who had swarmed into the waste marches of Hungary and Carniola, once populous, cultivated, and full of noble cities; fighting a desperate battle with the Gepidæ, up to their knees in a morass; till over the passes of the Julian Alps, where icicles hung upon their beards, and their clothes cracked with frost, they poured into the Venetian plains. It was a daring deed; and needed a spirit like Dietrich’s to carry it through.
Odoacer awaited him near the ruins of Aquileia. On the morning of the fight, as he was arming, Dietrich asked his noble mother to bring him some specially fine mantle, which she had embroidered for him, and put it over his armour, ‘that all men may see how he goes gayer into the fight than ever he did into feast. For this day she shall see whether she have brought a man-child into the world, or no.’
And in front of Verona (where the plain was long white with human bones), he beat Odoacer, and after a short and sharp campaign, drove him to Ravenna. But there, Roman fortifications, and Roman artillery, stopped, as usual, the Goth; and Odoacer fulfilled his name so well, and stood so stout, that he could only be reduced by famine; and at last surrendered on terms, difficult now to discover.
Gibbon says, that there was a regular compact that they should enjoy equal authority, and refers to Procopius: but Procopius only says, that they should live together peaceably ‘in that city.’ Be that as it may, Odoacer and his party were detected, after awhile, conspiring against Dietrich, and put to death in some dark fashion. Gibbon, as advocatus diaboli, of course gives the doubt against Dietrich, by his usual enthymeme—All men are likely to be rogues, ergo, Dietrich was one. Rather hard measure, when one remembers that the very men who tell the story are Dietrich’s own enemies. By far the most important of them, the author of the Valesian Fragment, who considers Dietrich damned as an Arian, and the murderer of Boethius and Symmachus, says plainly that Odoacer plotted against his life. But it was a dark business at best.
Be that as it may, Dietrich the Amal found himself in one day king of all Italy, without a peer. And now followed a three and thirty years’ reign of wisdom, justice, and prosperity, unexampled in the history of those centuries. Between the days of the Antonines and those of Charlemagne, I know no such bright spot in the dark history of Europe.
As for his transferring the third of the lands of Italy, which had been held by Odoacer’s men, to his own Goths,—that was just or unjust (even putting out of the question the rights of conquest), according to what manner of men Odoacer’s mercenaries were, and what right they had to the lands. At least it was done so, says Cassiodorus, that it notoriously gave satisfaction to the Romans themselves. One can well conceive it. Odoacer’s men had been lawless adventurers; and now law was installed as supreme. Dietrich, in his long sojourn at the Emperor’s court, had discovered the true secret of Roman power, which made the Empire terrible even in her fallen fortunes; and that was Law. Law, which tells every man what to expect, and what is expected of him; and so gives, if not content, still confidence, energy, industry. The Goths were to live by the Gothic law, the Romans by the Roman. To amalgamate the two races would have been as impossible as to amalgamate English and Hindoos. The parallel is really tolerably exact. The Goth was very English; and the over-civilized, learned, false, profligate Roman was the very counterpart of the modern Brahmin. But there was to be equal justice between man and man. If the Goths were the masters of much of the Roman soil, still spoliation and oppression were forbidden; and the remarkable edict or code of Theodoric, shews how deeply into his great mind had sunk the idea of the divineness of Law. It is short, and of Draconic severity, especially against spoliation, cheating, false informers, abuse by the clergy of the rights of sanctuary, and all offences against the honour of women. I advise you all to study it, as an example of what an early Teutonic king thought men ought to do, and could be made to do.
The Romans were left to their luxury and laziness; and their country villas (long deserted) were filled again by the owners. The Goths were expected to perform military service, and were drilled from their youth in those military evolutions which had so often given the disciplined Roman the victory over the undisciplined Goth, till every pomoerium (boulevard), says Ennodius, might be seen full of boys and lads, learning to be soldiers. Everything meanwhile was done to soothe the wounded pride of the conquered. The senate of Rome was still kept up in name (as by Odoacer), her nobles flattered by sonorous titles, and the officers of the kingdom and the palace bore the same names as they would have done under Roman emperors. The whole was an attempt to develop Dietrich’s own Goths by the only civilization which he knew, that of Constantinople: but to engraft on it an order, a justice, a freedom, a morality, which was the ‘barbarian’ element. The treasures of Roman art were placed under the care of government officers; baths, palaces, churches, aqueducts, were repaired or founded; to build seems to have been Dietrich’s great delight; and we have left us, on a coin, some image of his own palace at Verona, a strange building with domes and minarets, something like a Turkish mosque; standing, seemingly, on the arcades of some older Roman building. Dietrich the Goth may, indeed, be called the founder of ‘Byzantine’ architecture throughout the Western world.
Meanwhile, agriculture prospered once more; the Pontine Marshes were drained; the imperial ports restored, and new cities sprang up. ‘The new ones,’ says Machiavelli, ‘were Venice, Siena, Ferrara, Aquileia; and those which became extended were Florence, Genoa, Pisa, Milan, Naples, and Bologna.’ Of these the great sea-ports, especially Venice, were founded not by Goths, but by Roman and Greek fugitives: but it was the security and liberality of Dietrich’s reign which made their existence possible; and Venice really owes far more to the barbarian hero, than to the fabled patronage of St. Mark.