Theodoric Read Online Free

much tinder waiting for a spark. Within minutes, all cohesion in the Roman fleet was lost, as vessels strove to flee the danger. Valiantly, the
dromon
s tried to secure cables to the fireships to drag them clear but, overwhelmed by sheer numbers, could make little difference to the outcome.
    Ship after Roman ship exploded into flame as the fireships got among them, becoming in their turn agents of destruction. Soon chaos reigned, with vessels piling up on the rocky shore, or scattering wildly in their efforts to escape. Now, like a wolf pack closing on a helpless flock, the Vandals struck. With the wind-gauge allowing them to manoeuvre as they chose, they picked off single vessels with several of their own. Then, boarding, they swamped the defenders with a tide of yelling warriors. After vainly trying to repulse one such onslaught, Iohannes, shouting defiance, leapt into the sea rather than surrender, his armour pulling him instantly beneath the waves.
    Only a battered remnant of the mighty war-fleet that had set sail with such high hopes limped back to the Golden Horn. As news of the disaster spread throughout the Roman world, the Western federates breathed a collective sigh of relief. With the treasuries of both empires exhausted, no further rescue of the West could be attempted. Gaul, Spain and Italy were theirs for the taking.
    In that same fateful year, the twelve hundred and twenty-second from the Founding of the City, a fourteen-year-old hostage was receiving the education of a Roman aristocrat in Constantinople. The boy was the son of Thiudimer, king of the Ostrogoths, a Germanic tribe settled in Pannonia. * His name was Theoderic.
    Â 
    * Cape Bon, Tunisia.
    * Payment of a ‘backhander’ accompanying a transaction; in effect, a covert bribe.
    * An abandoned West Roman province in the Upper Danube region.

ONE
    The poor Roman imitates the Goth, the well-to-do Goth the Roman
    Aphorism of Theoderic,
c.
500
    â€˜â€œIngentem meminit parvo qui germine quercum
    Aequaevumque videt consenuisse nemus”,’
    declaimed Demetrius to the semicircle of (mainly bored-looking) schoolboys. ‘He remembers the great oak as a small acorn, and sees the grove, planted when he was born, grown old with him.’ The class, sons of aristocrats, generals and top civil servants, mainly from the Eastern Empire with a few from Italia and Gaul, was being held in a room of Constantinople’s Imperial Palace, a jumble of splendid though ill-assorted buildings that sprawled downhill towards the Propontis. * The schoolmaster was expounding the ideas contained in Claudian’s poem
On the Gothic War
.
    â€˜Bearing in mind that Alaric’s barbarians had crossed the Alps and were rampaging down through Italy,’ continued Demetrius, ‘what do you think Claudian was trying to tell us about this simple old man from Verona?’ He looked round his pupils’ faces expectantly. ‘Well?’
    Silence, while his charges fiddled with styluses and waxed tablets, or stared out of windows at the towering bulk of the Hippodrome. Sometimes, he wondered why he bothered. Granted, for most of them Greek was their mother tongue; but they’d had Latin – Caesar, Vergil, Tacitus, Ammianus et al. – drummed into them from an early age. It wasn’t the language they couldn’t cope with, just the authors’ concepts. Horses were the only thing that occupied the minds of these upper-class lads. Soon it would be girls. And after that? A sordid scramble for money and power, which was all that seemed to matter these days.Unless, that is, you were a member of the hoi polloi, when religion and betting on the Blue or Green teams at the Hippodrome were the twin obsessions. Whatever happened to
otium
– leisured scholarship – which, with civic patronage, was once seen as the proper ambition of a Roman gentleman?
    Before the pause could become embarrassing, Demetrius forced a smile and said, ‘No