Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- List of rulers
- Terminology and vocabulary
- List of abbreviations
- Map of Ostrogothic Italy
- Introduction: Studying the barbarians in late antiquity
- 1 Ethnicity, ethnography and community in the fifth and sixth centuries
- 2 The Ravenna government and ethnographic ideology: from civilitas to bellicositas
- 3 Individual reactions to ideology I: names, language and profession
- 4 Complementary and competing ideals of community: Italy and the Roman Empire
- 5 Individual reactions to ideology II: soldiers, civilians and political allegiance
- 6 Catholic communities and Christian Empire
- 7 Individual reactions to ideology III: Catholics and Arians
- 8 The origin of the Goths and Balkan military culture
- Conclusion
- Appendix 1 The inquiry into Gundila's property: a translation and chronology
- Appendix 2 The Germanic culture construct
- Appendix 3 Archeological and toponymic research on Ostrogothic Italy
- Appendix 4 Dress, hairstyle and military customs
- Prosopographical Appendix: A prosopography of Goths in Italy, 489–554
- Bibliography
- Index
- Cambridge Studies in Medieval Life and Thought Fourth Series
4 - Complementary and competing ideals of community: Italy and the Roman Empire
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 December 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- List of rulers
- Terminology and vocabulary
- List of abbreviations
- Map of Ostrogothic Italy
- Introduction: Studying the barbarians in late antiquity
- 1 Ethnicity, ethnography and community in the fifth and sixth centuries
- 2 The Ravenna government and ethnographic ideology: from civilitas to bellicositas
- 3 Individual reactions to ideology I: names, language and profession
- 4 Complementary and competing ideals of community: Italy and the Roman Empire
- 5 Individual reactions to ideology II: soldiers, civilians and political allegiance
- 6 Catholic communities and Christian Empire
- 7 Individual reactions to ideology III: Catholics and Arians
- 8 The origin of the Goths and Balkan military culture
- Conclusion
- Appendix 1 The inquiry into Gundila's property: a translation and chronology
- Appendix 2 The Germanic culture construct
- Appendix 3 Archeological and toponymic research on Ostrogothic Italy
- Appendix 4 Dress, hairstyle and military customs
- Prosopographical Appendix: A prosopography of Goths in Italy, 489–554
- Bibliography
- Index
- Cambridge Studies in Medieval Life and Thought Fourth Series
Summary
Other ideologies permeated the Italian air alongside the propaganda of the Gothic kings. In the secular world, the ethnographic labels “Roman” and “Goth” derived much of their power and importance from a political structure: the Roman Empire. But the Empire was changing faster than ideological rhetoric. For Italians, the presence of another Roman Empire in the East vied with ancient ethnographic and political ideas that Italy and Rome were the Roman Empire, ideas, in addition, cultivated by Theoderic under civilitas. Among elites, this paradox produced a delayed and ambivalent reaction to the renovatio ideology of Justinian, an ideology itself bound up not only with the idea of Rome but also with the notion of a Christian Empire.
The different Eastern and Western perceptions of Empire and ethnography reacted in various ways with the ideologies of Ravenna amidst the realities of Italian society, producing a multitude of ideas about the continuation or disruption of the Roman world. Historians once thought that the equation of the fall of the Western Empire with the advent of Odoacer, the first barbarian ruler in Italy, in 476, originated in the minds of the proudest senatorial families in Rome under Theoderic in the 510s and 520s, particularly that of Boethius's father-in-law, the historian Symmachus. Recent work has demolished this thesis entirely. The emphasis on 476 first appears in the Chronicle of Marcellinus comes, the Illyrian secretary to Justinian, who composed it in the East in the 520s. The year 476 was an Eastern fixation.
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- Information
- People and Identity in Ostrogothic Italy, 489–554 , pp. 109 - 148Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1997