2 Arnold, Bjornlie, and Sessa
Roman structures and ideas endured.2 Alternatively, other scholars underline
the essential ‘barbarism’ of Ostrogothic Italy as a warlord society lying beneath
a thin veneer of classical Roman civilization, and as a state whose emergence
marks the beginning of the early Middle Ages.3 Both the ‘continuist’ and the
‘catastrophist’ schools have their shortcomings. For one, they inevitably cast
the Ostrogothic period as either a long Indian summer of classical civilization
or an abrupt rupture that heralded the ‘Dark Ages’. Moreover, neither approach
fully acknowledges the important structural changes to society that Ostrogothic
Italy inherited from the 4th and 5th centuries. Consequently, these studies
sometimes obscure the ways in which various continuities and discontinuities
may have been normative well before the arrival of the Ostrogoths in 489.
One reason for such polarized treatments of the same period is the abun-
dance of rich contemporary evidence, which in some cases supports both
2 See e.g. Moorhead, Theoderic and O’Donnell, Ruin of the Roman Empire.
3 Gibbon, Decline and Fall is perhaps the most infamous example of this perspective, but
see more recently Heather, Empires and Barbarians; Kaylor’s introduction to Companion to
Boethius; and Ward-Perkins, Fall of Rome.
Figure 1.1 Map of Europe and the Mediterranean, ca. 500
Map by Ian Mladjov