148 Lafferty
the king himself. Under this system there was a strict jurisdictional division
between Goths and Romans. Cases involving just Romans were to be handled
by Roman officials, while the Gothic officers were to handle inter-Gothic dis-
putes. Cases involving both Goths and Romans were to be handled by a pair
of judges: the Gothic count (comes) and his Roman counterpart.1 This division
was not an ethnographic one, however, but a functional one between soldiers
(Goths) and civilians (Romans). Just as they had in the empire, soldiers and
civilians fell into two separate jurisdictions, but they were not necessarily sub-
ject to different laws.2
Both in terms of ideology and organization, therefore, Theoderic sought and
largely maintained the institutions and administrative procedures of the later
western imperial administration as he found them.3 The same can be said of
Rome’s laws. Several letters within the collection stress the need to preserve
the rule of Roman law, demand respect for it, reflect upon its fundamental
correctness, or even cite it.4 Theoderic, too, is often extolled as a champion of
Rome’s legal heritage. In a letter to the eastern emperor Anastasius, the king
reportedly remarked that his rule was in direct imitation of the emperor’s, and
noted how his Gothic followers obeyed Roman law (Variae 1.1). Elsewhere in a
letter addressed to his new Gallic subjects written shortly after his taking con-
trol of a large portion of southern Gaul in 510, Theoderic described his rule as
Roman, contrasting it sharply with the ‘barbarous’ rule of the Visigoths:
You, who have been restored to it after so long a time, should gladly obey
Roman custom, for it is gratifying to return to that place from where your
ancestors undoubtedly took their rise. And therefore, as by God’s grace
you have been recalled to ancient liberty, adorn yourselves in the morals
of the toga, cast off barbarism, throw aside savagery of the mind, for it1 E.g. Cassiodorus, Variae 7.3. The Variae are cited from the MGH edition of Mommsen, Berlin
1894, pp. 1–385. For a selected translation: Barnish, Cassiodorus.
2 E.g. Cassiodorus, Variae 3.12. Historians have long accepted this functional division as broadly
true in descriptive terms. See e.g. Moorhead, Theodericy, pp. 71–5; Amory, People and Identity,
ch. 1; Heather, “Merely an Ideology?”, pp. 31–60; id., “Gens and Regnum”, pp. 88–133.
3 On the late imperial court system in Late Antiquity, see Jones, Later Roman Empire, vol. 1,
pp. 479–93; Harries, Law and Empire; Matthews, Laying Down the Law; Humfress, Orthodoxy
and the Courts, ch. 2; Kaser, Das römische Zivilprozessrecht, pp. 517–19. On the imperial civil
service, see Kunkel, Introduction to Roman Legal, pp. 141–2; Jolowicz/Nichols, Historical
Introduction, pp. 423–5; Cameron, Later Roman Empire, pp. 39–41; Kaser, Römische Rechtsge-
schichte, pp. 208–10; Stein, Untersuchungen über das Officium; Delmaire, Les Institutions.
4 E.g. Cassiodorus, Variae 1.1, 27, 44; 3.17, 43.