Governmental Administration 59
specific officials simply as noster miles.59 A similar situation would eventually
obtain in the eastern empire under Emperors Maurice and Heraclius.60
The combination of economic reasons for reducing the numbers of admin-
istrative personnel and a peripatetic administrative strategy changed the tra-
ditional function of public offices in Ostrogothic Italy.61 The change is best
described as a shift from institutionally defined administrative practices to
an increasing tendency to assign administrative duties on an ad hoc basis by
the king. The relative shortage of personnel had the effect of conflating tra-
ditional administrative competences, such that the execution of state affairs
depended on the delegation of tasks to particular attendants at hand. The basic
organs of government remained essentially unchanged, with most offices and
bureaus of the late Roman government visible to some degree, and the basic
functions of the administration as a whole seem to address the same range
of activities.62 The Variae provide a rich tableau of appointments to office,
tax collection, the investigation of legal disputes and maintenance of legal
order, the maintenance of urban and regional infrastructure, the provisioning
and deployment of the army, and diplomatic relations with other states—in
short, the full spectrum of matters pertaining to a late Roman administration.
Nonetheless, the availability of smaller numbers of officials to execute this
range of activities required more flexibility in the scope of administrative func-
tions attended to by some members of civil service. In some ways it is possible
to view, in spite of the façade of governmental traditionalism present in the
Variae, how the dependence of the royal court on a smaller cohort of officials
required widening the authority of many offices. This trend in the government
of 6th-century Italy may parallel processes in the evolution of the legal cul-
ture of the state. The simplification of law, particularly visible in a text such as
the Edictum Theoderici, probably has as much to do with the administrative
needs of a bureaucracy with fewer specialized civil servants as it does with the
evolving needs of the people who depended upon the state for justice.63 The
same may be said of other ‘successor’ states of the West that evolved regional
bodies of law.
59 e.g. Variae 1.7.2, ed. Mommsen.
60 Haldon, Byzantium, pp. 173–207.
61 A healthy body of scholarship has already addressed aspects of change in the Ostrogothic
administration: Boak/Dunlap, Later Roman and Byzantine Administration; Sinnigen,
“Administrative Shifts”, pp. 456–67; Barnwell, Emperor, pp. 159–69; Tabata, “I comites
Gothorum”, pp. 67–78.
62 The formulae of Books 6 and 7 of the Variae provide a template for this basic structure.
63 On this trend from the legal perspective: Lafferty, “Law and Order”, pp. 260–90.