Introduction 7
significant non-military administrative posts to local Roman elites. As recent
work has shown, this trend in the administrative and military history of Italy
may be traced to policies of emperors from the dynasties of Valentinian I and
Theodosius I, and hence pre-dates the Ostrogothic regime by over a century.
Of course a neat distinction between Gothic soldiers and Roman civil
administrators in Italy belies a more complicated reality. Key administrative
posts awarded by the Ostrogothic court often involved both military and civil
authority, while many Romans found opportunities in the Ostrogothic mili-
tary. For instance, after the first victory of the Gothic king Totila against the
Byzantine army in 541, he seems to have focused on the recruitment of slaves
and peasants, many of whom were likely ethnically Roman.6 Consequently,
while a theoretical division of Goths and Romans into military and civil posts
existed in Late Antiquity, it fails to describe the more fluid situation on the
ground. Readers interested in further examining the complex relationship
between Roman and Ostrogothic military and political cultures can turn to
the contributions of Radtki on the Senate, Halsall on the army, Bjornlie on
civil administration, and Heydemann on political ideology, as well as Lafferty’s
related chapter on law and legal practice.
Ethnicity and Social Relations
Just as it is problematic to oversimplify the ethnic compositions of the
Ostrogothic army and administration, so it is troubling to maintain easy dis-
tinctions between ‘Goth’ and ‘Roman’ as ethnic and social categories. As is well
known, the army that Theoderic led into Italy in 489 was not an ethnically
‘pure’ corps of Ostrogoths, but a hodgepodge mix of barbarian soldiers, most
of whom had been fighting on behalf of the empire for some time. It is pos-
sible to imagine Theoderic and his ‘Ostrogoths’ as a natural extension of the
kind of class described by Alexander Demandt, as a highly fluid social stratum
in which military membership mattered more than ethnicity.7 Moreover, the
very concept of ethnogenesis (the idea that ethnicity is never an essential or
static category of identity, but a fluid and constructed set of characteristics
that are acquired by a people through both passive and active developments)
calls attention to the relative nature of barbarian identity. What it meant to
5 McEvoy, Child Emperor Rule.
6 Moorhead, “Totila” and Noyé, “Social Relations”.
7 Demandt, “Osmosis”.