300 Cooper
which pulls against his own reading of the episode. Although he praises the
queen’s administrative virtues—“wisdom and regard for justice”12—he frames
her interaction with her rivals in essentially domestic terms. The queen’s allies,
Procopius tells us, were “three among the old men of the Goths whom she
knew to be prudent and refined above all the others”13 whom she appointed to
live with her son. One imagines that these men were experienced civil officials,
but as Procopius tells the story there is a whiff of a boy being held back from
military training to keep company with women and old men.
Amalasuentha’s position at the time of her father’s death was in principle
reasonably strong, since ruling as regent on behalf of a son was a compara-
tively well-established position. Meghan McEvoy has shown that across the
4th and 5th centuries royal mothers and sisters were able, by working closely
with trusted generals, to establish long and often stable regimes in the name
of child emperors.14 When his father Arcadius died in 408, for example, the
Roman emperor Theodosius II had only recently turned seven; he survived,
and reigned for forty-two years. In his Variae, Cassiodorus invoked another
exemplary regency, that of Galla Placidia for Valentinian III, who was six at
his accession in 425.15 Placidia faced circumstances at least as daunting as
Amalasuentha’s, but she was able to play the rivalry between her generals,
Aetius and Bonifatius, to her son’s advantage.16
So a great deal was at stake in the education of Athalaric. Procopius suggests
that a faction among the nobles tried to distance Amalasuentha from her son,
and this has the ring of truth to it. To male aristocrats who had the military
credentials she lacked this may well have seemed the ideal field in which to
challenge the queen’s authority. Yet Procopius chooses to see this struggle for
authority through a domestic rather than a political lens. This framing colours
the incident that he identifies as the trigger for Amalasuentha’s loss of control
of Athalaric: “On one occasion the mother, finding the boy doing some wrong in
his chamber, chastised him; and he in tears went off thence to the men’s apart-
ments. And some Goths who met him made a great to-do about this.”17 Now
12 Procopius, Wars 5.2.3: “ξυνέσεως μὲν καὶ δικαιοσύνης ἐπὶ πλεῖστον ἐλθοῦσα.”
13 Procopius, Wars 5.2.7: “τρεῖς τε ἀπολεξαμένη τῶν ἐν Γότθοις γερόντων οὕσπερ ἠπίστατο μᾶλλον
ἁπάντων ξυνετούς τε καὶ ἐπιεικεῖς εἶναι.”
14 McEvoy, Child Emperor Rule.
15 Cassiodorus, Variae 11.1, ed. Mommsen.
16 On Cassiodorus’ comparison of Amalasuentha to Galla Placida, see Fauvinet-Ranson,
“Portrait d’une regent”, pp. 267–308, and Arnold, Theoderic and the Roman Imperial
Restoration, pp. 47–51.
17 Procopius, Wars 5.2.9: “καί ποτε ἡ μὲν μήτηρ ἁμαρτάνοντά τι ἐν τῷ κοιτῶνι τὸν παῖδα λαβοῦσα
ἐρράπισε: καὶ ὃς δεδακρυμένος ἐς τὴν ἀνδρωνῖτιν ἐνθένδε ἀπῆλθε.”