The Heroine and the Historian 307
had served as spatharius or sword-bearer to Athalaric and afterward as armiger
or commander of the bodyguard for Theodahad.46
One wants to know more about relations between Witigis and Amalasuentha.
We know that he was sword-bearer to Athalaric, but we do not know who
appointed him. What was his relationship to the military youths placed in the
household of Athalaric after Amalasuentha’s face-off with her enemies? Was
he a protégé of Amalasuentha, to whom Matasuentha had been promised to
seal his loyalty to the queen? This kind of promise was not unusual. But in this
case, his acceptance by Theodahad after the queen’s death would need to be
explained, since Theodahad was widely believed to have ordered her murder.
It is likely that Witigis was an ally of Amalasuentha’s enemies, since Procopius
mentions that when Matasuentha married him she did so “much against her
will”.47 In this case his service to Amalasuentha’s enemy Theodahad would
seem entirely natural, and his marriage to Matasuentha after her mother’s
death would seem to represent the final triumph of Amalasuentha’s enemies.
Still, we cannot exclude the possibility that here, too, Procopius is tailoring his
evidence to suit an imperial agenda, since by the time the Wars was written,
Witigis was dead and Matasuentha had remarried. This time the groom was
Justinian’s own cousin Germanus.
The ‘Eye’ of Procopius
Cristina La Rocca has suggested that Amalasuentha’s choice of a non-marital
partnership was an attempt to directly address the loss of standing that the
acquisition of a husband would imply, and that in doing so she was seeking to
create a rhetorical framework that pushed against the gender assumptions of
her society. The reasoning was that she and her cousin would rule together “not
because they are married, with power descending from the man to the woman
through their sexual intimacy, but because the woman, already in power, has
chosen the man to become not her husband, but instead her political partner.”48
In this, she had created an exception to the accepted pattern of sexual hierar-
chy. It was a high-risk strategy.
46 Jordanes, Getica 60, with discussion in Amory, People and Identity, pp. 161–2.
47 Procopius, Wars 5.11.27: “καὶ ἐπεὶ ἐνταῦθα ἀφίκετο, Ματασοῦνθαν τὴν Ἀμαλασούνθης
θυγατέρα, παρθένον τε καὶ ὡραίαν ἤδη οὖσαν, γυναῖκα γαμετὴν οὔτι ἐθελούσιον ἐποιήσατο, ὅπως
δὴ βεβαιοτέραν τὴν ἀρχὴν ἕξει τῇ ἐς γένος τὸ Θευδερίχου ἐπιμιξίᾳ.”
48 La Rocca, “Consors Regni”, pp. 134–5.