310 Cooper
Toward the end of the 6th century, Gregory of Tours remembered a very
different version of Amalasuentha’s downfall.59 In his version, the queen took
as her lover a slave called Traguila (the name is spelled variously in the man-
uscripts) after her father’s death. This led to conflict between Amalasuentha
and her widowed mother Audofleda, the sister of the late king Clovis of the
Franks.60 The mother rejected the union as unworthy of her daughter’s nob-
ile genus, suggesting that she marry someone more appropriate to her own
rank. When Amalasuentha refused to listen, the widowed queen sent an army
against Traguila and carried her daughter back to the palace. But soon after-
ward Amalasuentha worked her revenge by poisoning the Eucharistic chalice
offered to her mother—the Arian Eucharist reserved a dedicated chalice to the
royal family. After Audofleda died, her loyal servants called on Theodahad who
arranged to have Amalasuentha killed in an overheated bath.
The story does not appear in Jordanes, but it has many elements in common
with the one told by Procopius.61 Shared elements include identification of
Theodahad as Amalasuentha’s murderer, an accusation against Amalasuentha
as a poisoner, and a hovering sense that the queen’s most dangerous weapon
was her marriageability. In short, like Procopius, Gregory sees Amalasuentha
through the lens of family drama rather than considering her success or fail-
ure in building her own coalition of generals and ministers. What else can
we learn from the shared elements? To begin with, consider the poison. Both
writers remember Amalasuentha’s enemies as accusing her of using or trying
to use it to dispense with an inconvenient family member, though Procopius
remembers the victim as her son, while for Gregory it is her mother. Because
of its association with intimacy, poisoning is the perfect crime to pin on a royal
woman—we have seen this above with the anonymous Gothic wife of the
Vandal prince Huneric.62 But the fact that poisoning involves secrecy means
that it is a crime that implies weakness.
Second, Procopius and Gregory both indicate that Amalasuentha was a tar-
get of sexual speculation. Is it possible that a kernel of truth is hidden in the
story of Traguila? John Moorhead has suggested that Gregory’s story was in fact
59 Gregory of Tours, Histories 3.31.
60 The episode receives brief but illuminating treatment in Loseby, “Gregory of Tours”,
pp. 462–97.
61 On the relationship between the two writers’ versions of the story see Joye/Knaepen,
“L’image d’Amalasonthe”, pp. 229–57.
62 See Jones, Social Mobility in Late Antique Gaul, pp. 301–4, and Dailey, Queens, Consorts,
Concubines on charges of poisoning and enchantment against royal women in the writ-
ings of Gregory of Tours.