The Heroine and the Historian 311
a garbled version of the episode of Procopius concerning the conflict between
Amalasuentha and her own son, and this is certainly not impossible.63
But there is another way of looking at the elements common to Gregory and
Procopius. Bruno Krusch, the 19-century editor of Gregory’s Histories, noted
the unstable spelling in manuscripts of the name of Amalasuentha’s lover, and
suggested that the story almost certainly refers to Triwila, a grand chamber-
lain (praepositus cubiculi) attested by other sources.64 A 6th-century chronicle
preserved in the Anonymus Valesianus mentions him as being in office dur-
ing the consulate of Eutharic, Amalasuentha’s husband, in 519,65 and it is pos-
sible that Triwila still held this role when Amalasuentha took charge of the
palace in 526. The role of chamberlain was characteristically that of a senior
and highly trusted slave—indeed, chamberlains were often eunuchs. It is pos-
sible that the queen’s close relationship with the senior officer of her house-
hold was scrambled in memory, and enhanced with the memorable detail of
an elopement. By contrast, it may have been a desire to foreclose speculation
of this kind that motivated Procopius to characterize the men into whose care
Amalasuentha gave her son as aged. In any case, the queen’s enemies were
probably right to watch for signs that she intended to co-opt a male ally to
serve as both husband and king.
Why did she not do so? One possibility is that her family’s emphasis on Amal
blood was a constraint—it is a qualification which Athalaric’s father Eutharic
seems to have possessed, though in all likelihood it was manufactured on his
behalf.66 But Amalasuentha herself could bring this qualification to any union.
It is also possible that, like the empress Justina, Amalasuentha saw more dan-
ger than value in the gambit of taking a husband.
Conclusion: The Heroine and the Historian
Assessing the silences within our sources is always frustrating, but it is also
valuable and it tends to be particularly important where story lines involving
female players are concerned. Writers like Procopius and Gregory knew that
borrowing literary motifs from ancient romance did much to enhance a narra-
tive, and this kind of narrative styling could quite usefully serve to distract the
reader’s attention from inconvenient facts or other problems. And of course
63 Moorhead, Theoderic, p. 118.
64 Moorhead, Theoderic, p. 118.
65 Anon. Vales. 14, ed. Rolfe.
66 Heather, “Cassiodorus and the Rise of the Amals”, pp. 103–28.