312 Cooper
the figure of the imperilled heroine as the casus belli behind a military invasion
was a literary conceit that reached back to Homer.
This was certainly what Procopius found interesting in the case of
Amalasuentha. She had reigned as a wise and fair queen for eight years he
acknowledged, but his real interest was in her downfall. As he tells the story
the eight-year struggle over who would control the young king’s education is
collapsed into a single episode that leads directly into the fatal period between
Athalaric’s death in October of 534 and Amalasuentha’s own in April of 535.
The historian’s reasons are not difficult to discern. The queen’s death by her
cousin’s treachery offers a narratively powerful turning point: the impetus for
Byzantine westward expansion and the downfall of the Amal kingdom.
Ironically, later historians have judged Justinian’s invasion of Italy as a
turning point of a different kind. Still in the 9th century Agnellus of Ravenna
remembered the resulting devastation of the Italian countryside.67 Indeed
modern historians have identified the Gothic Wars as an episode from which
the peninsula would not recover, and have argued that it is the invasion of
reconquest in 535, not the abdication of Romulus Augustulus in 476 or some
other date, that should be remembered as the event marking the end of the
Roman Empire in Italy.68
This renders the silences of Procopius all the more disturbing. As a partici-
pant in Justinian’s invasion, Procopius had seen the devastation of Italy at first
hand. But he offered no real assessment of the fate of the fallen kingdom, only
the quiet suggestion that neither Amal blood nor Roman learning could have
protected the kingdom—or its queen—from a regrettable but inevitable fate.
BibliographyPrimary Sources
Ambrose of Milan, Persecution of Justina, in F. Homes Dudden, The Life and Times of
St. Ambrose, Oxford 1935, 270–97.
Anonymus Valesianus, ed. and trans. J.C. Rolfe, in Ammianus Marcellinus, vol. 3,
Cambridge, MA 1952.
Cassiodorus, Variae, ed. T. Mommsen, Cassiodori Senatoris Variae (Monumenta
Germaniae Historica, Auctores Antiquissimi 12), Berlin 1894.
67 Agnellus, Liber pontificalis ecclesiae Ravennatis 95.
68 Brown, Gentlemen and Officers, pp. 6–8.