Res Gestae

Although untrained in letters, he was nevertheless so wise that even now some of his sayings

A certain man died, leaving a wife and a little son who did not know his mother. Her son, when a small boy, was taken from her by some one, carried to another province, and there brought up. When he became a youth, he somehow returned to his mother, who had now become betrothed to another man. When the mother saw her son, she embraced him, thanking God that she had seen her son again, and he lived with her for a month. And behold! the mother’s betrothed came, and seeing the young man, asked who he was. She replied that he was her son. But when her betrothed learned that the youth was her son, he began to ask the return of the earnest-money[*](As his part of the agreement of betrothal; arra is derived from a Hebrew word.) and to say: Either deny that he is your son, or I certainly depart hence. The mother yielded to her betrothed and began to deny her son, whom she herself had before acknowledged, saying: Leave my house, young man, since I took you up as a stranger. But he kept saying that he had come back to his mother and to the house of his father. To make a long story short, while this was going on the son appealed against his mother to the king, who ordered her to appear before him. And he said to her: Woman, your son appeals against you; what have you to say? Is he your son, or not? She replied: He is not my son, but I

Afterwards Theodoric took to wife[*](accepta uxore is perhaps an example of the participle as a finite verb.) a Frankish woman named Augoflada. For before he began to reign he had a wife,[*](Her name was Ermenberga.) who had borne him daughters. One of these, called Areaagni, he gave in marriage in Gaul to Alaric, king of the Visigoths, and another daughter of his, Theodegotha, to Sigismund, son of King Gundebadus.[*](Jordanes mentions two natural daughters, Theudigotha and Ostrogotha, who also were married.)

Theodoric, through Festus, made peace with the emperor Anastasius with regard to his assumption of the rule, and Anastasius sent back to him all the ornaments of the Palace, which Odoacar had transferred to Constantinople.

At that same time a dispute arose in the city of Rome between Symmachus and Laurentius;[*](About the bishopric.) for both had been consecrated. But through God’s ordinance Symmachus, who also deserved it, got the upper hand. After peace was made in the city of the Church, King Theodoric went to Rome[*](In the year 500.) and met Saint Peter with as much reverence as if he

Then coming to Rome and entering it, he appeared in the senate, and addressed the people at The Palm,[*](A name apparently used from the fifth or sixth century for the area at Rome lying between the Curia and the arch of Septimius Severus; undoubtedly the same as the Palma Aurea of Fulgentius, Acta S. Fulgenti, in Acta Sanctorum, i. p. 37, ch. 13, Jan.) promising that with God’s help he would keep inviolate whatever the former Roman emperors had decreed.

In celebration of his tricennalia[*](Theodoric was in the eighth year of his reign and the Decennalia were sometimes celebrated ahead of time. Hadr. Valesius proposed to read decennalem for tricennalem. ) he entered the Palace in a triumphal procession for the entertainment of the people, and exhibited games in the Circus for the Romans. To the Roman people and to the poor of the city he gave each year a hundred and twenty thousand measures of grain, and for the restoration of the Palace and[*](seu perhaps = et; see note 1.) the rebuilding of the walls of the city he ordered two hundred pounds to be given each year from the chest that contained the tax on wine.

He also gave his own sister Amalafrigda in marriage to Transimundus, king of the Vandals. Liberius, whom he had appointed praetorian prefect at the beginning of his reign, he made a patrician, and appointed for him a successor.[*](A promotion; see § 36, note 6.) Now his successor in the administration of the prefecture was Theodorus, son of Basilus. Odoin, his general, made a plot against the king.

When Theodoric learned of it, he had Odoin beheaded in the palace which is called the Sessorium.[*](A building of unknown origin, situated at the extreme south-east of the Fifth Region, adjoining the Amphitheatrum Castrense. After the part outside the Aurelian wall was destroyed, the extensive inner section became an imperial residence by the beginning of the fourth century, and Helena, the mother of Constantine, lived there.)