Res Gestae

Ammianus Marcellinus

Ammianus Marcellinus. Ammianus Marcellinus, with an English translation, Vols. I-III. Rolfe, John C., translator. Cambridge, MA; London: Harvard University Press; W. Heinemann, 1935-1940 (printing).

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

v3.p.551

himself were a Catholic. The Pope Symmachus, and the entire senate and[*](vel often has the force of et in late Latin; cf. Dracontius, Satisfactio, 229 and 257; it has nearly, if not quite, that force in Virg., Aen. vi. 769, pariter pietate vel armis egregius. ) people of Rome amid general rejoicing met him outside the city.

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.