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Historic mistery. The vanishing of the Arian Goths

by Egenia Salza Prina Ricotti

..........And then they vanished in the fog
Eugenia Salza Prina Ricotti

History has produced lots of epigraphs and works of art. No despot has ever resisted to the pleasure to see beautiful marble slabs on which were listed all his numerous feats, and, of course, none of his misfits; moreover none of them abstained from the pleasure to admire his feature represented in marble or bronze. We must however thank them for the great quantity of beautiful portraits that now embellish our museums
Of course not all of these precious things did last for ever. Italy has always been the “Damnatio memoriae” country. As soon as one of the leader of the numerous civil wars that agitated ancient Romans fell from grace, his statues, epigraphs, and whatever else there was, was destroyed. Bronzes were melted and transformed in bed pot or other utilitarian objects, columns were fallen down, epigraphs broken in little pieces. Of course all around these scenes Romans assisted and gloated.
Did all this really destroy the historical personage, good or bad as he could be? No, of course not. Memory is hard to destroy and after that nearly everything had been reduced to minute fragments, and as soon as another leader came, people began to suspect that things were not as they should have been, and the old adage “everything was better when it was worse” began to circulate again.
Not withstanding this the “Damnatio memoriae” was valid in ancient times, is still here, and it still thrives, and this also if the lesson that history imparted to us is that no one could erase something from the past. If a man was part of history he will eternally live in it, he will always be there with all his vices and all his virtues. Only very few times the “desecratio” worked, but also then it was never complete. For all that had been done, nobody succeeded to erase completely someone or something from the past.
As an example we must now look to what happened to the Arian Goths. When the Gothic wars began, the year 540 A.D. was slowly elapsing, and the Goths were still in Ravenna, but Belisario was leading the Byzantine troops against them and, at the end, conquered the town. At the head of his troops he entered Ravenna, but not alone: with him arrived also the first Byzantine Bishop, Massimian, who had the task to reorganize the Catholic Church which had had been harshly oppressed by the Goths. But at the basis of the fight between the two cults there were not only spiritual reasons. As a matter of fact during their settlement the Arians had confiscated all the Church properties and the principal role of Massimian was to take them back. They were very important for the Church’s economy. Of course, it was not as simple as that: the Ostrogoths did not easily consign the keys of their houses and farms. It was a harsh contest. Then, the Byzantine saw that, to surmount the Arians obstacle, the simplest solution was to try to make good Catholics out from them. To accomplish this task came another bishop, Agnellus (565?) not exactly a very liberally-minded person. The holy man put to the Ostrogoths a simple dilemma: either to convert to Catholicism or loose all their properties. It was clear that, also if belonging to a hard northern race, and also if very headstrong persons, many Goths accepted.
Of course immediately the bureaucracy set up its eternal quadrille. As bureaucrats the Byzantine were unbeatable. They scribbled papers, papers and papers., At the end, anyway, after the normal lot of discussions and fights, everything was put in the order desired by Agnellus. Today the converts of Ravenna can only be recognized by the typically German names that we read on what is left of the ancient archives. These acts were a real triumph of Byzantinism. Just to give an example one of them occupied a 3 m long papyrus.
Also if they had arranged the question of the Church’s properties the Byzantines were still not satisfied with it. They wanted to completely destroy the memory of the Arians, and thus they started to erase them from all epigraphs and monuments. We can well notice this in the Palatine church of Teodoric, a splendid and monumental building once dedicated to Christ. As a first thing the name of the church was changed in St. Martin de Tours, a Saint who had been a well known enemy of the Arians. Also his name didn’t last long, because when the Longobards invaded the region they preferred a more congenial Saint and entitled the church to St. Apollinaris: St. Apollinaris the New.
It is a splendid church and, as all Ravenna’s ones, is resplendent of mosaics. In one of them - a long lateral mosaic that represented a porch of Theodoric’s palace - we still find the traces of the Arian Goths. The portico develops through a series of svelte columns on which rest round arches and, fixed high in them, colored curtains that probably were pulled down to protect the people inside from the sun or the wind. In this porch had been represented all the courtiers of the king who, praying, walked in procession toward Christ. Quickly the Byzantines purged them: beside being Goths and Arians they had also been defeated and that is a sin that no one can pardon. Thus their images were washed out, and everything that could remind them was erased. With them disappeared also the majestic Arian Christ who dominated the apse: not even him could escape the purge and, in his place, identified by its name and decked in a splendid red purple mantle, was set an armed and menacing St. Martin of Tours, the worst enemy of the Arians.
The Byzantines were now sure to have disposed of the question, and that everything was all right. The converted Goths went on living in the now Byzantine town, and little by little they became very much like their conquerors. At the end, they even transformed into Italians, masters of bureaucracy and transmigration.
For the other Goths who didn’t accept Agnellus’ conditions life became unbearable. Something had to be made. They tried to evaluate what there was to do; the group had lively discussions about what was the better suggestion; they valued the pro and the con of the different proposals, and maybe they fought among them, but at the end they reached a decision which had the grandiosity of their ancient sagas. Very early, in a gray morning typical of the region, all the Goths who, for not renouncing to their credo, had lost their homes and lands, reunited in dribs and drabs to a fixed place. They stood there graves and full of dignity, with all their families and their loyal servants around them.
It was one of the typical daybreak on the Padana plain: there was not a gust of wind and the fog stagnated as a queen wrapped in gray veils. Everything was cold, humid and sad. Also the sounds and the voices arrived muffled as if they were drowned in that gray nothing in which the world seemed to dissolve. When all the Arian Goths were reunited, someone, maybe the oldest man or their chief gave the signal to move, and the small group started for the North and vanished in the fog. Nobody knows what happened of them.
But did the Byzantines succeed in canceling completely the memory of the Arian Goths? Not completely of course. All the images of Theodoric’s courtiers who converged toward Christ were erased from the St. Apollinaris the New’s mosaics. The Byzantines had disposed to take away all the figures and then ordered to recreate the blue background. It was quite simple and it was done. Of course if someone looks more attentively at the mosaic, the differences between the old “tesserae” and the A.D. 540 ones can still be noticed and it is possible to distinguish the outline of some of the bodies, a very evanescent outline looking a little as the backs of the Arian Goths when they vanished in the fog. But this was not the only thing that was left there: the background was arranged but the columns of the porch were left just as they were. It would have involved more work to do, and the people in charge avoided the toil. Thus, today, looking at these columns, we can still see, clinging to them, some little hands, poor little disembodied hands of the courtiers that had been represented there and they attract our attention and tell us their sad story.
The moral? The moral is always the same: to cancel History, the great History with the capital H, it is not enough to melt a bronze statue or eliminate a mosaic. Something will always remain, maybe only a little disembodied hand, that will points to us what happened.

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