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St Gregory the Dialogist, tr. P. W., 1608
Book 4, 30. Of the Death of King Theodoricus, Who Was an Arian Heretic
GREGORY. Seeing with such difficulty you are brought to believe, I think it worth my labour to let you understand such things concerning this very point, as I have received from them that be of good credit. Julian, who died almost seven years since, and had a worshipful office in this church of Rome,1 in which now by God’s providence I serve, used often to visit me (living as yet in my Monastery) and to talk with me of spiritual things for the good of both our souls. This man, upon a day, told me this story.
“In the time of king Theodoricus2,” quoth he,“ my wife’s father, being then in Sicily, was to return into Italy. The ship in which he came arrived at the island of Liparis: where he understood that there dwelt a certain solitary man of great virtue, whom he thought good, whiles the mariners were occupied about mending of their ship and tackling, to visit, to talk with him, and to commend himself to his prayers: and so he did in the company of others. When they were come to the man of God, amongst other talk which they had, he asked them this question: ‘Do you,’ quoth he, ‘hear that king Theodoricus is dead?’ to whom they quickly answered: ‘God forbid: we left him alive at our departure from Rome; and before this present we never heard of any such thing.’ Then the servant of God told them that certainly he was dead: ‘for yesterday,’ quoth he, ‘at nine of the clock, he was without shoes and girdle, and his hands fast bound, brought betwixt John the Pope and Symmachus the Senator, and thrown into Vulcan’s gulph, which is not far from this place.’ When they heard this news, carefully they wrote down the time, and at their return into Italy, they understood that king Theodoricus died upon that very day, in which his unhappy passage out of this world and punishment was revealed to the servant of God.” And for as much as he had, by miserable imprisonment, been the death of Pope John, and also killed Symmachus, justly did he appear to be thrown of them into fire, whom before in this life he had unjustly condemned.
Notes
- Chapter XXX. p. 213. Julianus hujus Romanae Ecclesiae secundus defensor has already been mentioned, Bk. I. chap. 10. He was the second of this name to hold the office of “defender.” Cf. note on Bk. I. chap. 4.
- Ibid. p. 214. Theodoricus (Thiuda reiks), whom we call Theodoric the Goth, was born in 454, invaded Italy as the delegate of the Emperor Zeno in 489, and, by his capture of Ravenna from Odoacer in 493, founded the short-lived Ostrogothic kingdom. In 500, he came to Rome as a pacific and beneficent sovereign, hailed by the Romans as a new Trajan, pledging himself to maintain the Roman laws for the benefit of the Roman People. He restored the walls and decreed the preservation of the monuments of the city, “King of the Goths and Romans in Italy,” he ruled nominally as the representative of the Emperor at Byzantium. Himself an Arian, Theodoric during the greater part of his reign treated Arians and Catholics with the same impartial justice as he did Goths and Romans in the political field. But the reconciliation between the Byzantine Court and the Holy See in 519, the consequent tendency of the Roman Senate towards Constantinople rather than towards Ravenna, and the increasing bitterness between Arians and Catholics both in East and West, gradually alienated the King from his Catholic and Roman subjects, and he finally degenerated into a religious persecutor and suspicious tyrant. The philosopher Boethius was tortured to death by his orders in 524 or 525; Symmachus, the Head of the Senate, was executed in 525; and Pope John I. (cf, above, Bk. III. chap. 2) died in the King’s dungeons at Ravenna in May, 526. Theodoric followed his victims to the grave on August 30, 526, the day on which, according to his decree, all the Catholic churches in Italy were to have been surrendered to the Arians. At some uncertain date, his body was cast out of his magnificent tomb at Ravenna: Agnellus of Ravenna, who wrote in the first half of the ninth century, states that it had been done before his time (Liber Pontificalis, in Migne, P.L. cvi. col. 535); but there seems no foundation for the assertion of Fra Salimbene, the thirteenth-century chronicler of Parma (Cronica, ed. Holder-Egger, pp. 209, 210), that it was St. Gregory the Great himself who ordered this work of desecration to be carried out. The crater mentioned in this unpleasant legend is either that of Vulcano or Stromboli, two of the Lipari islands.