Boethius entered public service under
Ostrogothic King Theodoric the Great, who later imprisoned and executed him in 524 on charges of conspiracy to overthrow him.
109-14, 119-26, 156-57, 168; Patrick Amory, People and Identity in
Ostrogothic Italy, 489-554 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp.
Historians of late antiquity examine the state, culture and society, and religion of Italy under
Ostrogothic rule, beginning with Odovacer, who deposed the last Roman emperor of the West in 476 and ending with the "official" conclusion of the Gothic War in 554, when Justinian issued the Pragmatic Sanction.
The end of the Western Empire came swiftly after that; within years of the end of the Western Roman Empire, a Gothic monarch, Theoderic the Great, ruled the entire Italian peninsula and much of central Europe (the so-called
Ostrogothic Kingdom).
A loyal friend and adviser to the
Ostrogothic (and Arian) Emperor Theodoric, Cassiodorus later preserved many documents that became a precious source of history of the
Ostrogothic kingdom.
Chapter Two surveys the use of peace in the political vocabularies of the barbarian rulers of Vandal North Africa, Gibichung Burgundy,
Ostrogothic Italy, Visigothic Spain, and Merovingian Francia, with a digression on the notions of peace found in the works of Pope Gregory the Great.
Owing to
Ostrogothic king Theodoric the Great, two of his sons were also appointed as consuls in 522.
Highlights include an ornate gold band with emeralds (3rd-4th century), and an
Ostrogothic garnet ring from the late 5th century.
One of the two permanent bases established by Augustus for the Roman navy was built there; around 400, the sedes imperii, the imperial residence, was moved from Milan to Ravenna; in the sixth century, the city was the capital of the
Ostrogothic Kingdom and then of the Byzantine Exarchate in Italy.
Among the topics are whether the Jewish patriarchate was a state within a state, sacrifice and self-transformation in the alchemical writings of Zosimus of Palopolis, the negotiation of status in Augustine Letter 23, and west versus east in the rhetoric of
Ostrogothic Italy.