Saints And Sinners: A History Of The Popes; Fourth Edition - Plot & Excerpts
The change from empire to kingdom, from toga to trousers, however, was to take generations to make its full imaginative impact. The barbarian kings of Italy pursued their own interests, but they ruled, to begin with at least, in the name of the distant Emperor in Constantinople, maintaining and honouring the Roman Senate, and accepting the honorific title ‘Patrician of the Romans’. Even Odoacer’s ferocious successor Theoderic, a man who could sign his own name only with the help of a stencil cut from a plate of gold, accepted and exploited the fiction of empire. Theoderic adopted Roman dress, and his coinage carried the image of the Emperor. The Gothic kings based themselves on the Adriatic coast, in the old capital of the Western empire at Ravenna, and the glamour of Rome persisted. As Theoderic himself declared, ‘Any Goth who can, wants to be a Roman: no Roman wants to be a Goth.’ The papacy was the West’s most concrete link with the Roman past and with the living empire.
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