Some men survived in ravaged Italy and even came to prosper again. Three of the senate’s dignitaries from the days of Theoderic lived past their ninetieth birthday and remained atop the greased pole of public life—or rather, leaped from one greased pole to another, deftly and just in time. Least known to us of the three is Cethegus, sole consul of the year 504, master of the offices not long after, and patrician from 512 until his death almost half a century later in 558.
Ennodius praised him in writing as a younger contemporary in his little work on the best way to educate young gentlemen; and Cassiodorus addressed a puzzling document to him consisting partly of family boasting, partly of social climbing, and partly of a biographical index of a few famous contemporaries. Cethegus persisted and persisted in Italy, holding out until 547 or so, after the fall of Rome to Totila in 546. He was by now caput senatus (“head of the senate” by dignity and seniority). He fled Rome before it fell because he was suspected of pro-Gothic sympathies, as many of the veterans of Theoderic’s time would be suspected. When he came to Constantinople, he was regularly seen around and with Pope Vigilius, supporting doctrinal rapprochement and a more vigorous prosecution of the war at home. He seems to have stayed in Constantinople until the last dog had been hung back in Italy and the war finally ended, but we glimpse him one last time at home, now in Sicily, receiving a letter from Pope Pelagius I in about 558.
Liberius, the patrician who had been praetorian prefect in Italy before Theoderic, then served him and his successors in that role in Gaul for a quarter century, appeared in Italy in 535; there, Theodahad put him in a delegation sent to Constantinople to make peace. The sources we have credit him as the one voice who spoke up in Constantinople to report the murder of Amalasuntha, the deed that more than any other gave a pretext for Justinian’s invasion. Liberius was unable, as a result, to return to any Italy not ruled from Constantinople, and so stayed on in the east, where his long experience won him appointment at an advanced age (he must have been well over seventy by then) as Augustal prefect in Alexandria, effectively Justinian’s representative to and governor over Egyptian society.
Sent from Constantinople
In Egypt, Liberius was the grand avenging inquisitor, sent from Constantinople to bring a restive province to civil and ecclesiastical heel. He did as well as could be expected—which is to say, he left no lasting result. Justinian soon turned on him and sent out a replacement without bothering to recall Liberius. Remarkably, Liberius prevailed in an unfair fight, sending his would-be supplanter home in disgrace. Officially recalled shortly thereafter, Liberius still succeeded in defending himself before a court of inquiry on his return to Constantinople in the early 540s. There we must imagine him as part of the circle of western adventurers that also included Cassiodorus and Cethegus, eyes wide open for the main chance.
Even then, his career was not over. When Justinian prepared to send his nephew Germanus west to complete the war in Italy, Liberius was variously the stand-in and deputy as preparations dragged on, eventually going on in command ahead of Germanus, who then died before he could undertake the campaign. Justinian is said to have had second thoughts about the elderly general, but too late to stop his last success. He arrived at Syracuse to find the city under siege by Totila’s forces. Undismayed, he forced his way through the barbarian lines, sailed into the harbor, and got his entire force into the city customized tours balkan.
Armenian named Artabanes
While this was going on, Liberius’s appointed successor, an erratic Armenian named Artabanes, was trying to catch up with him to relieve him of command. But Artabanes encountered a terrific storm off the coast of Calabria and wound up, temporarily, on Malta. Liberius, meanwhile, was in the beleaguered Syracuse. Procopius reports that he found himself unable to carry out successful military actions while constricted by Totila’s siege forces, and that this military impotence made his troops an unwelcome burden on the limited supplies of the besieged city; so he once more embarked his troops and slipped out of Syracuse for a better encampment at Palermo—all this, while Totila was plundering Sicily at will.
Artabanes finally caught up with Liberius in Palermo in 551 and relieved him of command. One story has Liberius going on a last mission to command Justinian’s forces in Spain, but we find his tombstone in northern Italy, near Rimini, with a fine inscription in eight elegiac couplets, suggesting either that he retired to Italy directly from Sicily or that he made his way back into Italy after the “Pragmatic Sanction” to live in the shadow of the new regime from Constantinople. He was about ninety when he died. There is a hint that a descendant was still wealthy and well connected as late as the 590s.
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