Romance, Fantasy & Slavery: Fredegar on the Birth of Theodoric

By James R. Burns

DID YOU KNOW that Theodoric the Great, ruler of the Ostrogoths (c. 475-526), was the son of two slaves?

Well, he probably wasn’t really… But he was according to the seventh century Merovingian Chronicle of Fredegar. It’s a story – at least in Fredegar’s telling – of love, deceit, dreams, & tall trees…

This is how the Fredegar-Chronicle tells it:

A patrician named Idacius and his wife Eugenia wanted an heir, but they were childless. But one day they found that two of their slaves, Theodorus and Lilia, were in love. Theodorus and Lilia had been taken as captives from Macedonia when they were little. Idacius and Eugenia gave permission to Theodorus and Lilia to marry – and to consummate their marriage…

Eugenia ordered Lilia to tell her what she dreamed after having sex with Theodorus, “since what newlyweds see on their first night is believed to be truth.” That night, Lilia did indeed have a dream. She dreamed of “a tree bursting out from her belly’s navel, so tall that it was penetrating the clouds.” This dream would seem to prophesise Theodoric’s conquests and rise to power.

But Lilia did not tell this dream to her mistress. On the advice of Theodorus, she told Eugenia a different story: that she had had a vision of a beautiful stallion and mare, and a little beautiful foal, “walking in the house of my masters.” This dream suggested to Eugenia that Lilia would give birth to a magnificent child.

Eugenia relayed what Lilia had told her to Idacius. Very pleased by what they had heard, Idacius and Eugenia ordered Lilia and Theodorus to be freed, with manumission papers, and to be given some property.

Once Lilia gave birth to her son, he was named Theodoric and presented to her former master and mistress. “Embracing him with so much love, they adopted him as their very own son.”

Theodoric grew into a tall and handsome youth. When Idacius and Eugenia died, Theoderic became a soldier for Emperor Leo, before successfully leading the campaign against the “barbarian” warlord Odoacer in Italy.

But Theodoric’s birth-parents do not completely disappear from the story, forgotten and irrelevant…

Forced by Odoacer to retreat to Ravenna, Theodoric was met by his mother Lilia. She reproached him for his cowardice: “There is nowhere for you to flee, my son, unless I lift my robes, so that you may enter the womb from which you were born.” Theodoric was disconcerted by these words. He decided he would be better off dead. So he went out to face Odoacer… and was victorious.

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THAT, in any case, is the story in the Fredegar-Chronicle (Book 2, Chapter 57). The author probably got it from a lost source known as the ‘Deeds of Theodoric’ – though maybe the tale, or at least Fredegar’s willingness to accept it as genuine, also owes something to the descent of Merovingian royalty from former female slaves, often referred to in our sources as ‘concubines’ as well as ancillae. According to another early medieval historian, Jordanes, Theodoric’s actual father and mother were the Ostrogothic leader Theodemir and his concubine Erelieva.

Very little is known about Fredegar – the name ‘Fredegar’ itself was only attached to the chronicle in the sixteenth century. And his story about Theodoric’s birth is mostly fantasy.

Nonetheless, it is a fascinating glimpse into the early medieval imagination – as a story where childless lords exploit their slaves for breeding, supposedly with the complicity and enthusiasm of the slaves; where slaves lie to their masters about dreams; and where one of the most famous kings of Late Antiquity might have two slaves for parents.