The End of the Roman Senate

The fundamental question which this chapter attempts to answer is why the western Senate, after surviving radical changes throughout its millenary history, ceased to exist in the age of Gregory the Great. To this end, we analyze a variety of phenomena related to the fortunes of the Senate before, during, and after the Gothic war: the effects of conflict on Roman élites; the strategies pursued by Goths and Byzantines in order to control territory; the different choices made by senators in these hard times; and in particular the imprint of the new Byzantine government on Italic society after the victory, both in terms of the narratives and framings of the preceding regime that it promoted, and in concrete political and administrative practice. In consequence of changes in all these spheres of senatorial activity, we seek to show that the end of the Roman Senate was the natural outcome of the war and the change of regime. When Italy became an imperial province, the Senate lost its function as the forge of the Roman ruling class and its centrality in the res publica. As the Pragmatic Sanction shows, the new horizons of the senators who had survived the war were limited to a regional scale, and their ties with Rome were dissolved.