La percezione della fine del mondo antico nell’Italia ostrogota

The end of the Western Empire was an unprecedented institutional and cultural shock, which acted as an accelerator for changes already underway and required careful 'post-emergency management'. In the sixth century, Theoderic had to simultaneously lay the foundations of a new society and present the innovations he introduced as a hoped-for return to the golden age of Rome. There was no radical change in political language, but rather a domestication of the changes that had taken place in recent decades through the use of traditional late antique rhetorical stylistic devices. Contemporary political communication made use of the legitimising value of classical antiquity and a careful reworking of the memory of the crisis to show that the Western Empire had not fallen, but had undergone a metamorphosis.