Senate of City of Rome

The Senate of the City of Rome was the venerable governing council of the Roman aristocracy, which by late antiquity had lost most of its real legislative power but remained the symbolic heart of the city's senatorial elite and a body of immense prestige. In the early sixth century, under Ostrogothic rule, it received numerous formal communications from the royal court at Ravenna: the 13 letters here come from Cassiodorus's Variae, the collection of official correspondence he drafted on behalf of King Theoderic the Great and his successors. These letters address the Senate on matters of appointments, public works, taxation, grain supply, and civic order, reflecting the careful Gothic policy of governing Italy through, and with the cooperation of, the old Roman institutions. As an institution rather than an individual, the Senate embodied the continuity of Roman civic identity into the post-imperial West.