Note 101 — Chapter X

Footnote 101: (return) There is some difficulty in understanding this remark about the relative ages of the sovereigns If we put the date of the letters at 506 (and a later date is hardly possible, nor one more than two or three years earlier), though Gundobad might well be over sixty, Theodoric himself could be only fifty-two, while on the other hand the "regii juvenes", Clovis and Alaric, were about forty. But senex and juvenis are expressions often used with no great exactness; and I conjecture that the cares and struggles of Theodoric's early manhood had made him an old man before his time.