For all her genuine love for Roman things, her contempt of Gothic rudeness and barbarism, she failed to see that the one living thing that impressed the Roman mind, and really differentiated the Latin from the Goth, was religion, was Catholicism.  She remained, possibly from necessity, but she remained, an Arian, and though she brought Athalaric up “in all respects after the manner of the Romans,” she did not make him a Catholic, nor did she attempt the certainly hopeless task of leading the Gothic nation towards the only means of reconciliation that might have been successful.

The compromise she adopted was useless and futile, and only succeeded in alienating the Goths, without winning her a single ally among the Romans.  Her own people utterly disapproved of her method of education for her son, their king, “because they wished him to be trained in more barbaric style so that they might the more readily oppress their subjects.”  Presently they remonstrated with her:  “O Lady, you are not dealing justly with us, nor doing what is best for the nation when you thus educate your son.  Letters and book-learning are different from courage and fortitude, and to permit a boy to be trained by old men is the way to make him a coward and a fool.  He who is to dare and to win glory, and fame, must not be subjected to the fear of a pedagogue, but must spend his time in martial exercise.  Your father, Theodoric, would never suffer his Goths to send their sons to the grammarians, for he used to say:  ’If they fear the teacher’s strap they will never look on sword or javelin without a shudder.’  He himself, who won the lordship of such wide lands and died king of so fair a kingdom, which he had not inherited from his fathers, knew nothing, even by hearsay, of book learning.  Therefore, lady, you must say ‘good-bye’ to these pedagogues, and give Athalaric companions of his own age, who may grow up with him to manhood, and make him a valiant king after the manner of the barbarians."[1]

[Footnote 1:  Hodgkin, Theodoric (Putnam, 1900), pp. 307-308.]

Amalasuntha was forced to bow to this, the public opinion of her own people.  The result was disastrous; for the young Athalaric, like a true barbarian, was soon led away into a bestial sensuality which presently destroyed his health and sent him to an early grave.  Seeing his instability both of body and mind, Amalasuntha entered into secret communication with Constantinople, where Justinian was now emperor, and even prepared for a possible flight to that city.  Thus in 534, when she received an ambassador in Ravenna from Justinian who demanded of her the surrender of Lilybaeum, a barren rock in Sicily which Theodoric had assigned to Thrasamund on his marriage with his sister Amalafrida, in public she protested vigorously against the attempt of the emperor to pick a quarrel with “an orphaned king” too young to defend himself; but in private she assured the imperial ambassador of her readiness “to transfer to the emperor the whole of Italy.”