The Praeceptum of Theodoric of 11 March 507 is appended in Thiel’s edition to the acta of Symmachus’s Fifth Roman Synod (Letter VI, of November 502) because the two documents are inseparable in their canonical force. Thiel’s apparatus to this Appendix sets out the chain of events: Symmachus’s synod decreed against the alienation of Church property in November 502; Symmachus then took pains to have the Roman Senate issue its own decree (a senatusconsultum) confirming the synod; the Senate, having so acted, brought the matter to Theodoric for royal endorsement; Theodoric responded with the present Praeceptum from Ravenna nearly five years later. The chain is significant: synod → senate → king. Each tier acknowledges the prior, and the Gothic king explicitly states that the prior tiers, taken together, are already sufficient. The civil ratification adds enforcement, not authority.

The reader should weigh the contrast with the Basilian Constitutum of 483 — the document the Synod of 502 was called to declare null. Both documents are about the alienation of Church property; both are framed in the form of civil instruments. But the Basilian Constitutum was issued by Odoacer’s Praetorian Prefect as itself a legislative act over the Roman Church, claiming to bind future popes and attaching anathemas under lay authority. Theodoric’s Praeceptum is constructed differently from beginning to end. It is addressed not to bishops but to the Roman Senate. It rests its authority not on royal sovereignty over the Church but on the Senate’s consultation. It states that the synod and the Senate’s own ordinance alone would have sufficed. It assigns the recovery of alienated property to “the venerable prelate,” not to a civil tribunal. In every structural feature, Theodoric’s Praeceptum honors precisely the boundary that the Basilian Constitutum had violated. The same Symmachan synod that voided the one accepts the other.

The reader should attend especially to the central acknowledgment: after the venerable synod, the ordinance of your own judgment alone would suffice for decrees of this kind. This is a Gothic Arian king, ruling Italy from Ravenna, telling the Roman Senate that the Catholic synod’s decree on Church property holds primary authority and that royal endorsement is not strictly required. The Praeceptum is therefore not merely a piece of civil enforcement; it is testimony, by the highest civil authority of Italy in the early sixth century, that synodal decrees on the Church’s discipline carry their own binding force without the need for royal confirmation. Theodoric ratifies because he is asked, and because the Senate has already acted; he does not ratify because the Church’s discipline depends on him.

The Praeceptum is preserved only in part — Thiel notes that Holstenius transmitted what is here, and that the close is lost. What survives is enough to display the principle. The civil power, in its proper exercise, ratifies and enforces the Church’s own legislation; it does not legislate within the Church. The Roman Senate’s role as intermediary between synod and king illuminates the distinct competences: the synod decrees in its own authority, the Senate confirms in its civil deliberative authority, the king ratifies for the sake of civil enforcement. Each acts within its sphere; none usurps the others. The reader who places the Basilian Constitutum and the Theodoric Praeceptum side by side has, in those two documents, the negative and positive examples of how civil power may relate to ecclesiastical legislation — and which kind of civil instrument the Roman Church will accept.