Chapter 3
Gothic history, as it appears in every modern account, is a story of migration. Traditionally, it begins in Scandinavia, moves to the southern shores of the Baltic around the mouth of the Vistula river, and then onwards to the Black Sea. Depending upon what study one reads, one can find it stated that written sources, archaeology, and linguistic evidence all demonstrate that just such a migration took place, if not out of Scandinavia then at least out of Poland. In fact, there is just a single source for this extended story of Gothic migration, the Getica of Jordanes, written in the middle of the sixth century A.D., hundreds of years after the events it purports to record. Other sources, literary and archaeological, have been brought in to corroborate, correct or supplement Jordanes’ narrative, but his story of Gothic migration underpins nearly every modern treatment of the Goths, consciously or not. And yet Jordanes, as we shall see, is not merely unreliable, he is deeply misleading. To understand why his satisfyingly linear, but ultimately implausible, account is still so pervasive, we have to understand why the idea of Gothic roots stretching back into the deepest mists of prehistory has played so important a role in conceptualizing the northern European past. As we shall see, for the past 500 years the Goths have played an indispensable part in imagining a northern European history untouched by the Graeco-Roman world.
The Northern Renaissance and the Germanic Past
In 1425, the Italian humanist Poggio Bracciolini discovered the only known medieval manuscript of Tacitus’ Germania. That discovery, and still more the first printing of the text at Venice around 1470, were watersheds in the search for a northern, non-Roman, and ultimately Gothic, past. The Germania is a short treatise on the peoples and customs of the region that the Romans called Germany – which is to say the whole vast tract of central Europe beyond the Rhine and Danube rivers which was in many ways a mystery to the Romans. Probably written in A.D. 98 and based in part on earlier sources, the Germania uses its description of the primitive Germans as a mirror that can reflect the failings of decadent, civilized Rome. Short as it is, the Germania provided early modern thinkers and historians with a lot of food for thought. It opens with a section of ethnography in which Tacitus asserts that the Germans were not immigrants to their lands, but rather pure and uncontaminated by intermarriage with others. This is followed by a long description of German customs, and then by a survey of the different tribes of Germania.
For fifteenth- and sixteenth-century scholars – and for many others since then – the modern Germans (or Deutschen, as they are called in their own language) were the direct lineal descendants of Tacitus’ Germani. And so, for humanists in German-speaking countries, Tacitus’ Germania offered a hitherto undreamed of prospect – a window onto Germanic antiquity for its own sake, rather than as a mere adjunct to the Graeco-Roman past. In the fifteenth century, the Germanic past could only be conceived as a somewhat shady analogue to Roman history, but the discovery of Tacitus – who after all reported that the Germans were a pure race – legitimated the search for separate, unmixed German origins and led back to other texts that could provide insight into a specially German past. German humanists used Tacitus, medieval authors like Jordanes, Gregory of Tours or Einhard, and stray references in the classical sources as the basis for extrapolation and invention, which allowed them to posit a Germanic past that was older than, and therefore could not depend upon, a Roman past.
The Reformation sharpened discussions of the ancient Germans, as the German Protestant reaction against the contemporary Roman Catholic church seeped into discussion of ancient German resistance to the Roman empire. Thereafter, the increasing domestic impact of European colonialism and imperialism also served to change perceptions of northern European antiquity, largely because it encouraged new ideas about the ranking of civilizations into hierarchies. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Europeans began for the first time to have regular dealings with Asian and (especially) New World cultures which were understood as primitive according to European norms. In the same way that the myth of the ‘noble savage’ seemed to be validated by the imagined purity of New World primitives, unbesmirched by European decadence, so too were the ancient Germans fitted into a myth of primitive nobility and moral virtue. That Tacitus had used his Germani for precisely this purpose was no end of help, and it was easy enough for moralists and polemicists to take the step from the primitive virtues of the Germani to the modern virtues of the Deutschen. However, it was only with the rise of Romanticism towards the end of the eighteenth century that the study of Germanic antiquity began to ask the questions that still condition scholarly debates today.
Romanticism and the Rise of Modern Historical Scholarship
In the latter half of the eighteenth century, Romanticism became the reigning intellectual paradigm for German-speaking thinkers and artists. Romantic ideas about the intrinsic qualities of individuals and whole peoples helped to articulate a sense of belonging and identity in German-speaking lands where – unlike France, Spain, or Britain – no modern nation-state had developed. For that reason, Romantic ideology was an inextricable part of German nationalism throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In one of history’s most fertile accidents, the rigorous and professional study of the past developed in the German-speaking world at precisely this time. The idea that history is a professional scholarly discipline, with a set of analytical methods appropriate to it, goes back to Germany in the early nineteenth century, and is particularly associated with Leopold von Ranke (1795–1886), who insisted on rooting statements about the past in documents and popularized the radical new approach to teaching through seminars. As this innovative Rankean model of scholarship was adopted throughout Europe, and as history became a professional discipline in universities across the continent, so too did Romantic ideas about the past – ideas that were closely connected to German nationalism – filter into the wider world of nineteenth-century scholarship. In other words, German Romanticism helped to shape basic concepts about how the historical past should be studied during the very years when history was becoming the formal academic discipline it remains to this day.
Herder, the Volk, and Philology
The most important figure in this historical Romanticism was Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803). For Herder, the Volk – the people – was the focal point of all history. The Volk was not a constructed or merely political entity, but rather an organic whole with an eternal core identity expressed in language, art, literature and characteristic institutions. All these were expressions of the Volksgeist, the unique spirit of the Volk. The Volksgeist could not be changed by conquest or by borrowings from other cultures, because it was essentially pure and immutable. Herder’s emphasis on language as a marker of the identity of the Volk had a particular importance for the subject of this book. At the same time that language was taking a leading place among the many attributes of theVolk, so too was a new scientific philology – what we would now call historical linguistics – being developed. Of particular importance was the discovery that many living spoken languages were related both to one another and to other languages that had once existed but were now no longer spoken. The idea of language families that could be plotted in a sort of genealogical table fitted in perfectly with the nineteenth-century search for national origins. Close linguistic community – as, for instance, the various members of theGermanic language family – could be invoked as evidence for deeper sorts of political or ideological community. When retrojected into the distant past, evidence for linguistic community could be used as evidence of politically conscious community action in the past.
It was these linguistic arguments that anchored the Goths firmly to the study of a Germanic past. As we saw in the last chapter, our ancient sources never regarded the Goths as Germans, but rather as Scythians. In the nineteenth century, however, philologists discovered that Gothic belonged to the Germanic language family. It was thus a relative not just of medieval and modern German, but of other Germanic languages like Dutch, English, and the different Scandinavian tongues. This meant that the Goths could be annexed to the world of the ancient Germans on philological grounds. Once that was possible, they could take a central role in a history of the German Volk. That Romantic ideal of a single German Volk helped provide a conceptual framework for the political unification of German-speaking lands that was brought about by Otto von Bismarck in 1871. With the creation of a united Germany, the study of a German national past became even more important. The chieftain Arminius, who had destroyed three Roman legions at the battle of the Teutoburger forest in A.D. 9, emerged as the most potent symbol of an eternal German spirit; in his modern nationalist incarnation as Hermann the German, Arminius became the subject of a beautiful and famous monument, the Hermannsdenkmal, put up near the town of Detmold as a tribute to a free German nation.[29]
Pre-war and Post-war Scholarship
Given how important the ancient Germanic past was to the national formation of modern Germany, it will come as no surprise that ancient history was also used to justify some of the nastier manifestations of German nationalism. Nazi foreign policy made much of the purity of the German race rooted in the very remote past. The wide distribution of ancient Germans across the European continent could justify the conquest of modern Germany’s neighbours as a ‘reconquest’ of the former lands of the German Volk. Proving the ‘Germanic’ nature of eastern Europe’s original population – on the basis of ancient texts or on the basis of archaeology and physical anthropology – had modern political significance. For that reason, historians and archaeological services followed in the wake of the Wehrmacht as it subjugated large tracts of Europe. The story of a Gothic migration from Scandinavia to the Polish Baltic to the Ukraine was, for obvious reasons, a precious testimony to the true extent of German Lebensraum. We nowadays recognize that there was no way for a German historian of the 1930s to avoid some association with the Nazi regime, in the same way that fine Soviet historians had to begin their works with an obligatory chapter of Marxist orthodoxy before getting on with their real subject. As a result, alongside quantities of nationalist and racist tripe, some very important monuments of historical scholarship derive from the Nazi era: to take just one example, even today one cannot study the Goths or any other late antique barbarians without reference to the revised second edition of Ludwig Schmidt’s Geschichte der deutschen Stämme (‘History of the German Tribes’), brought out between 1933 and 1942 and in sympathy with the nationalist ideology of that era.
In the post-war period, scholars across Europe consciously repudiated many of the visibly nationalist aspects of pre-war scholarship on the northern European past, analysing barbarian tribes as social constructs, ‘imagined communities’, rather than timeless and changeless lines of blood kin. As pan-European institutions developed in the second half of the twentieth century – first through a common market, then through the European Union – this sort of approach was increasingly in keeping with a modern political outlook that aims to make it impossible for Europeans to repeat the nationalist conflagrations of the early twentieth century. Yet despite this conscious distancing, many strands of pre-war and wartime scholarship into the Germanic past survived into the discussions of the 1950s and later. Ideas about Germanic lordship, for instance, with its focus on the role of the aristocratic leader in constituting the Volk, are prominent in the post-war scholarship of Walter Schlesinger and influence even the most recent debates about barbarian history. Given that, it is very important for us to be clear about a point of intellectual history: to acknowledge scholarly and intellectual continuities with the historical debates of pre-war or wartime nationalism is not to suggest a continuity of political outlook or motive. One cannot stress that point strongly enough, for recent debates about barbarian society and Gothic origins have been poisoned by the mistaken belief that the intellectual continuity of pre- and post-war scholarship must imply political continuity. That is simply not the case. Yet the fact of this intellectual continuity is of fundamental importance, not for political reasons, but because it shows that even the most self-consciously modern work on the barbarians rests on older scholarship rooted in a quest for Germanic origins. The Goths, and particularly Jordanes’ Gothic history, have been central to any such quest since the Renaissance, and much of the continued reliance on Jordanes’ is rooted in that time-honoured tradition. Unfortunately, as we shall see, Jordanes’ history cannot bear the weight that is placed on it.
The Problem of Jordanes
Since Jordanes’ Gothic history was first printed in 1515 by the humanist Conrad Peutinger – going through seven more editions in the sixteenth century alone – it has remained the core around which those who want to create a single, deep channel of Gothic history must build. No other source suggests that the Goths had a history before the third century, and if Jordanes’ Getica had not survived, the study of early medieval barbarians would not have evolved in the way it has. In a sense, the Getica of Jordanes is nothing more than the earliest manifestation of the impulse to give a non-Roman past to a non-Roman people, the same impulse at work in the many histories that have followed in Jordanes’ footsteps.
Of the man and his work we know nothing save what he tells us: Jordanes was the son of Alanoviamuth and the grandson of Paria, a secretary to the barbarian chieftain Candac. Before he was converted to the life of an observant Christian, Jordanes was himself secretary to a barbarian general in imperial service, one Gunthigis also known as Baza. The names of Jordanes’ forebears are certainly barbarian, and he may himself claim Gothic descent depending upon how one reads a difficult passage in the Getica.[30] Yet nothing in his extant writings suggests that this Gothic descent had any claim on his sympathies, which were entirely Christian and imperial. Jordanes wrote two works that have survived, the Romana, or Roman History, and the Getica, the accepted short title for hisDe origine actibusque Getarum, ‘On the Origin and Deeds of the Goths’. He wrote at Constantinople, in Latin as did many of his contemporaries in that capital of the eastern Roman empire. His Getica was written sometime after the year 550, the date of the last allusion detectable in the text, but we do not know how long afterwards. When he wrote, it was as the subject of the emperor Justinian (r. 527–565), who had launched bloody wars of (re-)conquest against three barbarian kingdoms that had grown up in the former western Roman empire during the fifth century. When Jordanes was writing, the Vandal kingdom of Africa had been destroyed by imperial troops, and the Gothic kingdom in Italy was on the brink of total annihilation, an annihilation which theGeticawholeheartedly endorses. Yet despite the clarity of Jordanes’ pro-imperial perspective in the Getica, his Gothic descent has long been thought to offer us a privileged window into the Gothic mind and the ancient Gothic past. This unfortunate assumption is perhaps understandable, but it is further complicated by the textual history of the Getica.
Jordanes and Cassiodorus
Jordanes dedicates his Getica to Castalius, who had asked him to abridge a much larger Gothic history now lost to us – the twelve books on the topic written by the Roman nobleman Cassiodorus.[31] Cassiodorus had served as the praetorian prefect of theOstrogothic kings of Italy, before giving up on the Gothic cause and going into exile at Constantinople in about 540. Sometime before 533, in his capacity as chief littérateur at the Gothic court of king Theodoric (r. 489–526) and his successor, Cassiodorus had written his Gothic history. As befitted the work of a loyal courtier, this history placed at its apex Theodoric and his dynasty, the Amals, showing how a continuous line of Gothic kings had reached down to the great Theodoric. Not one word of Cassiodorus’ history remains to us in its own right. Jordanes’ Getica survives, but its relationship to Cassiodorus is a matter of controversy. Jordanes himself tells us that he had three days’ access to Cassiodorus’ Gothic history when that author’s household steward let him read them. When Jordanes composed the Getica, he had no copy of Cassiodorus available and needed instead to work from memory. Jordanes says that although he cannot reproduce Cassiodorus’ words, he can reproduce his argument and the factual substance of his account. On the other hand, Jordanes also tells us that he added to Cassiodorus an introduction and conclusion, many items from his own learning, and other things drawn from Greek and Latin writers.[32]
So how close does Jordanes stand to Cassiodorus? Many sixth-century authors – for instance the Greek Zosimus who probably wrote not long before Jordanes – did nothing but cut and paste sections from earlier authors into their own narrative. Jordanes claims not to have done this, but perhaps he is not to be trusted on that point. Perhaps his Getica is nothing more than a pale shadow of Cassiodorus’ lost history. If that is so, and we do indeed have access to Cassiodorus by way of Jordanes, then we are suddenly in the orbit of the greatest barbarian king of the sixth century, and perhaps in touch with the traditions and memories of his family and his court. The relationship between Jordanes and Cassiodorus is thus a matter of real importance – if one wants to believe the stories of Gothic origins and migrations that one finds in Jordanes, then making him little more than a conduit for Cassiodorus is an invaluable device. Jordanes, of course, tells us all sorts of stories about the Goths, placing their origins some 2,030 years before the time of his writing, and linking them to Biblical, Greek, Roman, and Near Eastern history in a bizarre melange of material from different sources. Most of these stories have held little interest for scholars since the Renaissance – no one has tried to prove the historicity of Philip of Macedon’s marriage to Medopa, the supposed daughter of a supposed Gothic king named Gudila.[33] On the contrary, there is just one story in Jordanes that scholars have clung to for centuries – the narrative of Gothic migration out of Scandinavia, ‘as if out of a womb of nations’.[34]
One of several conflicting origin stories recounted by Jordanes tells us that the Goths left ‘Scandza’ in three boats and migrated across the Baltic under king Berig; then Filimer, perhaps the fifth king after Berig, led the army of Goths away from the Baltic and into Scythia near to the Black Sea.[35] Having got the Goths to the Black Sea, Jordanes begins to mention historical names known from Greek and Latin sources closer to the events they record, but these notices are intermingled with all sorts of legendary and pseudo-historical material and Jordanes’ implied chronology is impossible to chart coherently. The important thing, from the point of view of Jordanes, is to work all of the stories from his many different sources into a single linear narrative of Gothic history, in which Gothic heroism and strength is effectively unbeatable until finally subdued by Justinian. He dates the beginning of the Gothic relationship with the Roman empire to the time of Julius Caesar, and reads the narrative of that relationship in sixth-century legal terms as a series of official treaties between Goths and emperor repeatedly broken by one party or the other and then renegotiated.[36] This continuous Gothic history from Scandinavia to the Black Sea to the Balkans and on to Italy is the part of Jordanes’ narrative which modern scholars have striven so hard to sustain. Providing as he does a narrative of Gothic history that pre-dates Greece and Rome, Jordanes’ Getica was every bit as precious to northern humanists as was Tacitus’ Germania. For them, as for modern nationalists, both proved the great antiquity of the German identity. Nowadays, scholars have repudiated such explicitly nationalist aims, but their ongoing reluctance to discard Jordanes’ origin and migration narratives resides in a similar unwillingness to give up our only evidence for a Gothic past that pre-dates contact with the Roman empire.
‘Ethnogenesis’
Even today, some eminent scholars maintain that Jordanes’ testimony is both a valid historical source and a repository of Gothic ethnic traditions. Such arguments are generally couched within discussions of ‘ethnogenesis’, a neologism borrowed from American social science, but now used for the coming into being of a barbarian ethnic group and closely associated with the Viennese historian Herwig Wolfram. Wolfram and his followers argue that barbarian ethnicity was not a matter of genuine descent-communities, but rather of Traditionskerne (‘nuclei of tradition’), small groups of aristocratic warriors who carried ethnic traditions with them from place to place and transmitted ethnic identity from generation to generation; larger ethnic groups coalesced and dissolved around these nuclei of tradition in a process of continuous becoming or ethnic reinvention – ethnogenesis. Because of this, barbarian ethnic identies were evanescent, freely available for adoption by those who might want to participate in them. Parts of this theoretical model are not new: even nationalist historians of the earlier twentieth century knew that the membership of barbarian tribes ebbed and flowed with success or failure, so that the blood kinship which supposedly held them together was partly fictional. The role of noble families in forming the Traditionskern is equally a direct echo of pre-war lordship studies. On the other hand, the impact of the Viennese approach has been enormous and its wide acceptance by a non-specialist audience has made it seem more novel than it is. Until quite recently, popular literature and textbooks on the barbarians were dominated by an essentialist approach to barbarian ethnicity: each named ethnic group was a ‘tribe’ (Stamm in German), possessing essential characteristics that made its differences from other tribes self-evident and its history continuous and unique. Proponents of ethnogenesis-theory, whose research has frequently developed in pan-European symposia, often claim it as the only alternative to the sort of racist and nationalist scholarship that blighted past generations. Although that stance is much exaggerated, ethnogenesis-theory has undoubtedly killed off essentialist views of barbarian tribal identity, an excellent result.[37]
Less fortunately, however, ethnogenesis-theory has permitted its proponents to maintain the historicity of Jordanes’ migration stories, treating them not as a tribal migration but rather as the ethnic memory of a small noble group, particularly the Amal family ofTheodoric. The only recent treatment of Gothic history to dissent from the Vienna school and its focus on aristocratic traditions is that of Peter Heather. But Heather, too, accepts the basic historicity of Jordanes’ migration narrative, viewing it as evidence for the large-scale migration of a free Gothic population whose size was such that its ‘Gothic-ness’ was widely understood by adult male Goths. Thus for both Heather and Wolfram, as for many earlier scholarly generations, the story of the Goths starts in a distant northern land, far from the Roman frontier, whence either migration or ‘ethnic processes’ bring the Goths or the Gothic identity to the edges of the Roman world. For both, in other words, the controlling narrative is that of Jordanes.
Historical Method and Jordanes’ Gothic History
But how much faith does Jordanes really deserve? Is he any more reliable on events long past than are other sixth-century Byzantine authors? And, if he is, are his northern migration stories any more reliable than the derivation of Goths from the biblical Gog and Magog? That biblical ancestry was commonly accepted by Greek and Latin writers from the fourth century onwards, and Jordanes himself refers to it.[38] Why should Jordanes’ migration story be more credible than his story that the Egyptian king Vesosis made war upon the Gothic king Tanausis, who defeated him and chased him all the way back to the Nile?[39] Along with many other changes in our understanding of ancient historical texts, the past two decades have witnessed a realization that we need to take each of them as a whole, reading it in context and in its entirety. We cannot simply pick and choose among the evidence offered by a text on the grounds of its seeming plausible or ‘historical’. We must, on the contrary, demonstrate why, in the whole context in which it appears, a particular piece of evidence is authentic.
There is no way to do that with the origin stories in Jordanes. It is possible that Jordanes, via Cassiodorus, had access to genuine stories told by sixth-century Goths about their distant past; it is also possible that such stories entered Jordanes through a mysterious historian named Ablabius whom he mentions, but who is otherwise unknown.[40] That the Goths told such stories is likely a priori and probably confirmed by Jordanes’ explicit mention of ancient Gothic songs.[41] Yet even if any one of these lines of transmission is real and the migration from the north was genuinely believed by sixth-century Goths, that does not make it true, any more than the famous origin story of Romulus and Remus is true because Romans in the third century B.C. believed it to be. As modern anthropological studies have shown, oral transmission can preserve astonishingly accurate nuggets of historical data, but the context in which it does so is always distorted. Without outside controls, we have no way of telling which, if any, element of an orally transmitted story might be true. Most of the time – as here – that outside control simply does not exist.
Because of all this, we are not justified in taking Jordanes’ Getica as the narrative foundation for our own Gothic histories. One of the most important differences between the present book and other recent studies of Gothic history is its evaluation of Jordanes on the same terms as any other Byzantine author of the sixth century. If we take him on those terms, we realize that he has very limited information about, and very limited understanding of, fourth- and fifth-century events, particularly those in the western part of the empire. Where we can discover the source for a particular piece of Jordanes’ evidence, or where his evidence finds corroboration elsewhere, then we can use it with appropriate caution. That is the case, for instance, with the third-century Gothic chiefs Argaith andGuntheric, whose sack of Marcianople was mentioned early in chapter one: Jordanes’ information almost certainly comes from the reliable third-century historian Dexippus, and a corruption of the chieftains’ names is attested in a fourth-century text, the Historia Augusta, which also drew on Dexippus. In such circumstances, there can be little objection to accepting Jordanes’ evidence as fundamentally authentic. Yet where Jordanes is our sole voice, and where we have no evidence for his source or its reliability, we must leave him to one side. That is clearly the path of caution when it comes to Gothic migration stories, which rest solely on Jordanes. No other source makes this long Gothic history probable.[42] Rather than migrants from the distant north, it is more likely that the Goths who entered imperial history in the earlier third century were a product of circumstances on the imperial frontier.
As we saw in the last chapter, powerful barbarian polities tended to arise on the Roman frontiers in response to the existence of the empire, a function of the changes which complex and imperial cultures can work on neighbouring cultures that are less socially stratified and less technologically advanced. These were the social forces that created the coalitions of the Franks and Alamanni along the Rhine and the upper Danube in the third century, and we have suggested that the Goths on the lower Danube should be understood in the same way. Before we can go on to address that question in more detail, we need to think about how the Goths or any other barbarian group differed from other ones. More particularly, we need to consider the ways in which both Greek and Roman writers, and we ourselves, go about ‘telling the difference’, as Walter Pohl has put it.[43]
Barbarian Identity: Graeco-Roman Ethnography
How do we tell a Goth from a Frank or an Alaman from a Sarmatian? How did the Romans do so? In more abstract terms, how does anyone tell themselves and those with whom they identify from other people with whom they do not? The definition of difference was a pressing concern for Greek and Roman writers, for whom ethnography – the literary description of non-Greeks and non-Romans – was so well known a genre that Virgil could parody it in his fourth Georgic with a poetic ethnography of bees. Modern scholars, in trying to explain the ancient sources with all their myriad names of peoples, strive both to understand the criteria by which ancient writers told their subjects apart, and to establish criteria by which we can do the same thing. From these two questions there follows a third: how did the different peoples we meet in our sources tell themselves apart from their neighbours? This question is much more difficult, because none of the peoples to the north of the Graeco-Roman world left behind written sources from which we might extract such information. Archaeology, if we can use it for this purpose, might provide an answer, but as we shall see, reading ethnic or group identity in the archaeological evidence is very difficult in most circumstances. Let us, however, take the contents of the ancient literary sources first.
The three words Greek and Roman sources most often use to describe barbarian groups are gens, natio and ethnos (gentes, nationes, and ethne in the plural). The first two words are Latin, the third Greek, and the modern English derivatives of each word are plain to see. Theoretically, in etymological terms, the word gens refers primarily to an extended family, the word natio to a community of such gentes, but in practice the words were interchangeable and their Greek equivalent is ethnos. There is no good English word which we can use to translate any of the three terms. ‘Tribe’ (equivalent to the modern German Stamm) is useful because it implies a sense of community and perhaps a blood relationship (real or fictive), but it also connotes the primitive in a way that only the Latin gentes conveys (and even then, only in the plural and when used of non-Romans). ‘People’ might work, but especially in American English it implies a sense of political purpose which is absent from the Greek and Latin. ‘Nation’ and ‘race’ are too weighted down with modern baggage to be of any use. Modern scholars have settled on the boring, but deliberately neutral, word ‘group’ as the safest way of translating gens, natio, or ethnos in the context of late antique barbarians. This is quite sensible, because it prevents us from implying political or cultural characteristics without meaning to do so. On the other hand, it is very important for us to realize that when the Greek and Roman sources on which we must rely use the words gens, natio, or ethnos, they do indeed mean to imply a coherent, interrelated group of non-Greeks and non-Romans that can be identified as different and which share a sense of belonging together because they do in fact belong together. In other words, the Greeks and Romans did not share our conceptual concerns about the existential nature of barbarian groups – they worried about how to tell such groups apart.
A Distorting Mirror: Interpretatio romana
All our evidence for the differentiation of barbarian groups is filtered through ancient Graeco-Roman perceptions of alterity, of the non-Greek or non-Roman. This filter is what scholars call the interpretatio romana, the ‘Roman interpretation’, or perhaps Roman distortion, of the barbarian reality it claims to report. The interpretatio romana poses real difficulties, in part because a cognitive disjunction lies at the heart of Graeco-Roman ethnographic thinking. On the one hand, at a very real level Greeks and Romans believed all barbarians were fundamentally the same. The very word barbaros may be onomatopoeia, coined in order to describe the sound that came out of barbarians’ mouths – a noise like that of animals, rather than language which was the special preserve of the Greeks.[44] Barbarians lacked language and so they were all the same. And yet they were not: ethnography, in fact, existed to tell all those others apart. It set out to abstract from the universal ‘other’ that was the barbarian a set of gentes or ethne which gave shape and order to the world beyond civilization. Although Roman generals on the frontiers had very practical experience of, and sometimes extremely detailed information about, the neighbours whom they had to fight, the ethnographic tradition was not as concerned with such practical matters as it was with abstracting reality into analytical categories. These categories might pattern the experience of reality as much as they were derived from it. For this purpose, Greek and Roman writers had a series of criteria that they could use to analyse identity and difference among their barbarian neighbours or subjects. Chief among these were habits of dress and clothing; traditional weaponry or fighting styles; sex habits and gender roles; religion; and perhaps most importantly language.
Unfortunately, each of these classificatory criteria posed interpretative problems for ancient ethnographers, because none of them was infallibly diagnostic of ethnic difference. In the case of language, for instance, there were considerably more gentes than there were languages. There were, equally, many fewer fighting styles than there were people who deployed them. And couldn’t a set of stereotyped ‘barbarian’ clothing be used to signify any barbarian in artwork? Public victory monuments have a series of iconographic codes which shout out ‘barbarian’ to the viewer, be they peaked ‘Phrygian’ caps, trousers for Germans and Persians, or hair worn in a ‘Suevic’ topknot. Our ancient writers were fully aware that their classificatory categories were problematical. For that reason, even though they believed that such categories could indeed be used to separate gens from gens, Greek and Roman authors also deployed ethnographic categories as broad existential sets, into which new or newly encountered barbarians could be slotted as necessary, according to whichever classificatory criteria seemed most empirically appropriate at a given time. Categories like German, Celt or Scythian were very broad, their definitions open to discussion. It was, for instance, a very long time before the distinction between Germans and Celts came to be generally accepted among Graeco-Roman authors, and for many years Germans and Celts were regularly taken to be the same. Or again, while in the third century Dexippus could classify Alamanni as Scythians, no fourth-century author could do the same because the Alamanni were clearly fixed as Germani by then.[45] What all this means for us is a constant confrontation with the limitations of our Greek and Roman sources for the barbarians. Their belief in an eternal barbarian type explains the constant identification of the Goths with Herodotus’ Scythians, and also explains why fourth-century authors can freely combine ancient or poetic barbarians like the Cimmerians or Gelonians with the very real Iuthungi and Franci of their own day.
These conceptual contradictions, or cognitive disjunctures, are pervasive and because they are all we have, they interpose a real barrier between us and the barbarians. We lack nearly any sense of whether or not such Graeco-Roman categories meant anything to the people who were fixed within them. In the case of such meta-categories as German or Scythian the answer, from all we can tell, is no. Nothing in our sources, even filtered through an interpretatio romana as they are, suggests that the later empire’s Germanifelt any kinship amongst themselves, or that Goths and Sarmatians, both Scythians in our sources, were aware of any similarities between themselves. We are on much less certain grounds with more specific ethnonyms – Iuthungi, Iazyges, or Tervingi, for example – which seem to designate groups that shared a sense of kinship and engaged in common actions for that reason. Unlike German or Scythian, these names for smaller groups may have been generated by their users themselves, rather than imposed from outside by Greeks and Romans.
Even if that is true, however, it tells us very little about how a sense of identity was constituted within or between barbarian groups. How did the Tervingi tell themselves apart from the Greuthungi, who both appear in our fourth-century sources as political divisions of the Goths? In other words, can we get at barbarians’ own criteria of identity and alterity? Language must surely have been important in creating a sense of alterity. Yet despite the deep rooted nineteenth-century conviction that belonging to the same language family produces some sort of shared identity, too many different gentes spoke mutually intelligible languages for a common tongue to contribute much to a sense of identity. Religion may have been more significant – some of our ethnonyms, for instance that of the Suevi, may originally have referred not to political or kinship units, but rather to a variety of groups who shared sacred cult sites. Unfortunately, we have virtually no access to authentic traces of barbarian religion, certainly not enough to chart what function, if any, it had in defining the boundaries of identity and alterity. What of dress? Clothing does have, and has always had, a very important function in expressing identity and alterity. Precisely because it is instantly visible, clothing can serve an emblematic function for those in a position to decode what any particular item of dress, or any combination of such items, means. Greeks and Romans were fully aware of the importance of clothing as a signifier of identity: imperial laws from the fourth century restrict the wearing of ‘barbarian’ costume in certain places, exemplified by a ban on trousers in the city of Rome from A.D. 397.[46] Yet if we try to move from the recognition that clothing could be used to tell the difference to an analysis of how it did so, we run up against one of the most vexed and vexing questions of late antique and early medieval studies: what can archaeological evidence tell us about identity, and ethnic identity more specifically?
Archaeology, Identity, Ethnicity
The material remains of the frontier regions are an extremely valuable source for barbarian social history, as will become clear in the next chapter, but they are much less useful as evidence for ancient ethnic divisions. Although that fact has been demonstrated by a great deal of recent work – both practical and theoretical – it flies in the face of more than a century of scholarship. The correlation of particular types of material evidence with particular barbarian groups named in the literary sources has long been, and remains, normal practice, as does the tracing of migrations on the basis of artefacts. The origins of these approaches lie in the early twentieth century and are particularly associated with the archaeologist Gustav Kossinna, though they underpin the work of other great archaeologists of the European barbaricum like Hans Zeiß and Joachim Werner. Kossinna’s Siedlungsarchäologie (‘settlement archaeology’) postulated that materially homogeneous archaeological cultures could be matched up with the ethnic groups attested in our literary sources, and also with the language groups defined by philologists. The shifting extensions of material cultures should therefore be interpreted as the movements of peoples. The rigidity of Kossinna’s approach has long been repudiated, but its legacy is pervasive. One widespread belief ultimately rooted in that legacy is that artefacts themselves carry ethnicity: that one particular form of brooch is Gothic, another Vandalic, and that wherever we find such brooches we can locate Goths and Vandals. This ‘ethnic ascription’ – the attaching of ethnic identity to particular material artefacts – is still ubiquitous in archaeological study of the barbarians, as is the designation of complexes of material evidence with ethnic names drawn from our literary evidence. Ethnic ascription is what allows some scholars to maintain that the Gothic migration recorded in Jordanes is also visible in the archaeological evidence.
Unfortunately, it has now been definitively shown that artefacts do not carry ethnicity in such a fashion.[48] Whether in the cemeteries from which most of our artefacts come or in the remains of barbarian settlements, material evidence tells us a great deal about vertical social relationships – those between different status levels within a society – but much less about horizontal relationships between ethnic or linguistic groups with separate identities. Thus while it is comparatively easy to characterize vertical distinctions within a single archaeological assemblage – such as bigger houses, better grave goods – defining assemblages by contrast to others is much more difficult. For one thing, it is a wholly artificial process that involves selecting out several characteristics – for instance the positioning of weapons in burials, or particular brooch forms or building techniques – and holding them to be diagnostic, either singly or in combination, of a particular archaeological culture. The selection of defining characteristics can itself be a problem, as there is always a danger of taking as diagnostic characteristics that are actually very widely diffused. But even if we avoid that danger, we are still making another problematical assumption: that the characteristics we have selected as definitive are the same ones that contemporaries would have recognized as defining their sense of identity or alterity. That assumption can never be possible in purely archaeological terms. Although we can be sure that some items of dress were used as emblems of identity and alterity – of belonging and exclusion – we need the human voice of the past to tell us which items communicated that sense of identity and how they did so. As we have seen, the only human voice that exists for our late antique barbarians is that of aninterpretatio romana which is as alien to the barbarian perspective as we are ourselves. For that reason, we cannot be confident that our archaeological cultures really do represent something other than our own selection of dead remains – that they do in fact identify some sense of cultural identity that living contemporaries might have recognized. In consequence, we risk investing the material evidence with a historical significance it does not intrinsically possess. That is to say, we risk turning an abstract set of material markers, which we have ourselves selected, into a historically real group of humans to which we then attribute a collective identity or ascribe collective actions. These intrinsic risks are only exacerbated when we draw a connection between an archaeological culture and a historical group named in our sources.
The Goths and the Sântana-de-Mureş/Černjachov Culture
It is, of course, sometimes possible to draw a legitimate connection between the material evidence and the barbarians named in our Greek and Roman authorities. If a well-dated material culture is widely present in a region in which our sources locate a named ethnic group over a substantial period of time, then we can say with some certainty that the named ethnic group used that material culture. The correspondence is never absolute, however. All of the archaeological culture zones that we know extend over regions in which the literary sources describe more than one ethnic or political grouping. In other words, a material culture is never identical with a particular ethnic grouping we find in the written sources. The single best illustration of this theoretical position is, as it happens, the Goths themselves. We know that Goths first appear in contemporary literary sources in the early decades of the third century and that, in the company of various other named groups, they posed a threat to the peace of the empire from bases in the region to the north and west of the Black Sea. As we shall see in the next chapter, by the earlier fourth century the Goths had unquestionably become the most powerful group in that region. In that same region – roughly between Volhynia in the north, the Carpathians in the west, the Danube and Black Sea to the south and the Donets to the east – a single archaeological culture is visible from the late third until the early fifth century. This archaeological culture is known as the Sântana-de-Mureş/Černjachov culture and is reasonably well dated on archaeological grounds. That is to say, the region in which the Goths were dominant fell within the Sântana-de-Mureş/Černjachov cultural zone. This means that we can use the socio-historical evidence of that material culture to help describe fourth-century Gothic social structures and economic relations – as we will in the next chapter.
Gothic Migration in the Archaeological Evidence
But does the identification allow us to do more than that? For instance, does the identification of the Sântana-de-Mureş/Černjachov culture with fourth-century Goths allow us to find Goths elsewhere? Many archaeologists and historians would answer yes. The argument has been made most explicitly by Volker Bierbrauer: the Sântana-de-Mureş/Černjachov archaeological culture is Gothic; some of its characteristics – particular brooch and ceramic types, a tendency not to place weapons in graves – are similar to those of the Wielbark culture, which was centred on the Vistula river and lasted from the first to the fourth century A.D.; the Wielbark culture must therefore also be Gothic. Also, because the Sântana-de-Mureş/Černjachov culture is Gothic, and because some artefacts associated with it appear inside the frontiers of the Roman empire, these artefacts must represent the movement of Goths from the Danube to Italy, and thence to Gaul and Spain. Bierbrauer’s simplistic ethnic ascription model is extreme, but only because it is articulated so clearly.[47] Unfortunately, many other archaeologists and historians working in the field accept its core assumptions without acknowledging the fact. Even Peter Heather, the most subtle modern interpreter of Gothic history, has written about ‘working backwards’ from the Sântana-de-Mureş/Černjachov culture to earlier stages of ‘Gothic’ archaeology.[49] Two separate considerations, one practical, one theoretical, make this approach untenable.
For one thing, the Sântana-de-Mureş/Černjachov culture is extremely diverse. As we shall see in the next chapter, the artefacts, construction techniques, and burial practices found within the Sântana-de-Mureş/Černjachov zone have parallels with earlier cultural traditions within the zone itself, with Roman provincial culture, with the Wielbark and Przeworsk cultures to the north and west, and with the steppe cultures of the east. The Wielbark elements in the Sântana-de-Mureş/Černjachov culture are no more numerous than other elements, so there is no archaeological reason to privilege them over others. Even if Wielbark artefacts were dominant in the Sântana-de-Mureş/Černjachov zone, they would not necessarily signify the same thing in both places: artefacts that are emblematic of one thing in one place may change meaning radically if transposed to another. More importantly still, the closeness of the artefactual connections between the two cultures is not as great as is usually asserted. Indeed, their chief point of intersection is not particular artefacts, but the fact that weapon burials are absent from the Wielbark and rare in the Sântana-de-Mureş/Černjachov zones. In purely logical terms, a negative characteristic is less convincing proof of similarity than a positive one, and the fact that weapon burials are commonest where archaeological investigation has been most intensive suggests that our evidentiary base is anything but representative. Given this, why should the Wielbark–Sântana-de-Mureş/Černjachov connection seem so self-evident to so many scholars? One answer is an old methodology that seeks to explain changes in material culture by reference to migration. The other is Jordanes.
Migration v. Diffusion Theories
The methodological problem is of long standing. In the early years of archaeology’s development as a scientific discipline, it was normal to understand cultural changes as the result of one tribe or people conquering or displacing another and replacing the previous material culture with a new one of their own. This interpretative paradigm goes back in part to the nationalist scholarship of the Volk at which we have already looked, in part to the preoccupation of our ancient historical sources with invasion, migration and conquest, and in part to Kossinna’s ascription of fixed and defined material cultures to ethnopolitical groupings. In the 1970s and 1980s, some archaeological theorists reacted radically against such migration theories. Working from the simple and obvious observation that the material culture of a place can change radically without the population of that place changing much at all, these archaeologists sought to explain change in archaeological cultures by reference to the diffusion of materials and ideas rather than migration. Diffusionist theory became and remains the norm, particularly amongst British archaeologists.
On the other hand, diffusionist theory, like any theory, can be pushed to unrealistic extremes. It is, after all, a simple fact that people move and have always done so, sometimes over long distances – a fine example from our period is the Sarmatian Iazyges, who moved en masse from the vicinity of the Dnieper and Dniester rivers, where Strabo places them at the beginning of the first century A.D., to the Alföld between the Danube and Tisza, where Pliny places them in the 70s A.D., having come at the request of theQuadic king Vannius for aid against the Hermunduri. When people move, they often bring large parts of their native culture with them, however transformed it may be when transplanted into a new environment: one need only look at any large immigrant neighbourhood in the U.S. or Britain to see the truth of this fact. What is more, the conquest of one region by people from another can profoundly alter the culture of a conquered region, with or without massive population shifts: the expansion of the Roman empire is history’s best illustration of this. Each of these points contradicts the more extreme statements of radical diffusionist theory, but it is unfortunate that this kind of overstatement has given comfort to those who would rather think solely in terms of migration and conquest. The truth of the matter, as so often, lies in the middle ground. Massive cultural changes can take place without much movement of population; by the same token, large-scale movements of population have obviously taken place in the past, which means that some massive cultural changes should indeed be explicable in terms of migration. Neither migration nor diffusion will suit every case, neither can be denied in every case, and we should always have a reason for asserting one explanation over the other in any given instance.
The deep attachment to migration theories in the case of the Goths – and the reading of connections between Wielbark and Sântana-de-Mureş/Černjachov cultures in terms of Gothic migration – can be explained without any deep engagement with archaeological theory. The reading of both Wielbark and Sântana-de-Mureş/Černjachov cultures is what we might call ‘text-hindered’ and Jordanes is the culprit.[50] His migration story takes the Goths from Scandinavia to the Baltic and then to the Black Sea. Archaeologists have therefore been called upon not to read the material evidence on its own terms, but rather to prove or disprove the authenticity of Jordanes’ text. In 1970, Rolf Hachmann disproved the Scandinavian connection on archaeological grounds, thereby making necessary new theories of ethnogenesis such as we have looked at earlier.[51] But the question has remained the same for the Baltic–Black Sea sequence: can one prove or disprove Jordanes? For an archaeologist of the Goths like Michel Kazanski, this is not even a question: the text of Jordanes tells us the Goths were at the Baltic, then in the Ukraine; therefore the material culture of both regions must be Gothic and we should study it as such.[52] That is precisely what we mean when we say the topic is text-hindered: consciously or not, the archaeological question is always structured by Jordanes, hence an insistence on drawing out the material similarities between the Wielbark and the Sântana-de-Mureş/Černjachov cultures.
If we did not have Jordanes, that connection would not seem self-evident. Taken on purely archaeological grounds, without reference to our one piece of textual evidence, there is no reason to interpret the Wielbark and the Sântana-de-Mureş/Černjachov cultures as close cousins. The Sântana-de-Mureş/Černjachov culture represents an intermingling of many different earlier material cultures, some native to its zone, others not. One might argue, as most do, that the Sântana-de-Mureş/Černjachov culture came into being because of a migration out of the Wielbark regions, but one might equally argue that it was an indigenous development of local Pontic, Carpic and Dacian cultures or of the migration of steppe nomads from the east meeting Przeworsk-culture warriors from the west. In purely archaeological terms, each of these interpretations is equally possible, for as we have seen, Wielbark cultural elements are no more numerous in the Sântana-de-Mureş/Černjachov culture than are the many other cultural traditions that make it up. It is only the text of Jordanes that leads scholars to privilege the Wielbark connection. Indeed, if Jordanes did not exist and we were dealing with truly prehistoric cultures, it is highly unlikely that anyone would draw the same connection.
How the Sântana-de-Mureş/Černjachov Culture Became Gothic
What, then, are we to make of all this? How are we to interpret the origins of the Sântana-de-Mureş/Černjachov culture and the Gothic hegemony with which it coincides chronologically? Is there such a thing as Gothic history before the third century? The answer, at least in my view, is that there is no Gothic history before the third century. The Goths are a product of the Roman frontier, just like the Franks and the Alamanni who appear at the same time. That is clearly demonstrated by contemporary literary evidence, and indeed all the evidence of the fourth and fifth centuries – everything except the sixth-century Jordanes. In the third century, the Roman empire was assaulted from the regions north of the Danube and the Black Sea by large numbers of different barbarian groups, among whom Goths appear for the first time. Not long thereafter, the Goths are clearly the most powerful group in the region, while most of the other barbarian groups with whom they appear in the third century either disappear from the record or are clearly subordinated to them. The most plausible explanation of this evidence is to see one group among the many different barbarians north of the Black Sea establishing its hegemony over the scattered and hitherto disparate population of the region, which was thereafter regularly identified as Gothic by Graeco-Roman observers.
The archaeological evidence of the Sântana-de-Mureş/Černjachov culture makes sense in these terms as well. The rise to prominence of a few strong leaders created a stable political zone in which a single material culture came into being, synthesized from a variety of disparate traditions. None was more important than the others – as the material evidence clearly shows – and there is no need to look for ‘original’ Goths coming from elsewhere to impose their leadership and their identity on others. There were, of course, immigrants into the region where the Sântana-de-Mureş/Černjachov culture arose, from elsewhere in northern and central Europe and from the steppe lands to the east as well. But none of them need themselves have been Goths, because there is no good evidence that Goths existed before the third century.
What Made a Goth a Goth and How Can We Tell?
That leads us back to the sense of collective identity, the problem of telling the difference that we looked at earlier. How was it that these different people knew that they were Goths rather than something else, or did they? How did Greeks and Romans know it? What marked them off as such? In most cases, context alone would have supplied the clues. There may well have been items of emblematic clothing that established insider and outsider status. But that does not mean we can construct a Gothic costume on the basis of grave finds, because in most circumstances, these items were displayed to other Goths and communicated information about status within the community, not about relations to those outside it. Language probably made a difference, and when Gothic was codified as a written religious language in the fourth century, the use of the Gothic bible will surely have identified its user as a Goth as well as a Christian. But languages can be acquired and many of the philologically Germanic languages spoken in central Europe were mutually intelligible. We have no sources to tell us that specifically Gothic idioms or accents could be used to tell a Goth from a Gepid on the Danube frontier – perhaps they could not. What was it, then, that created a sense of community among the Goths of the later third and the fourth centuries? How was it that they knew what their Greek and Roman observers claim to know – that all these people were Goths?
It is possible that precisely the same Roman elite discourse that is accessible to us nowadays helped cultivate a sense of barbarian collective identity along different stretches of the frontier. Just as contact with the Roman empire shaped, and sometimes created, new social and political hierarchies beyond the frontier, so too Roman ideologies and perceptions may have helped single out elements in the culture of the barbarians that came to define those barbarians’ own sense of community. In other words, Roman elite discourses about what a Goth was helped to define how people came to identify themselves as Goths, to codify the signs that conveyed Gothicness. This possibility is not as strange as it might seem at first glance, as post-colonial studies of more recent periods have shown. Modern imperialism has had profound effects in shaping the identity of indigenous and subject peoples – it has been shown, for instance, that the codification of a Sikh cultural, as opposed to religious, identity was largely the result of the British need to have a readily identifiable collective group who could be employed in the colonial army.[53] That a parallel process took place along the frontiers of the Roman empire is actually quite plausible: the diverse small groups whom the Romans called Franks or Goths because they lived in a particular place and were recruited into particular units of the Roman army eventually became Franks and Goths because that was how they were described when they had political dealings with the Roman empire, when, for instance, they were recruited into Roman military units or were defeated by an emperor and described in an imperial victory title. As leaders whom Romans identified as Goths grew in strength and their followers grew in numbers, those followers became more like each other, spurred to it by the military intercourse with the empire next door. If one wants to, it is possible to call this transformation ‘ethnogenesis’ – new Gothic polities clearly came into being at the end of the third and the start of the fourth century. But it needs no appeal to Gothicaristocrats or royal lines, nor to ethnic traditions or processes, to explain what happened, and whether these new polities were very aware of being a gens or an ethnos is not something that the evidence can tell us.
The barbaricum had always been a vast and changing place when viewed from the Graeco-Roman perspective. Probably its changeability was fully evident to those who lived in it as well. People moved about in that changing world, and alliances shifted repeatedly, sometimes at a great distance from the Roman frontier where neither Greeks and Romans nor we can have any inkling of precise circumstances. Sometimes we see tiny faded traces of changing patterns of alliance, changing patterns of trade and interaction, often no more than a shift in the routes along which Roman coins and luxury goods were dispersed. In the third century, in the region northwest of the Black Sea, the warrior stratum of a heterogeneous population came together to take advantage of imperial civil war and to reap a harvest of as much loot as speed and violence would permit. By the end of the third century, a few of these warriors were powerful enough to coordinate political control over stretches of territory north of the Danube and Black Sea. Sometimes they fought the empire, sometimes they fought each other, sometimes they served the empire, sometimes they came together and acted for their common interest. At their centre were leaders who were seen to be Goths by the Romans and who perhaps saw themselves as Goths as well. Certainly, in time, after being told repeatedly that they were in fact Goths and leaders of Gothic gentes with whom the empire would fight and make treaties, there was no question in anyone’s mind that they were indeed Goths. Likewise the Sântana-de-Mureş/Černjachov culture must surely be the result of a political stability of long enough standing for stable cultural relations to develop. That stability is attested by the growing political sophistication of the Gothic leaders whom we meet in the course of the fourth century and who form the subject of the next chapter.