Rome's Gothic Wars: From the Third Century to Alaric (Key Conflicts of Classical Antiquity)

by Michael Kulikowski

  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 his De 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 the Getica wholeheartedly 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 the Ostrogothic 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 Cassiod
orus’ 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 of Theodoric. 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 w
ay 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 and Guntheric, 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.