Empires and Barbarians (28 page)

No late Roman commentator ever sat down to draw up a precise description of any migrant group of barbarians – stating that eight out of ten migrant males, say, came with their families – but Ammianus clearly understood the action as being driven by armed migrant males moving with families, their belongings carried in a wagon train, which features at several points as a mobile fortress that could be pulled (like that of the Boers) into a defensive laager, and must have been of enormous size. As noted earlier, historians have often used a multiplier of 5:1 for the ratio of total population to warriors, but that is a guess. But whatever ratio you choose, up to twenty thousand warriors or perhaps even more, plus their families, has to mean many tens of thousands of people in total on the move. And while making it quite clear that not every migrant belonged to one of the major Gothic concentrations, Ammianus does report a striking degree of political coherence among the two main groups of Goths – Tervingi and Greuthungi – who crossed into the Empire in 376. They each negotiated as a body with the Roman state from the banks of the Danube, and continued to act together, for the most part, afterwards.

If we take these main features of Ammianus’ report for 376 together – the Gothic groups’ mixed gender/age makeup, the fact that
we are dealing with several tens of thousands of people, that they were on the run from the Huns, and the coherent way in which the immigrants dealt with the Roman state – then you can see what makes modern commentators hesitate. It all adds up to something that looks worryingly like the old invasion hypothesis: one people, one leadership, and one clearly directed move or set of moves with invasion and flight playing a major role. We have seen too that this kind of phenomenon – different again from the flows of predatory migration of the third century and the Viking period – is strikingly absent from modern, better-documented case studies of migration. In the face of both of these problems, can we believe the picture drawn with such clarity by Ammianus?

Establishing the credibility of an ancient historian operating in the classical tradition is never straightforward. Back then history was a branch of rhetoric, and although it aimed at truthfulness, truth did not have to be merely literal. A high degree of artistry was expected, partly for the audience’s entertainment, but this might again be harnessed in the service of bringing out a deeper truth about persons or situations. What we know about Ammianus in particular is deeply intriguing. He closed his History with a memorable and essentially accurate, if limited, one-line self-description: ‘a soldier once and a Greek’ (
miles quondam et Graecus
). He was born in Antioch in the largely Greek-speaking eastern Empire, and clearly received an excellent education in Greek and Latin language and literature before entering the army, where he rose to mid-staff officer rank as a general’s aide. He faced battle many times and undertook secret missions – behind Persian lines on one occasion and to assassinate a usurper on another – but, as far as we can tell, he never commanded a unit in action. He left the army in the mid-360s on the death of the last pagan Roman emperor, Julian the Apostate, and was himself a non-Christian. Otherwise he doesn’t tell us much about himself or his purposes in writing history, except to mention in passing a few places that he’d visited between leaving the army and eventually moving to Rome in the late 380s, where his History was brought to completion in the early 390s.

There is a huge and growing literature on the historian and his work, from which two points emerge clearly. First, while claiming to be interested in the truth, Ammianus was not averse to deploying literary artistry in the service of what he considered to be true, and sometimes even evasion. The big cultural story unfolding around
him in his own lifetime was the progressive Christianization of the Empire, but he deliberately minimized its appearance in his text, and may even have attempted to conceal a personal aversion to it in the guise of favouring religious toleration. And what is true of his treatment of religion may be equally true of his treatment of other matters, where a lack of candour is less obvious.
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But all that said, Gibbon regarded Ammianus as a ‘most faithful guide’. Gibbon was no fool, and the second point reinforces the quality of this judgement. By an extremely wide margin, Ammianus provides the most detailed and informative narrative to survive from the late Roman period (or pretty much any other Roman period, for that matter). What we’ve already seen of his Gothic narrative is true at many other points, as well: the level of circumstantial detail included in his text simply overwhelms, where they overlap, other sources of surviving information. This vast body of knowledge was acquired partly from his own experience (his secret missions get extensive and entertaining coverage, for instance, and Ammianus was also on Julian’s failed Persian campaign), partly from talking to informed participants such as the retired palace eunuch Eucherius, but also from consulting documentary archives. He refers at one point to a ‘more secret’ archive he wasn’t allowed a glimpse of, which makes it plain that there were others that he did see, and at another he lets slip that it was his normal practice to look up the official records of their careers when writing about military functionaries. A French historian has also successfully demonstrated the substantial extent to which Ammianus’ narratives are constructed on his reading of the original dispatches that had gone back and forth between Roman generals and their subordinate commanders.
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In other words, alongside literary artistry and calculated evasion, you have to reckon with Ammianus having engaged in something analogous to modern historical research, without which the degree of detail in his narrative would have been impossible. No simple blanket answer to the question of Ammianus’ reliability is possible, therefore, and passages have to be considered case by case.

In relation to the events of 376, Ammianus’ credibility has recently been attacked on two counts, one profound, the other only slightly less so. Most important, it has been suggested that his account of the events of 376 looks a bit like the old invasion hypothesis because he (and the other authors who write in less detail) couldn’t help but portray the action in that fashion. It was so ingrained in classically
educated authors that ‘barbarians’ moved as ‘peoples’ – interrelated ‘communities of descent’ – that they automatically wrote up any example of outsiders on the march on Roman soil along these lines. Deeply ingrained in their heads, in other words, was a migration topos, which made it impossible for them to give an accurate characterization of barbarians on the move. Second, it has been argued that Ammianus’ emphasis on the Huns as the root cause of the Goths’ arrival on the Danube is misplaced. It was in fact Roman action that had destabilized the Gothic client world, allowing the Huns to move into new territories, so that the latter were not quite the ferocious outside invaders that our sources portray.
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These are important critiques, but are they convincing? Has Ammianus misunderstood the significance of the Huns’ role, and did he describe the events of 376 as a mass movement of men, women and children because he lacked the conceptual machinery to do otherwise?

Sometimes, as we have seen, our sources do give good reason for thinking that a migration topos was in operation in their authors’ heads. The sixth-century Jordanes describes third-century Gothic migrations into the Black Sea region as one ‘people’ on the move, when the reality portrayed in more contemporary sources was much more complex. In due course we will encounter another excellent example in ninth-century accounts of fourth- and fifth-century Lombard migrations. But what about Ammianus on the events of 376?

In this case, falling back on the migration topos argument looks deeply unconvincing. To start with, though this is just a footnote, it is entirely unclear to me that Ammianus does envisage either the Tervingi or the Greuthungi as ‘peoples’ in the sense of ‘communities of descent’ in some ideologically reflexive manner. In fact, he does not analyse them at all. What interests him, and this is generally true of ‘imperial’ accounts of barbarians, is the power of these groupings as military and political collectives, and hence any threat they might pose to Roman security. How they worked in detail was not his concern. The Tervingi surely were not a ‘people’ in the classic sense of the word: a closed biologically self-reproducing group whose members all shared pretty much equally in a distinct cultural identity. Social differentiation already existed in the Germanic world at the start of the Roman period, and had grown apace over the subsequent three centuries (
Chapter 2
). All the Germanic groups of the late Roman period that we know anything about went into battle with two hierarchically
arranged groups of fighters, whose investment in their group identities was substantially different. These groups quite probably also incorporated slaves, who were not allowed to fight. That Ammianus does not explore any of this certainly limits our capacity to understand the Tervingi, but that is not the same as saying that he had one simple model for all groups of outsiders on the move. In fact – and this is much the more important point – it emerges clearly from his History that he was perfectly capable of differentiating between different types of mobile barbarian.

In different chapters of his History, for instance, we meet barbarian warbands on Roman soil, engaging in their usual pastime of wealth collection. These groups are always identified as such, their numbers sometimes given in the few hundreds, and Ammianus clearly had no problem in telling a warband from a large mixed body of population. This is perhaps not surprising, given the huge difference in scale between a warband and the Gothic forces in action in 376. For that reason, his account of the battle of Strasbourg, which we encountered in
Chapter 2
, is still more pertinent. This involved, in Ammianus’ view at least, over thirty thousand Alamanni and their allies, gathered under the leadership of Chnodomarius – and all of them on Roman soil. Despite the size of the opposing force, Ammianus is perfectly clear that this was a military action that had the continued annexation of Roman territory in mind and was undertaken only by males. He also distinguishes clearly the range of recruitment methods that had been used to gather Chnodomarius’ army. Many were the followers of various Alamannic kings present at the battle, but some had overthrown their king to be present, and others were mercenaries hired for the occasion.
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Thus although the action involved very large numbers of barbarians, Ammianus did not suffer from any ‘barbarian army equals people on the move’ reflex.

The point is reinforced if you look more closely at his account of what was going on north of the Danube around the time of the Goths’ appearance on the frontier. Not even all the outsiders who crossed the Danube in the run-up to Hadrianople, for instance, are presented as on the move with families. In the autumn of 377, the Goths found themselves in a difficult situation, trapped in the northern Balkans with food supplies running out. To help lever out the Roman garrisons who were holding the passes of the Haemus Mountains against them, the Goths recruited the help of a mixed force of Huns and Alans, promising
them a large amount of booty. The stratagem did the trick. The point here is that, first, Ammianus can identify a force as politically mixed (not a ‘people’) when it was so – this one composed of Huns and Alans – and, second, that although they were mobile barbarians on Roman soil, he made no reference to women and children. For Ammianus, this was merely a mixed mercenary warrior band useful to the Goths in a tight situation.
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Indeed, he does not describe even the Tervingi as a whole ‘people’ moving in untroubled fashion from their old homelands on to the Roman frontier. The Tervingi arrived on the Danube in two separate concentrations in 376 because there had been a split among them. The larger group led by Alavivus and Fritigern was composed of those who had decided to reject the leadership of Athanaric, from the established ruling house, and seek asylum inside the Roman Empire. A second and smaller, though still quite substantial, group later followed them to the river under the command of the old leadership. There, having initially thought of seeking asylum too, Athanaric took an alternative option. Ammianus explicitly describes the Tervingi as a political confederation in crisis, not a ‘people’ taking seamlessly to the road.
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The range of different types even of very large barbarian forces that he was able to describe, and the details of his account of the Goths in crisis, both lead to the same conclusion. Our Greek soldier was both sophisticated enough and well enough informed to describe events on the Danube specifically and accurately. When he tells us that concentrations of Goths came in large numbers, and with their families, this does not look remotely like a cultural topos. In other parts of his History, he described even very large barbarian groups on the move on Roman soil in quite different ways. He chose to present the events of 376 in the way he did quite deliberately, and not because it was the only model in his head. This much now, it seems, is more or less accepted. Even among scholars generally rather suspicious of large-scale migration, only one has tried to discount Ammianus’ account of the numbers involved, and that by asserting the existence of a general migration topos rather than by any more detailed argument.
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On balance, it is highly probable, therefore, that Ammianus knew what he was talking about.

As for the other line of attack on Ammianus’ credibility – the emphasis he placed on the Huns as the first cause of these population displacements – this derives from a report in the
Church History
of one
Socrates Scholasticus that Athanaric’s confederation split not in 376 in the face of Hunnic attack, but immediately after Valens’ earlier war against the Tervingi which ended in 369. It was after this, according to Socrates, that Fritigern broke with the leadership of Athanaric. On the basis of this, Guy Halsall has recently argued that Valens, not the Huns, was ultimately responsible for the arrival of the Goths on the Danube, in the sense that Valens’ campaigns inflicted defeats on Athanaric and the Greuthungi, thereby destabilizing Rome’s Lower Danubian client states. It was this dislocation that allowed the Huns to move into Gothic territory, and accepting this point undermines the traditional picture of the Huns as outsiders of enormous military power whose migratory intrusion destroyed an existing political order north of the Black Sea.
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