Rome's Gothic Wars: From the Third Century to Alaric (Key Conflicts of Classical Antiquity) (14 page)

As is so usual in studies of late antique barbarians, cemetery sites are considerably better known than are settlements, a fact that raises all sorts of problems because what people take to their graves does not always reveal what they did or thought in life. All the same, the whole Sântana-de-Mureş/Černjachov region stands out from the rest of the
barbaricum
for the striking variety of its funerary customs. Some cemetery sites contain both cremation burials, whether in an urn or straight into a hole in the ground, and inhumations, some of them in wooden chambers, some in more or less elaborate graves with or without stone coverings. In general, we can observe a trend throughout the Sântana-de-Mureş/Černjachov region away from cremation and towards inhumation, but cemetery chronology is too uncertain for us to press that point. Grave goods
vary just as much as do burial typologies. With very few exceptions, the sort of enormously rich ‘princely’ burials – loaded with gold and silver and known throughout western and north-central Europe – are absent from the Sântana-de-Mureş/Černjachov zone.
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Most Sântana-de-Mureş/Černjachov graves were unfurnished, some were furnished with pottery alone, some with fibulae (brooches – either one or two). Many bodies were belted, since belt buckles appear in large quantities, and some belts were decorated with hanging ornaments known as pendentives.
Weapon burials are even rarer than they are in the Rhineland and upper Danube but by no means unknown. Grave goods might be positioned in different ways in different types of inhumation, while in cremations grave goods were sometimes burned along with the body, sometimes deposited intact with the ashes. In a few inhumations, the body was arranged on a raised platform within the grave, and a very few bodies show signs of deliberate cranial deformation in the skulls of the deceased. Both these latter habits are characteristic of steppe-nomad customs known from earlier and later periods, and quite common further to the east.
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These variations in burial type are perhaps the best sign of the diverse cultural traditions that made up the Sântana-de-Mureş/Černjachov culture. Everyday artefacts also show a mixture of nomadic, Roman, northern European, and local traditions, but the diversity of burial ritual in the Sântana-de-Mureş/Černjachov is truly extraordinary. That raises questions on many different levels.
Unsurprisingly, differences in burial customs have generally been interpreted in ethnic terms, some rituals and artefacts ascribed to one ethnic group, some to another. But that is problematical. The material culture of the living population was relatively uniform across the Sântana-de-Mureş/Černjachov zone, however many different cultural traditions lay behind it. By contrast, the material culture of the dead was highly differentiated both within and between cemetery sites. In other words, cultural differences are not uniformly distributed across every social context in Sântana-de-Mureş/Černjachov culture, but are confined to the specific context of burial ritual. What is more, no one has been able to demonstrate that the particular ornaments singled out for burial with a dead person were widely used while
he or she was still alive. For that reason, although the differences in burial ritual may well reflect different beliefs about the afterlife, there is no evidence that funerary customs and objects differentiated people except at the brief moment during which the body was displayed before its cremation or interment. That fact helps us to interpret Sântana-de-Mureş/Černjachov burials in a more nuanced fashion than a strictly ethnic reading requires.

The ways in which burial ritual communicates clues about identity has been rigorously examined in the Frankish world, and some of that research can be applied to the Sântana-de-Mureş/Černjachov zone as well.
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Burial ritual is, at least originally, a reflection of beliefs about the afterlife, but it is also
a social ritual for those who remain alive to bury the dead person. Although the materials deposited in tombs are all that we have left to study, they were not meant for us. Rather, they are the surviving traces of a ritual that was viewed and experienced for only a short time by the people who took part in it. This burial ritual not only commemorated the deceased and prepared his or her way into the afterlife, it also helped delineate the social relationships among the people who came together to bury the dead. In other words, contemporary observers both inside and outside the dead person’s family would read and interpret burial ritual for the social signals it conveyed. Thus, people buried with more and better goods may have occupied a higher social station than those with less – or at least their living relations will have been asserting the higher status of the deceased, and therefore their own higher status, as the heirs or family of the dead. In the Sântana-de-Mureş/Černjachov zone, there seems to be a correlation between richer grave goods and the alignment of bodies with the head to the north, and this too may have had a status link now lost to us.

However, the sheer heterogeneity of the Sântana-de-Mureş/Černjachov burials is such that purely status-based explanations seem inadequate. Beliefs about the afterlife must also come into the picture, beliefs that differed widely between neighbours. Whether one was burnt
or buried, with a sword or without, raised on a wooden platform or deposited straight into the earth would seem self-evidently to reveal different expectations about what was going to happen in death. The question that has most exercised scholars, of course, is whether these differing beliefs reflect ethnic difference, whether we can tell Goths from Gothic subjects on the basis of how they were buried. The answer is complicated by the fact that there are really two separate questions. At some point, the wildly divergent burial customs we meet in the Sântana-de-Mureş/Černjachov zone must have derived from populations with different beliefs about the afterlife. This impression is re-enforced by the parallels that exist between burial rituals in the Sântana-de-Mureş/Černjachov zone and those elsewhere in Europe and central Asia. But the fact of differing derivation – even differing ethnic derivation – does not mean that burial ritual continued to have an ethnic meaning within the Sântana-de-Mureş/Černjachov culture. This is especially true because, thanks to patterns of material preservation, we have no evidence that the population of the zone marked such differences in any context other than that of burial ritual.

That fact suggests that rituals representing different beliefs about the afterlife, which had at one time corresponded to ethnic origins, had no ethnic content within the Sântana-de-Mureş/Černjachov culture. This suggestion may well seem implausible to those who believe that burial ritual is a primordial depository of ethnic beliefs. But it is in fact not at all far-fetched. We know for a fact that groups of people within the same society can have incompatible beliefs about what happens after death without thereby ceasing to share social and ethnic common ground. The best ancient example is the Roman empire itself. There, elite Romans of the second through fourth centuries shared a single material, literary and aesthetic culture, as well as the legal status of Roman citizens, but their religious and philosophical views differed enormously and came from the most various provincial and ethnic traditions. The differences in burial ritual within the Sântana-de-Mureş/Černjachov culture should be interpreted as a parallel to this contemporary Roman reality.

The Sântana-de-Mureş/Černjachov zone was, in this view, a complex cultural world in which many different historical strands had mingled. It may have been much smaller in scale and less socially varied than its imperial Roman neighbour, but it was not fundamentally different in kind. The wealthy military elite whose status display remains so visible to us led a society that was recognizably Gothic for Graeco-Roman observers. When Romans of the fourth century looked beyond the lower Danube, they saw Goths, divided into different groups like the Tervingi, but Goths all the same. They did not see what they saw at the Danube bend, in the ‘land of
the Sarmatians’, where an ethnically distinct subject population could be distinguished from the Sarmatians. Nor did they see what they saw in the
Sântana-de-Mureş/Černjachov cultural zone at a later date, in the fifth century, when distinctly Hunnic masters ruled over many different subject populations, Goths included.

It is, in other words, fundamentally wrong to follow the many modern historians who call the Gothic realm of the fourth century ‘polyethnic’. It was polyethnic only in the sense that no culture is totally autonomous and free from the admixture of disparate cultural strands. The Sântana-de-Mureş/Černjachov culture emerged within two generations of the Goths first appearing in contemporary written sources. Its origins are nearly contemporary with the decade in which, according to the literary sources, Goths come to dominate the lower Danube and the northwestern Black Sea region. As we saw in the
last chapter
, nothing in the material evidence suggests that ‘the Goths’ came from somewhere else and imposed themselves on a polyethnic coalition; nothing contemporary tells us that Goths ‘came’ from anywhere at all. Instead, in the crucible of Roman frontier politics, people of very different backgrounds came together under leaders who were defined as Goths in their constant interaction with the Roman empire. The relative clarity of that relationship with the empire led to a stable political system just beyond the frontier in which the material culture we call Sântana-de-Mureş/Černjachov developed. That culture, its agricultural base and its
nomadic hinterland, were the foundations on which different Gothic polities grew up and solidified in the course of the fourth century. Some of those polities are deeply obscure, glimpsed only as shadows in our sources. Others, closer to the frontier, were more heavily implicated in the life of Rome’s provinces and are therefore quite well known to us. The history of these Gothic groups, and the Tervingi in particular, will occupy us in the
next chapter
.

As the last chapter suggested, the Sântana-de-Mureş/Černjachov culture was the material expression of Gothic hegemony in the lower Danube region. That is to say, it was the product of a relative political stability that the imperial support for Gothic hegemony ensured. But the same stability held inherent dangers for the Roman empire. Constantine’s defeat of king Ariaric in 332, and the subsequent thirty years of peace between the empire and the Tervingi, did nothing to retard the growth of Tervingian military power. Thus when a Roman emperor next came to fight a major Gothic war, as Valens did in the later 360s, he confronted an opponent whose power would have surprised Constantine. More shocking still was the Gothic victory at Adrianople which, in 378, wiped out the larger part of the eastern Roman army. For us, it would be very satisfying to know just how Gothic power grew so great in this period. Unfortunately, we know remarkably little about the history of the Tervingian region in the three decades of peace that followed Constantine’s victory – not even whether we should talk about a Tervingian kingdom or kingdoms – and still less about more distant Gothic groups.

As we have already
seen, it is impossible to be sure whether Ariaric was the only Tervingian king involved in the campaigns of 332, and how or whether he was related to later Tervingian rulers. The evidence for the mid fourth century is just as uncertain. In the year 364/365, we hear of more than one Gothic king sending troops to support an
unsuccessful claimant to the imperial throne.
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But in the later 360s and early 370s, our main narrative sources regard one particular Goth,
Athanaric, as the sole leader of the Tervingi, even though they refer to him as
iudex
, ‘judge’, rather than as king. Other sources, however, demonstrate quite clearly that Athanaric was not the only Tervingian leader: we meet royal figures – a queen
Gaatha, and others unnamed – who act in opposition to the
iudex
Athanaric, who is also called
iudex regum
, ‘judge of kings’, in one, admittedly highly rhetorical, source.
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Thus, although a judge was clearly superior to a king, the substantive distinctions between them are altogether unclear, despite reams of scholarly speculation
. Our Graeco-Roman sources were translating a genuine distinction between the Gothic word for king,
reiks
, a cognate of the Latin
rex
, and the Gothic word for judge,
thiudans
. The fact that
thiudans
was used to translate the Greek
basileús
, ‘emperor’, in a Gothic martyrial calendar is a significant clue to the importance of the rank, but how much authority a Tervingian judge wielded over a Tervingian
reiks
, and how permanent it was, will always elude us.
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Regardless, the short-term consequence of Constantine’s Gothic victory was merely to shift the focus of confrontation to a new set of barbarian enemies. In 334, Constantine campaigned against the Sarmatians, probably those who had asked for his help against the Goths in the first place. We are told that the servile population of the Sarmatian lands rebelled against their masters, and that many Sarmatians – 30,000 according to one source – fled into Roman service. Once inside Roman territory, they were divided among the Balkan and Italian provinces.
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Whatever the shadowy events that had preceded the Gothic war, it is clear that the whole structure of the Danubian
barbaricum
had been deeply disturbed, as old hierarchies of power were overturned.
After the
334 campaign, Constantine took the victory title
Sarmaticus Maximus
to accompany his multiple acclamations as
Gothicus Maximus
.
He also took the title
Dacicus Maximus
, which probably represents a claim to have restored Trajan’s province of Dacia
. The Carpathian lands of the old province were certainly not reannexed and subjected to Roman administration, but new garrisons in trans-Danubian
quadriburgia
and other small forts probably justified the claims
. Nevertheless, Constantine was a familiar and frightening force beyond the
limes
, as is illustrated by the large number of barbarian ambassadors present in 335 at the celebration of his
tricennalia
, his thirtieth anniversary on the throne, which is described to us by
Eusebius, an eyewitness.
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