Rome's Gothic Wars: From the Third Century to Alaric (Key Conflicts of Classical Antiquity) (7 page)

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.
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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.

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
.
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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 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.
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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 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.
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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.
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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’.
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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.
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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.
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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.

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.
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