Rome's Gothic Wars: From the Third Century to Alaric (Key Conflicts of Classical Antiquity) (8 page)

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.

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.
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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.
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That the Goths told such stories is likely
a priori
and probably confirmed by Jordanes’ explicit mention of ancient Gothic songs.
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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.

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]

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.

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.
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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
Germani
felt 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.