Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- MAPS
- ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
- Prologue BEFORE THE GATES OF ROME
- 1 THE GOTHS BEFORE CONSTANTINE
- 2 THE ROMAN EMPIRE AND BARBARIAN SOCIETY
- 3 THE SEARCH FOR GOTHIC ORIGINS
- 4 IMPERIAL POLITICS AND THE RISE OF GOTHIC POWER
- 5 GOTHS AND ROMANS, 332–376
- 6 THE BATTLE OF ADRIANOPLE
- 7 THEODOSIUS AND THE GOTHS
- 8 ALARIC AND THE SACK OF ROME
- Epilogue THE AFTERMATH OF ALARIC
- GLOSSARY OF ANCIENT SOURCES
- BIOGRAPHICAL GLOSSARY
- FURTHER READING
- NOTES
- INDEX
3 - THE SEARCH FOR GOTHIC ORIGINS
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 August 2015
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- MAPS
- ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
- Prologue BEFORE THE GATES OF ROME
- 1 THE GOTHS BEFORE CONSTANTINE
- 2 THE ROMAN EMPIRE AND BARBARIAN SOCIETY
- 3 THE SEARCH FOR GOTHIC ORIGINS
- 4 IMPERIAL POLITICS AND THE RISE OF GOTHIC POWER
- 5 GOTHS AND ROMANS, 332–376
- 6 THE BATTLE OF ADRIANOPLE
- 7 THEODOSIUS AND THE GOTHS
- 8 ALARIC AND THE SACK OF ROME
- Epilogue THE AFTERMATH OF ALARIC
- GLOSSARY OF ANCIENT SOURCES
- BIOGRAPHICAL GLOSSARY
- FURTHER READING
- NOTES
- INDEX
Summary
GOTHIC HISTORY, AS IT APPEARS IN EVERY MODERN AC-count, is a story of migration. Traditionally, it begins in Scandinavia, moves to the southern shores of the Baltic around the mouth of the Vistula river, and then onwards to the Black Sea. Depending upon what study one reads, one can find it stated that written sources, archaeology, and linguistic evidence all demonstrate that just such a migration took place, if not out of Scandinavia then at least out of Poland. In fact, there is just a single source for this extended story of Gothic migration, the Getica of Jordanes, written in the middle of the sixth century A.D., hundreds of years after the events it purports to record. Other sources, literary and archaeological, have been brought in to corroborate, correct or supplement Jordanes' narrative, but his story of Gothic migration underpins nearly every modern treatment of the Goths, consciously or not. And yet Jordanes, as we shall see, is not merely unreliable, he is deeply misleading. To understand why his satisfyingly linear, but ultimately implausible, account is still so pervasive, we have to understand why the idea of Gothic roots stretching back into the deepest mists of prehistory has played so important a role in conceptualizing the northern European past. As we shall see, for the past 500 years the Goths have played an indispensable part in imagining a northern European history untouched by the Graeco-Roman world.
THE NORTHERN RENAISSANCE AND THE GERMANIC PAST
In 1425, the Italian humanist Poggio Bracciolini discovered the only known medieval manuscript of Tacitus' Germania. That discovery, and still more the first printing of the text at Venice around 1470, were watersheds in the search for a northern, non-Roman, and ultimately Gothic, past. The Germania is a short treatise on the peoples and customs of the region that the Romans called Germany – which is to say the whole vast tract of central Europe beyond the Rhine and Danube rivers which was in many ways a mystery to the Romans.
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- Rome's Gothic WarsFrom the Third Century to Alaric, pp. 43 - 70Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2006