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and Scott Bradbury, Select Letters of Libanius (2004). Gregory Thaumaturgus, the documents bearing on Ulfila, the Passio Sabae, and the other Gothic martyrologies are all translated in an excellent collection by Peter Heather and John Matthews, The Goths in the Fourth Century (Liverpool, 1991). The major Greek church historians, unfortunately, are not well served in English translation: Socrates and Sozomen are available in the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers (second series, vol. 2), but the translations were made from old and inaccurate editions, as was the version of Philostorgius in Bohn’s Library (London, 1855).

Among the secondary literature, Peter Heather’s Goths and Romans, 332–489 (Oxford, 1991) is the best treatment of its subject available in any language, even though my interpretation of motive and causation in Gothic history differs substantially from his. Unfortunately, Heather’s more recent works, The Goths (Oxford, 1996) and The Fall of the Roman Empire (Oxford, 2005), restate the same arguments as the first book and shear them of all their nuance, advocating instead a neo-Romantic vision of mass migrations of free Germanic peoples. Heather’s idée fixe – that the Huns were responsible for the fall of the Roman empire and the end of the ancient world – is simple, elegant, and wrong. The literature on ethnogenesis is vast, but Herwig Wolfram’s History of the Goths (1979; English trans., Berkeley, 1988) is the most widely available. Its mixture of outlandish philological speculation, faulty documentation, and oracular pronouncement remains very influential. Less bizarre, if wholly derivative, accounts of ethnogenesis are available in works by Wolfram’s Anglophone apostles: see especially Patrick Geary’s contribution to Late Antiquity: A Guide to the Post-Classical World, edited by Peter Brown, G. W. Bowersock and Oleg Grabar. Far better are the many works of Walter Pohl, the best of which are not available in English; however, see his contributions to the Transformation of the Roman World series (in Strategies of Distinction, 1998; Kingdoms of the Empire, 1998; Regna and Gentes, 2003). Among older literature in English, the work of E. A. Thompson must have pride of place. His History of Attila and the Huns (Oxford, 1948), Early Germans (Oxford, 1965), Visigoths in the Time of Ulfila (Oxford, 1966), and Goths in Spain (Oxford, 1969) were all pioneering, even if their mixture of rigorous empiricism and Marxist dogma reads oddly today. J. M. Wallace-Hadrill’s ‘Gothia and Romania’, reprinted in The Long-Haired Kings (Oxford, 1962), also broke new ground in its day.

Much of the most important work on the Goths was done in more general studies of the later Roman empire. J. B. Bury’s Later Roman Empire (London, 1923) can still be read with great profit and A. H. M. Jones’ massive Later Roman Empire, 284–602 (Oxford, 1964) remains the basic work of reference. Several useful articles appear in the new volumes 13 and 14 of the revised Cambridge Ancient History. The only good introduction to the third century in English is David S. Potter, The Roman Empire at Bay, AD 180–395 (London, 2004), though its treatment of the fourth century is less reliable. For the tetrarchy, Stephen Williams’ Diocletian and the Roman Recovery (London, 1985) is generally sound, but the key text is T. D. Barnes’ Constantine and Eusebius (Cambridge, MA, 1981). Hugh Elton’s Warfare in Roman Europe (Oxford, 1996) is useful on the Roman approach to fighting barbarians. For the reign of Constantius, T. D. Barnes’ complex and difficult Athanasius and Constantius (Cambridge, MA, 1993) provides the only reliable narrative in English. For Valens, we now have Noel Lenski’s Failure of Empire (Berkeley, 2002); while it is perhaps too kind to Valens, its approach to Gothic history betters Heather on such points as Gothic conversion. Simon MacDowall, Adrianople AD 378 (New York, 2001) is an excellent, if speculative, reconstruction of the battle aimed at the hobbyist audience. No reliable modern study of Theodosius has been published in English.

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