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of Sarmatian and other groups formed small communities at the edges of the Roman provinces, and were generally managed in the same way that the empire managed any other barbarians, with periodic subsidy and periodic military punishment. This was how Trajan had dealt with the Roxolani and Costoboci – two of the region’s minor barbarian groups – before, during, and after his Dacian wars. Yet it is quite clear that the barbarians of the lower Danube and the Ukrainian steppe were not, in the first and second centuries, perceived as a threat on the same scale as were those of the middle Danube or upper Rhine. Instead, these regions became really important to imperial strategy only in the course of the third century – exactly when we first begin to hear of Goths. Why should the chronology of barbarian history on the lower Danube differ so much from that of other European frontiers? The answer must lie in large part with the relative pace of provincialization in the region.

The Dacian Frontier and the Rise of the Goths

The Balkan and Danubian provinces were among the last to be added to the Roman empire. Even after Augustus had fixed a line of communication along the Danube to connect eastern and western empires, the mountainous Balkan interior developed only slowly for generations. The series of forts along the frontier was not backed up by the same development of urbanism and road networks as in Gaul, which meant that models of provincial behaviour were not diffused as quickly in the Balkans as they were in frontier provinces further west in the empire. Indeed, it was not until after 107 – when Trajan created the province of Dacia across the Danube in Transylvania and the Carpathians – that the provincialization of the land south of the Danube began in earnest. The existence of the new Dacian province acted on the people of its periphery in the same way that Roman Gaul affected barbarian Germania – it was a spur to the rise of more structured social organization beyond its borders. Archaeological evidence from the lower Danubian regions is not as abundant as it is for the Rhineland and Upper Danube, but we know that the growth of a provincial Roman culture in Dacia followed the same rhythms as those documented with such precision in Gaul. That is to say, by the end of the second century and within two generations of the conquest, a recognizably Roman provincial culture had developed in a long arc across what is now modern Romania. The reigns of Septimius Severus (r. 193–211) and his immediate successors represent the height of Roman material culture in Dacia.[28] It is thus no coincidence that the culture of the steppe lands east of Dacia began to grow more complex in the third century, nor that barbarian confederacies capable of threatening Roman provinces grew up shortly thereafter: this is exactly what had happened in the case of the Franks along the lower Rhine, and with the Alamanni on the upper Rhine and upper Danube. In other words, even though the absolute chronology of change along the lower Danube differs from that further west, it obeys the same relative pace of change: two or three generations after Roman provincial culture began to develop inside the frontier, new and more sophisticated barbarian polities appeared along the periphery, prompted by both the example of Roman provincial life and the threat of the Roman army. The rise of the Goths should be understood within this interpretative framework, as a product of the provincialization of Dacia and the lower Danube provinces.

That, however, leaves open the question of migration. Even readers with a very casual interest in ancient history will have heard of ‘the barbarian invasions’ or ‘the Germanic migrations’ and will probably remember that Rome fell because of them. Popular histories are filled with maps that use arrows to plot barbarian migrations from the distant north and east to the doorstep of the Roman empire and beyond. The Goths always feature prominently on such maps and usually come with a very long arrow attached to their migration. Even