Rome's Gothic Wars_ From the Third Century to Alaric - Michael Kulikowski [24]
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.
The Problem of Jordanes
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