• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 303 0

passage in the Getica.[30] Yet nothing in his extant writings suggests that this Gothic descent had any claim on his sympathies, which were entirely Christian and imperial. Jordanes wrote two works that have survived, the Romana, or Roman History, and the Getica, the accepted short title for his De origine actibusque Getarum, ‘On the Origin and Deeds of the Goths’. He wrote at Constantinople, in Latin as did many of his contemporaries in that capital of the eastern Roman empire. His Getica was written sometime after the year 550, the date of the last allusion detectable in the text, but we do not know how long afterwards. When he wrote, it was as the subject of the emperor Justinian (r. 527–565), who had launched bloody wars of (re-)conquest against three barbarian kingdoms that had grown up in the former western Roman empire during the fifth century. When Jordanes was writing, the Vandal kingdom of Africa had been destroyed by imperial troops, and the Gothic kingdom in Italy was on the brink of total annihilation, an annihilation which the Getica wholeheartedly endorses. Yet despite the clarity of Jordanes’ pro-imperial perspective in the Getica, his Gothic descent has long been thought to offer us a privileged window into the Gothic mind and the ancient Gothic past. This unfortunate assumption is perhaps understandable, but it is further complicated by the textual history of the Getica.

Jordanes and Cassiodorus

Jordanes dedicates his Getica to Castalius, who had asked him to abridge a much larger Gothic history now lost to us – the twelve books on the topic written by the Roman nobleman Cassiodorus.[31] Cassiodorus had served as the praetorian prefect of the Ostrogothic kings of Italy, before giving up on the Gothic cause and going into exile at Constantinople in about 540. Sometime before 533, in his capacity as chief littérateur at the Gothic court of king Theodoric (r. 489–526) and his successor, Cassiodorus had written his Gothic history. As befitted the work of a loyal courtier, this history placed at its apex Theodoric and his dynasty, the Amals, showing how a continuous line of Gothic kings had reached down to the great Theodoric. Not one word of Cassiodorus’ history remains to us in its own right. Jordanes’ Getica survives, but its relationship to Cassiodorus is a matter of controversy. Jordanes himself tells us that he had three days’ access to Cassiodorus’ Gothic history when that author’s household steward let him read them. When Jordanes composed the Getica, he had no copy of Cassiodorus available and needed instead to work from memory. Jordanes says that although he cannot reproduce Cassiodorus’ words, he can reproduce his argument and the factual substance of his account. On the other hand, Jordanes also tells us that he added to Cassiodorus an introduction and conclusion, many items from his own learning, and other things drawn from Greek and Latin writers.[32]

So how close does Jordanes stand to Cassiodorus? Many sixth-century authors – for instance the Greek Zosimus who probably wrote not long before Jordanes – did nothing but cut and paste sections from earlier authors into their own narrative. Jordanes claims not to have done this, but perhaps he is not to be trusted on that point. Perhaps his Getica is nothing more than a pale shadow of Cassiodorus’ lost history. If that is so, and we do indeed have access to Cassiodorus by way of Jordanes, then we are suddenly in the orbit of the greatest barbarian king of the sixth century, and perhaps in touch with the traditions and memories of his family and his court. The relationship between Jordanes and Cassiodorus is thus a matter of real importance – if one wants to believe the stories of Gothic origins and migrations that one finds in Jordanes, then making him little more than a conduit for Cassiodorus is an invaluable device. Jordanes, of course, tells us all sorts of stories about the Goths, placing their origins some 2,030 years before the time of his writing, and linking them to Biblical, Greek, Roman, and Near Eastern history in a bizarre melange