Rome's Gothic Wars_ From the Third Century to Alaric - Michael Kulikowski [26]
One of several conflicting origin stories recounted by Jordanes tells us that the Goths left ‘Scandza’ in three boats and migrated across the Baltic under king Berig; then Filimer, perhaps the fifth king after Berig, led the army of Goths away from the Baltic and into Scythia near to the Black Sea.[35] Having got the Goths to the Black Sea, Jordanes begins to mention historical names known from Greek and Latin sources closer to the events they record, but these notices are intermingled with all sorts of legendary and pseudo-historical material and Jordanes’ implied chronology is impossible to chart coherently. The important thing, from the point of view of Jordanes, is to work all of the stories from his many different sources into a single linear narrative of Gothic history, in which Gothic heroism and strength is effectively unbeatable until finally subdued by Justinian. He dates the beginning of the Gothic relationship with the Roman empire to the time of Julius Caesar, and reads the narrative of that relationship in sixth-century legal terms as a series of official treaties between Goths and emperor repeatedly broken by one party or the other and then renegotiated.[36] This continuous Gothic history from Scandinavia to the Black Sea to the Balkans and on to Italy is the part of Jordanes’ narrative which modern scholars have striven so hard to sustain. Providing as he does a narrative of Gothic history that pre-dates Greece and Rome, Jordanes’ Getica was every bit as precious to northern humanists as was Tacitus’ Germania. For them, as for modern nationalists, both proved the great antiquity of the German identity. Nowadays, scholars have repudiated such explicitly nationalist aims, but their ongoing reluctance to discard Jordanes’ origin and migration narratives resides in a similar unwillingness to give up our only evidence for a Gothic past that pre-dates contact with the Roman empire.
‘Ethnogenesis’
Even today, some eminent scholars maintain that Jordanes’ testimony is both a valid historical source and a repository of Gothic ethnic traditions. Such arguments are generally couched within discussions of ‘ethnogenesis’, a neologism borrowed from American social science, but now used for the coming into being of a barbarian ethnic group and closely associated with the Viennese historian Herwig Wolfram. Wolfram and his followers argue that barbarian ethnicity was not a matter of genuine descent-communities, but rather of Traditionskerne (‘nuclei of tradition’), small groups of aristocratic warriors who carried ethnic traditions with them from place to place and transmitted ethnic identity from generation to generation; larger ethnic groups coalesced and dissolved around these nuclei of tradition in a process of continuous becoming or ethnic reinvention – ethnogenesis. Because of this, barbarian ethnic identies were evanescent, freely available for adoption by those who might want to participate in them. Parts of this theoretical model are not new: even nationalist historians of the earlier twentieth century knew that the membership of barbarian tribes ebbed and flowed with success or failure, so that the blood kinship which supposedly held them together was partly fictional. The role of noble families in forming the Traditionskern is equally a direct echo of pre-war lordship studies. On the other hand, the impact of the Viennese approach has been enormous and its wide acceptance by a non-specialist audience has made it seem more novel than it is. Until quite recently, popular literature and textbooks on the barbarians were dominated by an essentialist approach