Rome's Gothic Wars_ From the Third Century to Alaric - Michael Kulikowski [27]
Less fortunately, however, ethnogenesis-theory has permitted its proponents to maintain the historicity of Jordanes’ migration stories, treating them not as a tribal migration but rather as the ethnic memory of a small noble group, particularly the Amal family of Theodoric. The only recent treatment of Gothic history to dissent from the Vienna school and its focus on aristocratic traditions is that of Peter Heather. But Heather, too, accepts the basic historicity of Jordanes’ migration narrative, viewing it as evidence for the large-scale migration of a free Gothic population whose size was such that its ‘Gothic-ness’ was widely understood by adult male Goths. Thus for both Heather and Wolfram, as for many earlier scholarly generations, the story of the Goths starts in a distant northern land, far from the Roman frontier, whence either migration or ‘ethnic processes’ bring the Goths or the Gothic identity to the edges of the Roman world. For both, in other words, the controlling narrative is that of Jordanes.
Historical Method and Jordanes’ Gothic History
But how much faith does Jordanes really deserve? Is he any more reliable on events long past than are other sixth-century Byzantine authors? And, if he is, are his northern migration stories any more reliable than the derivation of Goths from the biblical Gog and Magog? That biblical ancestry was commonly accepted by Greek and Latin writers from the fourth century onwards, and Jordanes himself refers to it.[38] Why should Jordanes’ migration story be more credible than his story that the Egyptian king Vesosis made war upon the Gothic king Tanausis, who defeated him and chased him all the way back to the Nile?[39] Along with many other changes in our understanding of ancient historical texts, the past two decades have witnessed a realization that we need to take each of them as a whole, reading it in context and in its entirety. We cannot simply pick and choose among the evidence offered by a text on the grounds of its seeming plausible or ‘historical’. We must, on the contrary, demonstrate why, in the whole context in which it appears, a particular piece of evidence is authentic.
There is no way to do that with the origin stories in Jordanes. It is possible that Jordanes, via Cassiodorus, had access to genuine stories told by sixth-century Goths about their distant past; it is also possible that such stories entered Jordanes through a mysterious historian named Ablabius whom he mentions, but who is otherwise unknown.[40] That the Goths told such stories is likely a priori and probably confirmed by Jordanes’ explicit mention of ancient Gothic songs.[41] Yet even if any one of these lines of transmission is real and the migration from the north was genuinely believed by sixth-century Goths, that does not make it true, any more than the famous origin story of Romulus and Remus is true because Romans in the third century B.C. believed it to be. As modern anthropological studies have shown, oral transmission can preserve astonishingly accurate nuggets of historical data, but the context in which it does so is always distorted. Without outside controls, we have no way of telling which, if any, element of an orally transmitted story might be true. Most of the time – as here – that outside control simply does not exist.
Because of all this, we are not justified in taking Jordanes’ Getica as the narrative foundation for our own Gothic histories. One of the most important differences