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between the present book and other recent studies of Gothic history is its evaluation of Jordanes on the same terms as any other Byzantine author of the sixth century. If we take him on those terms, we realize that he has very limited information about, and very limited understanding of, fourth- and fifth-century events, particularly those in the western part of the empire. Where we can discover the source for a particular piece of Jordanes’ evidence, or where his evidence finds corroboration elsewhere, then we can use it with appropriate caution. That is the case, for instance, with the third-century Gothic chiefs Argaith and Guntheric, whose sack of Marcianople was mentioned early in chapter one: Jordanes’ information almost certainly comes from the reliable third-century historian Dexippus, and a corruption of the chieftains’ names is attested in a fourth-century text, the Historia Augusta, which also drew on Dexippus. In such circumstances, there can be little objection to accepting Jordanes’ evidence as fundamentally authentic. Yet where Jordanes is our sole voice, and where we have no evidence for his source or its reliability, we must leave him to one side. That is clearly the path of caution when it comes to Gothic migration stories, which rest solely on Jordanes. No other source makes this long Gothic history probable.[42] Rather than migrants from the distant north, it is more likely that the Goths who entered imperial history in the earlier third century were a product of circumstances on the imperial frontier.

As we saw in the last chapter, powerful barbarian polities tended to arise on the Roman frontiers in response to the existence of the empire, a function of the changes which complex and imperial cultures can work on neighbouring cultures that are less socially stratified and less technologically advanced. These were the social forces that created the coalitions of the Franks and Alamanni along the Rhine and the upper Danube in the third century, and we have suggested that the Goths on the lower Danube should be understood in the same way. Before we can go on to address that question in more detail, we need to think about how the Goths or any other barbarian group differed from other ones. More particularly, we need to consider the ways in which both Greek and Roman writers, and we ourselves, go about ‘telling the difference’, as Walter Pohl has put it.[43]

Barbarian Identity: Graeco-Roman Ethnography

How do we tell a Goth from a Frank or an Alaman from a Sarmatian? How did the Romans do so? In more abstract terms, how does anyone tell themselves and those with whom they identify from other people with whom they do not? The definition of difference was a pressing concern for Greek and Roman writers, for whom ethnography – the literary description of non-Greeks and non-Romans – was so well known a genre that Virgil could parody it in his fourth Georgic with a poetic ethnography of bees. Modern scholars, in trying to explain the ancient sources with all their myriad names of peoples, strive both to understand the criteria by which ancient writers told their subjects apart, and to establish criteria by which we can do the same thing. From these two questions there follows a third: how did the different peoples we meet in our sources tell themselves apart from their neighbours? This question is much more difficult, because none of the peoples to the north of the Graeco-Roman world left behind written sources from which we might extract such information. Archaeology, if we can use it for this purpose, might provide an answer, but as we shall see, reading ethnic or group identity in the archaeological evidence is very difficult in most circumstances. Let us, however, take the contents of the ancient literary sources first.

The three words Greek and Roman sources most often use to describe barbarian groups are gens, natio and ethnos (gentes, nationes, and ethne in the plural). The first two words are Latin, the third Greek, and the modern English derivatives of each word are plain to see. Theoretically,