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By Root 343 0

‘barbarian’ to the viewer, be they peaked ‘Phrygian’ caps, trousers for Germans and Persians, or hair worn in a ‘Suevic’ topknot. Our ancient writers were fully aware that their classificatory categories were problematical. For that reason, even though they believed that such categories could indeed be used to separate gens from gens, Greek and Roman authors also deployed ethnographic categories as broad existential sets, into which new or newly encountered barbarians could be slotted as necessary, according to whichever classificatory criteria seemed most empirically appropriate at a given time. Categories like German, Celt or Scythian were very broad, their definitions open to discussion. It was, for instance, a very long time before the distinction between Germans and Celts came to be generally accepted among Graeco-Roman authors, and for many years Germans and Celts were regularly taken to be the same. Or again, while in the third century Dexippus could classify Alamanni as Scythians, no fourth-century author could do the same because the Alamanni were clearly fixed as Germani by then.[45] What all this means for us is a constant confrontation with the limitations of our Greek and Roman sources for the barbarians. Their belief in an eternal barbarian type explains the constant identification of the Goths with Herodotus’ Scythians, and also explains why fourth-century authors can freely combine ancient or poetic barbarians like the Cimmerians or Gelonians with the very real Iuthungi and Franci of their own day.

These conceptual contradictions, or cognitive disjunctures, are pervasive and because they are all we have, they interpose a real barrier between us and the barbarians. We lack nearly any sense of whether or not such Graeco-Roman categories meant anything to the people who were fixed within them. In the case of such meta-categories as German or Scythian the answer, from all we can tell, is no. Nothing in our sources, even filtered through an interpretatio romana as they are, suggests that the later empire’s Germani felt any kinship amongst themselves, or that Goths and Sarmatians, both Scythians in our sources, were aware of any similarities between themselves. We are on much less certain grounds with more specific ethnonyms – Iuthungi, Iazyges, or Tervingi, for example – which seem to designate groups that shared a sense of kinship and engaged in common actions for that reason. Unlike German or Scythian, these names for smaller groups may have been generated by their users themselves, rather than imposed from outside by Greeks and Romans.

Even if that is true, however, it tells us very little about how a sense of identity was constituted within or between barbarian groups. How did the Tervingi tell themselves apart from the Greuthungi, who both appear in our fourth-century sources as political divisions of the Goths? In other words, can we get at barbarians’ own criteria of identity and alterity? Language must surely have been important in creating a sense of alterity. Yet despite the deep rooted nineteenth-century conviction that belonging to the same language family produces some sort of shared identity, too many different gentes spoke mutually intelligible languages for a common tongue to contribute much to a sense of identity. Religion may have been more significant – some of our ethnonyms, for instance that of the Suevi, may originally have referred not to political or kinship units, but rather to a variety of groups who shared sacred cult sites. Unfortunately, we have virtually no access to authentic traces of barbarian religion, certainly not enough to chart what function, if any, it had in defining the boundaries of identity and alterity. What of dress? Clothing does have, and has always had, a very important function in expressing identity and alterity. Precisely because it is instantly visible, clothing can serve an emblematic function for those in a position to decode what any particular item of dress, or any combination of such items, means. Greeks and Romans were fully aware of the importance of