Rome's Gothic Wars_ From the Third Century to Alaric - Michael Kulikowski [35]
What, then, are we to make of all this? How are we to interpret the origins of the Sântana-de-Mureş/Černjachov culture and the Gothic hegemony with which it coincides chronologically? Is there such a thing as Gothic history before the third century? The answer, at least in my view, is that there is no Gothic history before the third century. The Goths are a product of the Roman frontier, just like the Franks and the Alamanni who appear at the same time. That is clearly demonstrated by contemporary literary evidence, and indeed all the evidence of the fourth and fifth centuries – everything except the sixth-century Jordanes. In the third century, the Roman empire was assaulted from the regions north of the Danube and the Black Sea by large numbers of different barbarian groups, among whom Goths appear for the first time. Not long thereafter, the Goths are clearly the most powerful group in the region, while most of the other barbarian groups with whom they appear in the third century either disappear from the record or are clearly subordinated to them. The most plausible explanation of this evidence is to see one group among the many different barbarians north of the Black Sea establishing its hegemony over the scattered and hitherto disparate population of the region, which was thereafter regularly identified as Gothic by Graeco-Roman observers.
The archaeological evidence of the Sântana-de-Mureş/Černjachov culture makes sense in these terms as well. The rise to prominence of a few strong leaders created a stable political zone in which a single material culture came into being, synthesized from a variety of disparate traditions. None was more important than the others – as the material evidence clearly shows – and there is no need to look for ‘original’ Goths coming from elsewhere to impose their leadership and their identity on others. There were, of course, immigrants into the region where the Sântana-de-Mureş/Černjachov culture arose, from elsewhere in northern and central Europe and from the steppe lands to the east as well. But none of them need themselves have been Goths, because there is no good evidence that Goths existed before the third century.
What Made a Goth a Goth and How Can We Tell?
That leads us back to the sense of collective identity, the problem of telling the difference that we looked at earlier. How was it that these different people knew that they were Goths rather than something else, or did they? How did Greeks and Romans know it? What marked them off as such? In most cases, context alone would have supplied the clues. There may well have been items of emblematic clothing that established insider and outsider status. But that does not mean we can construct a Gothic costume on the basis of grave finds, because in most circumstances, these items were displayed to other Goths and communicated information about status within the community, not about relations to those outside it. Language probably made a difference, and when Gothic was codified as a written religious language in the fourth century, the use of the Gothic bible will surely have identified its user as a Goth as well as a Christian. But languages can be acquired and many of the philologically Germanic languages spoken in central Europe were mutually intelligible. We have no sources to tell us that specifically Gothic idioms or accents could be used to tell a Goth from a Gepid on the Danube frontier – perhaps they could not. What was it, then, that created a sense of community among the Goths of the later third and the fourth centuries? How was it that they knew what their Greek and Roman observers claim to know – that all these people were Goths?
It is possible that precisely the same Roman elite discourse that is accessible to us nowadays helped cultivate a sense of barbarian collective identity along different stretches of the frontier. Just as contact with the Roman empire shaped, and sometimes created, new social and political hierarchies beyond the frontier, so too Roman ideologies and perceptions