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By Root 343 0

may have helped single out elements in the culture of the barbarians that came to define those barbarians’ own sense of community. In other words, Roman elite discourses about what a Goth was helped to define how people came to identify themselves as Goths, to codify the signs that conveyed Gothicness. This possibility is not as strange as it might seem at first glance, as post-colonial studies of more recent periods have shown. Modern imperialism has had profound effects in shaping the identity of indigenous and subject peoples – it has been shown, for instance, that the codification of a Sikh cultural, as opposed to religious, identity was largely the result of the British need to have a readily identifiable collective group who could be employed in the colonial army.[53] That a parallel process took place along the frontiers of the Roman empire is actually quite plausible: the diverse small groups whom the Romans called Franks or Goths because they lived in a particular place and were recruited into particular units of the Roman army eventually became Franks and Goths because that was how they were described when they had political dealings with the Roman empire, when, for instance, they were recruited into Roman military units or were defeated by an emperor and described in an imperial victory title. As leaders whom Romans identified as Goths grew in strength and their followers grew in numbers, those followers became more like each other, spurred to it by the military intercourse with the empire next door. If one wants to, it is possible to call this transformation ‘ethnogenesis’ – new Gothic polities clearly came into being at the end of the third and the start of the fourth century. But it needs no appeal to Gothic aristocrats or royal lines, nor to ethnic traditions or processes, to explain what happened, and whether these new polities were very aware of being a gens or an ethnos is not something that the evidence can tell us.

The barbaricum had always been a vast and changing place when viewed from the Graeco-Roman perspective. Probably its changeability was fully evident to those who lived in it as well. People moved about in that changing world, and alliances shifted repeatedly, sometimes at a great distance from the Roman frontier where neither Greeks and Romans nor we can have any inkling of precise circumstances. Sometimes we see tiny faded traces of changing patterns of alliance, changing patterns of trade and interaction, often no more than a shift in the routes along which Roman coins and luxury goods were dispersed. In the third century, in the region northwest of the Black Sea, the warrior stratum of a heterogeneous population came together to take advantage of imperial civil war and to reap a harvest of as much loot as speed and violence would permit. By the end of the third century, a few of these warriors were powerful enough to coordinate political control over stretches of territory north of the Danube and Black Sea. Sometimes they fought the empire, sometimes they fought each other, sometimes they served the empire, sometimes they came together and acted for their common interest. At their centre were leaders who were seen to be Goths by the Romans and who perhaps saw themselves as Goths as well. Certainly, in time, after being told repeatedly that they were in fact Goths and leaders of Gothic gentes with whom the empire would fight and make treaties, there was no question in anyone’s mind that they were indeed Goths. Likewise the Sântana-de-Mureş/Černjachov culture must surely be the result of a political stability of long enough standing for stable cultural relations to develop. That stability is attested by the growing political sophistication of the Gothic leaders whom we meet in the course of the fourth century and who form the subject of the next chapter.

Chapter 4 Imperial Politics and the Rise of Gothic Power

Our attempt at explaining Gothic origins has taken us a very long way from our narrative, indeed a long way from the ancient world, and into a discussion of modern intellectual