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By Root 299 0

a product of fifth-century politics within the Roman and Hunnic empires, and the names are retrojection from the sixth-century text of Jordanes: they bear no demonstrable relationship to fourth-century divisions. The Gothic groups that emerged in the fourth century, after Adrianople, and in the fifth century, after the collapse of the Hunnic empire, were of thoroughly mixed origin, with connections to several different Gothic polities of the fourth century. Of these, the Tervingian polity is moderately well attested, but our knowledge of the Greuthungi comes almost entirely from a few pages of Ammianus Marcellinus. He, in turn, only mentions the Greuthungi when he describes the destruction of their kingdom by the Huns and the death of their king Ermanaric.

Ammianus actually knew very little about the Greuthungian kingdom. He tells us that Ermanaric ruled ‘lands rich and wide’ and was a ‘most warlike king and, on account of his many and various deeds, feared by the neighbouring peoples’.[108] That, in full, is the only contemporary evidence for Ermanaric’s kingdom that exists. Jordanes, however, expands that account into an elaborate list of peoples over whom Ermanaric held sway, drawing on traditions of classical ethnography and extending this fictional empire as far as northern Russia. Utter nonsense, Jordanes’ ‘empire of Ermanaric’ warrants none of the attention given it by otherwise serious scholars desperate for any scrap of information on the early Goths. Apart from the single line of Ammianus, the extent of Ermanaric’s power must remain a mystery to us. After his kingdom collapsed in the face of a Hunnic attack, we learn of several different groups of Greuthungi whom we cannot positively identify as having once been Ermanaric’s followers. That fact suggests that, just as different factions are known amongst the Tervingi in the face of Valens’ invasions of the 360s, so amongst the Greuthungi, Ermanaric was not the single source of power. The archaeological evidence we have looked at offers no help, and there is no material difference between the Sântana-de-Mureş/Černjachov territories in which the Tervingi were dominant and those in which Ermanaric’s Greuthungi lived. We must, in other words, content ourselves with only a very imperfect sense of Gothic history between the victory of Constantine in 332 and that of Valens in 369, to which we can now turn.

Valentinian and Valens

As with so much of the history of the Roman frontier, Valens’ Gothic wars are tied up in the internal conflicts of the empire, and particularly the legacy left to him by his predecessors Constantius Ⅱ and Julian. Julian, when we last saw him, had been appointed caesar by Constantius, in the hope that he would restore the Rhine frontier which had been so badly weakened by the usurpation of Magnentius. In 359, after many successes against Franks and Alamanni in the Rhineland, Julian was declared augustus by his troops. Both he and Constantius prepared for civil war, the latter bringing his Persian campaigns to an abrupt end in order to deal with his upstart cousin. A full-blown conflict was only averted by Constantius’ timely death, of natural causes, in 361. Julian immediately launched into a hugely ambitious program of reform, aimed both at reversing the Christianization of the Constantinian empire, and at fulfilling the dreams of his uncle and cousin and conquering Persia. After initial successes that brought the army to the walls of the Persian capital at Ctesiphon, Julian’s campaign ended in shambles; he himself died of a wound received in a sudden ambush. The army elected an ineffectual officer named Jovian (r. 363–364) to get them out of Persia, which he did at the cost of a humiliating peace-treaty that ceded several important Mesopotamian towns to the Persians. Jovian, a heavy drinker, soon died of self-indulgence, and the army high command elected Valentinian (r. 364–375) as emperor. Valentinian, a protector like the historian Ammianus, in turn appointed his younger brother Valens (r. 364–378) as his co-emperor.

The brothers