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useful contacts were cultivated. The Passion of Saba is still available to us because of just this sort of letter exchange: a Balkan cleric (either Ascholius of Thessalonica or perhaps more likely a simple priest of the same name) seized the opportunity of Soranus’ appointment and his known connections to Basil to inform the great bishop of church affairs in the Danubian provinces and beyond. Basil, in gracious reply, flatters the author as a ‘trainer of Gothic martyrs’, though we have no way of evaluating the truth of that epithet. Regardless, the dux Soranus was enchanted by the legend of the holy Saba, sending men across the Danube to collect the saint’s relics and ultimately sending them to Cappadocia, where they would thenceforth rest. The accidental connection of Gothic Christianity and Cappadocia, whence Ulfila’s ancestors had been taken more than a century earlier, was thereby perpetuated.

The story of Saba, as portrayed in his Passion, must detain us a little longer, for its incidental details offer the only glimpse of Gothic social history we possess apart from the archaeological remains of the Sântana-de-Mureş/Černjachov culture. Saba, we are told, was a villager somewhere in Gothia, perhaps in the region just to the southeast of the Carpathians. He was a Nicene rather than a homoean Christian, and may have been a cantor or lector in the local church (it is not altogether clear whether the reference to his “singing God’s praises in the church” should be given such a technical meaning). The Passion distinguishes several phases of persecution by the Gothic megistanes – ‘lords’ or ‘chiefs’, perhaps a direct reference to the Gothic king Rothesteus mentioned later in the text, perhaps to his more important followers. In both phases, these megistanes tested the loyalty of the villagers by forcing them to eat sacrificial meat. The first time this happened, the pagans in Saba’s village decided to trick the supervising officials by substituting meat that had not been sacrificed to the pagan gods for meat that had been. For us, this demonstrates the integration of Gothic Christians into village life and the willingness of their fellow villagers to unite against authority from outside the village, however legitimate it was.

For Greek contemporaries reading the Passion, however, it was Saba’s actions that proved his sanctity: refusing to go along with the deception, he made a conspicuous show of rejecting the meat altogether, and thus provoked his fellow villagers into exiling him from the village. He was allowed back before long, but promptly stirred up further trouble for himself and the other Christians of the village. When a Gothic noble came to the village for a second time to supervise the consumption of the sacrificial meat, the pagan villagers were going to swear, while eating it, that there were no Christians in the village. Once again, Saba revealed himself and refused to play along. But when the villagers swore that Saba was a man of no account, possessing ‘nothing but the clothes he wears’, the Gothic lord did no more than order his expulsion from the gathering, on the grounds that a man with no property could neither help nor harm. That response is strong evidence for the essentially political nature of the persecution in Gothic territory: powerful Gothic converts might be a threat, potentially in league with the emperor; a man like Saba was at worst a conspicuous nuisance.

Yet in the final phase of the persecution, Saba’s obstinacy reached a pitch that provoked the martyrdom he so clearly craved. Saba was en route to another village to celebrate Easter with a priest named Gouththikas, when a miraculous fall of snow prevented his going forward and turned him back to celebrate the feast in his own village with his fellow Christian, the priest Sansalas. Three days after Easter, Atharidus, the son of the Gothic king Rothesteus, arrived in the village with an entourage, specifically to arrest Sansalas. Saba, found in his company, was likewise arrested, but while Sansalas was held captive to face a higher authority,