Rome's Gothic Wars_ From the Third Century to Alaric - Michael Kulikowski [64]
The Huns of Ammianus appeared from the distant East. For him, they are bipedes bestias, ‘two-legged beasts’: they live on horseback and cannot walk normally as other men do, they scar their children’s faces and drink only mare’s milk, they never cook their food, but rather place raw meat between their thighs and the backs of their horses in order to warm it up.[126] Eunapius once reported something similar, for Zosimus tells us that Huns could not fight on foot because they even slept on horseback.[127] Whereas scholars once took this evidence very seriously, it is now generally agreed that almost every element in Ammianus’ description can be traced to older ethnographic traditions, often stretching back as far as Herodotus, 800 years earlier. Ammianus, we may be fairly certain, had never seen a Hun and nor had most of his readers, who would instead envisage the Huns as the historian intended them to – a patchwork of ethnic stereotypes stitched together to make a composite, but suitably barbarous, whole.
For all that we must distrust it, Ammianus’ account may simply be retailing the sort of rumours that were all most Romans ever heard of events beyond the frontier.[128] His own lack of certain knowledge must explain why his narrative of the Hunnic onslaught lacks any chronological markers. The Huns appear suddenly, at some unspecified time, and overcome the Alans who dwell between the Don and the Caspian. Unlike the Huns, these Alans had long been known to Graeco-Roman ethnography. They made periodic incursions into Roman territory, but were for the most part a greater threat to Persia than to Rome. As early as the second century, Arrian (c. 86–160), the Hadrianic governor of Cappadocia and famous historian of Alexander, had written a tactical manual, the Order of Battle against the Alans, explaining how a Roman army should be disposed in order to repel the charge of Alanic cavalry. Arrian was a keen observer, but even in his own time, they had been confounded with ethnographic stereotypes in existence since the time of Herodotus, and his sketch of their tactics is not very informative. By the fourth century, Ammianus’ sketch of the Alans does little more than nod towards the conventional Graeco-Roman image of the horse-nomad. Starting from these Huns and Alans, Ammianus narrates a simple chain reaction, one group of barbarians pushing against the next until eventually the massed Tervingi appear on the banks of the Danube.
The Defeats of Ermanaric and Athanaric
The Alans, so we are told, joined forces with the Huns after being defeated by them. In the company of their new Hunnic masters, they went on to assault the borders of the Gothic Greuthungi. These Greuthungi were led by the ‘most warlike’ king Ermanaric, whom we met briefly in the last chapter. Ermanaric determined to make a stand against his enemies, but to no avail. In the end, he committed suicide rather than face the coming horrors. A new Greuthungian king, Vithimir, succeeded him, and like his predecessor determined to make a stand on the battlefield. Unlike his predecessor, he lost his life in battle. Thereafter, his little son Videric was made king, but two duces – a generic term which Ammianus uses for subordinate commanders – acted as the new king’s guardians and seem to have taken Greuthungian affairs into their own hands. These duces, named Alatheus and Saphrax, led the Greuthungi of Videric westwards to the Dniester river. There, according to Ammianus, their plight came to the notice of the Tervingi and their iudex Athanaric.[129]
Athanaric, Valens’ old enemy, advanced with an army to the banks of the Dniester, where he encamped