• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 357 0

at a safe distance from the Greuthungi. Sending an advance guard to observe and perhaps intercept the Huns, he waited at the Dniester, but was surprised by the Huns’ strategic skill. A party of Huns crossed the Dniester in the night, marched down it to Athanaric’s camp and forced him to withdraw into some unnamed mountains, perhaps the foothills of the Carpathians where he had previously sought refuge from Valens. What appears in Ammianus as a tactical retreat was in fact a massive withdrawal, for nearly 200 kilometres separate the Dniester from the line which Athanaric next determined to hold. This ran from north to south above the Danube, just beside the Carpathian foothills, and probably reconstituted the old Roman limes transalutanus, parallel to the river Olt and the frontier of the high imperial province of Dacia. Despite the efforts he put into throwing up earthworks and other defences, Athanaric’s new measures came too late. Though he repulsed a Hunnic attack somewhere in the region, many of his followers had already deserted him. The populi pars maior, ‘the larger part of his people’, left their stubborn leader to fight his own battles, themselves seeking refuge in the empire. The Greuthungi under Alatheus and Saphrax, for their part, disappear from view until 377, several months after many Tervingi were allowed to cross the Danube into the empire.[130]

The Chronology of Gothic Defeats

The foregoing narrative raises more questions than it answers, in large part because it derives exclusively from the last book of Ammianus’ history. His account is heavily telescoped: its stages may be well defined, but its actual chronology is almost totally invisible. Even if Ammianus’ account is substantially correct – and the very linear trajectory he suggests must be suspect – the series of conflicts among Huns, Alans and Goths will have taken much longer than the headlong rush implied by Ammianus. What is more, it is not easy to sustain his simple ‘domino-effect’ theory of causation, with the Huns toppling the Alans onto the Greuthungi onto the Tervingi onto the Romans. To be sure, the emergence of the Huns somewhere between the Caspian and the Black Sea probably did spark far-reaching changes in eastern and central Europe. But it is harder to make the case that the Huns were the proximate cause of Gothic collapse, rather than its catalyst. No named Hun appears on the frontiers of the empire until the very end of the 390s, two full decades after the disaster at Adrianople. Even then, it is another three decades before there is evidence for a Hunnic state, or even far-reaching Hunnic hegemony, in the barbarian lands near the empire where the Greuthungi and Tervingi had once held sway.

These facts suggest that, however much Ammianus may have envisaged Hunnic wolves snapping at the heels of the fleeing Goths, the process was altogether more gradual, not to mention more complex. The time frame of these events is unclear from Ammianus, and wholly beyond reconstruction from other sources, despite the best efforts of scholars. A reasonable guess might place the early confrontations between the Huns and Alans, and then between the Huns, Alans and Greuthungi, as far back as the 350s, but that can be no more than speculation. The only certainty is that the disruptions along the Don river and north of the Sea of Azov had not yet been felt along the lower Danube when Valens made his treaty with Athanaric in 369. As we have seen, the persecution in which Saba was martyred was a response to the campaigns of Valens and Saba’s Passion gives no hint at all of traumatic upheavals to the east. Even though that may be no more than a reflection of the hagiographic genre and its constraints, nothing else in the evidence for Valens’ campaigns shows the slightest awareness of trouble beyond Athanaric’s realm. Thus when all is said and done, our only firm chronological indicator is the arrival of a large number of Tervingi on the banks of the Danube in spring 376.

Tervingian Petition and Imperial Response

Early in the year, before