Universal empires.

Dachs said:

I'm not a genuine historian, FP, but while most of what you've pointed out about the constructed history of the Goths is essentially correct, the Romans did identify some of the groups that invaded the Balkan provinces of the Empire in the third century as "Goths".

There are some problems with precisely how closely some of these groups are associated with "Goths", it's true. Unfortunately, I don't know this period very well, so it's hard for me to give specifics. But many of the groups subsequently referred to as "Goths" in the third century were originally referred to by other names and only acquired the "Goth" sobriquet later. Greek writers almost always called the third-century invaders "Skythoi", with smatterings of other names like "Boranoi" and "Boradoi" by late historians. And with Roman ethnography the shambles it was, it's certainly not unreasonable to take the position that most if not all of the identifications that Roman historians made were worthless even when they did assign a nonstandard name to a given group.

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On the subject, it's interesting how the Roman historian Ammianus writes about the Goths when they defeat the Romans at Adrianople - if you read his account, it's full of horse archers, attacks by massed hordes, and wagon circles, just like you'd expect from an army of nomads like the Huns or Scythians. As I mentioned in passing earlier, the Goths are unusual in that we can actually place them on top of identified archaeological material from the 3rd century; we know that the Roman sources called the people living there 'Goths', and we know that the people living there left a particular set of things in the ground. Those people are nearly all farmers, living in dense, permanent villages which sometimes got large and elaborate - one or two even have buildings imitating Roman country houses, complete with columns and glass windows. They didn't have a lot of horses, except for the aristocracy. Again, you can't say that this material is 'Gothic', because we have no idea how anybody living in it saw themselves, or used their possessions as part of that - we do know, however, that the people called 'Goths' by the Romans in the 3rd century were using this stuff.

Now the Goths of Adrianople are the descendants of these people, after fleeing across the Danube, being starved in Roman internment camps, and then revolting against the empire. If anything, they should have lost their horses, not turned into a horde of cavalry from an essentially pedestrian society. So the Romans clearly played up (or just invented) stereotypical features that they were used to seeing in scary, murdering barbarians to make the story go as they were expecting it - you can't separate the bits like that from the genuine facts, even if you assume that all history-writing and propaganda must bear some relation to the truth. I'd agree with your suggestion to admit that we just don't know, rather than trying to bash the evidence into something which sounds convincing.

How contemporary are the sources referring to them as Goths?

Roman sources are pretty much contemporary, or at least use that name in sources written before the Goths entered the empire. The first Goth we have calling his people as such is late sixth century, so pretty much two centuries after that happened.

So what I'm seeing from this is that the "Goths" is more or less as valid a term as "the Huns"...which strangely disappoints me for some reason.

All I really know is that steppe nomads are cool, man.

All barbarians are the same