Barbarian Tides by Walter Goffart

Author:Walter Goffart [Walter Goffart]
Language: eng
Format: epub

A Medley of Barbarian Peoples

Introduction

The barbarians in the age of Rome’s fall were not Germans even though they have long been called so. None of them in late antiquity, either as individuals or as groups, ever appealed to this name as though it were theirs. They did not imagine that the words coming out of their mouths were variants of a common Germanic tongue or that the customs they practiced proceeded from a common Germanic civilization. Lombards, Franks, Goths, and all the others did not studiously pore over Tacitus’s Germania and take care that their individual and collective behavior should conform to the package of mores described by the Roman ethnographer. German Altertumskunde and Tacitus’s Germania are among the things we have to unlearn if we wish to come to terms with the encounter of Rome and Christianity with the barbarians of late antiquity. Instead of appealing to ethnosociological abstractions and ostensibly institutional connections, we would do well to pay attention to dynasties and family relationships among the leading elements of society, regardless of nationality, and most of all strive to maintain a tight relationship between what we say and the sources on which it is based.

There is no “prototypical” barbarian people. Neither the Huns nor the Goths nor any other is “representative.” No special group of peoples, not even those whom we lump together as “Germanic,” was singled out by divine providence as its special favorite in the course of events. The northern sector of the Roman frontier contained quite a few peoples that cannot be labeled “Germanic” and nevertheless attracted contemporary attention. The Romano-Britons, stripped of their Roman defenders, considered the Irish and Picts to be their major enemies and eventually imported Saxons from the Continent as military auxiliaries against them. The Picts were still a military menace on the eve of the age of Bede.⁴⁴ Elsewhere, ten Roman emperors fought so hard and often against the Sarmatians that they called themselves “Sarmaticus” in honor of their victories; the Sarmatians were a nomadic people classified by us as “Iranian.”⁴⁵ Aurelian, the Tetrarchs, and Constantine battled the Carpi so strenuously that they called themselves “Carpicus” in honor of their victories; the Carpi were Dacians outside Dacia.⁴⁶ The Moors of North Africa had been a menace to the Roman province and were an even greater one to the Vandals. The modern German masters of Migration Age history have convinced themselves and us that whatever relations involved non-Germans were side shows, incidental to the main act.⁴⁷ Yet the ostensible “main acts” involving Goths, Vandals, and Lombards may be subsidiary to aggressive impulses proceeding from nomadic Alans, Huns, and Avars.⁴⁸ The scanty information available to us does not permit certainties.

Books about barbarians in late antiquity often examine individual peoples one by one. Tacitus included something of this sort in part two of the Germania; so did Beatus Rhenanus, more elaborately, in his 1531 treatise on the Germans. Karl Zeuss rejuvenated the exercise in a famous work called Die Deutschen und die Nachbarstämme (The Germans and the Neighboring Peoples).

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