Empire of Hope and Tragedy: Jordanes and the Invention of Roman-Gothic History Dissertation Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University By Brian Swain Graduate Program in History The Ohio State University 2014 Dissertation Committee: Timothy Gregory, Co-advisor Anthony Kaldellis Kristina Sessa, Co-advisor Copyright by Brian Swain 2014 Abstract This dissertation explores the intersection of political and ethnic conflict during the emperor Justinian’s wars of reconquest through the figure and texts of Jordanes, the earliest barbarian voice to survive antiquity. Jordanes was ethnically Gothic - and yet he also claimed a Roman identity. Writing from Constantinople in 551, he penned two Latin histories on the Gothic and Roman pasts respectively. Crucially, Jordanes wrote while Goths and Romans clashed in the imperial war to reclaim the Italian homeland that had been under Gothic rule since 493. That a Roman Goth wrote about Goths while Rome was at war with Goths is significant and has no analogue in the ancient record. I argue that it was precisely this conflict which prompted Jordanes’ historical inquiry. Jordanes, though, has long been considered a mere copyist, and seldom treated as an historian with ideas of his own. And the few scholars who have treated Jordanes as an original author have dampened the significance of his Gothicness by arguing that barbarian ethnicities were evanescent and subsumed by the gravity of a Roman political identity. They hold that Jordanes was simply a Roman who can tell us only about Roman things, and supported the Roman emperor in his war against the Goths. In this study, I argue that Jordanes must be appreciated as both Roman and Gothic. His texts reveal an individual negotiating his own dual identity in reaction to the acute crisis of the Gothic War. It is my contention that through his praise for both Goths and Romans, and his incorporation of contrived Gothic origins into the fold of Roman history, Jordanes sought to establish an ii inextricably entwined Roman-Gothic destiny in order to reconcile the two warring peoples with whom he personally identified. This project examines how Jordanes’ multivalent identity informs his conception of both historic and contemporary relations between Goths and Romans, and thereby significantly enhances our ability to interpret Roman-Gothic cultural dynamics, while also advancing debates over barbarian ethnicity. Jordanes provides unparalleled insights into the complex processes that accompanied ethnic confluence and assimilation into the Roman order. This study is also the first to examine Jordanes and a chorus of other authors as interlocutors in an empire-wide polemical discourse on the nature of Gothic rule in Italy and the war that forever halted imperial ambition to reconquer the west. Importantly, at the moment when the emperor Justinian was calling for the extermination of the ‘tyrannical, barbarian’ Goths, Jordanes published a counter-narrative which praised the Goths, challenged the stereotype of Gothic barbarism, and criticized the emperor’s war of aggression. He calls for the establishment of a modus vivendi between Goths and Romans – a desire clearly reflective of his own imbricated sense of self. iii For my father. iv Acknowledgments In a pursuit as seemingly solitary as spending years alone in an office researching and writing on a topic of considerable obscurity, one racks up a surprising number of debts to others. A few words of thanks at the beginning of a dissertation are insufficient repayment. Still, I offer them with great pleasure and sincerity. I express my deepest gratitude to my academic mentors Tim Gregory, Tina Sessa, and Anthony Kaldellis. Tim has provided me a sense of intellectual independence and self-sufficiency, and in the summers I spent with him doing archaeology in Greece, Tim gave me an eye for mentally reconstructing a historical world that is often no longer physically visible. This archaeological skill has informed the way I read ancient texts in no small way. Tina, in her characteristic mix of warmth and grit, has made me a leaner, meaner scholar. She has embodied the part of myself that is ever mindful that my work can always be better. This has meant more to me than I can say. And without Anthony I would have almost certainly bailed out of academia long ago. The selflessness with which he has consistently offered his time and energy for my needs has been humbling, and has inspired me to attempt to do the same for others. Anthony regularly believed that my ideas were right when even I wasn’t so sure. This, more than anything else, has made me a confident thinker. Alexander had Aristotle. I had Anthony. Not bad. I also wish to express my thanks and love to Lillian Stockell. Her patience, unceasing kindness, and general benevolence frame every day of my life. I wouldn’t be much without her. And, finally, I thank my father for instilling in me the guiding principles of my life. Thinking matters. Ideas matter. Imagination matters. v Vita 2002……………………………………………Saint Stephen’s Episcopal School 2006……………………………………………B.A. History, The University of the South 2009……………………………………………M.A. History, The Ohio State University 2006 - 2014……...……………………………. Graduate Teaching Associate, Department of History, The Ohio State University Publications ‘Jordanes and Virgil: A Case Study of Intertextuality in the Getica’, Classical Quarterly, (2009) ‘Goths and Gothic Identity in the Ostrogothic Kingdom’, in J. Arnold, S. Bjornlie, and K. Sessa, eds., Brill’s Companion to Ostrogothic Italy (forthcoming) (Leiden, 2016) Fields of Study Major Field: History vi Table of Contents Abstract……………………………………………………………………………………ii Acknowledgements…………………………………………..…………………………...iv Vita……………………………………………………………………..………………….v Introduction………………………………………………………………………………..1 Chapter One: The Question of Cassiodorus I: Methodological Problems………………...8 Chapter Two: The Question of Cassiodorus II: Exegetical Problems…………………...37 Chapter Three: Genre and Structure in the Getica and Romana………………………...79 Chapter Four: The ‘Gothic Question’: Contemporary Discourse Between East and West………………………….........................................................................................130 Chapter Five: The Gothic War and the Politics of Jordanes’ Historical Corpus……….217 Bibliography……………………………………………………………………………323 vii Introduction This is a study of the sixth-century historian Jordanes, his texts, and his world. Despite his prominent status a source of information about Gothic history, Jordanes the individual and Jordanes the purposive historian generally have not been topics of inquiry. Most commentators over the last two centuries have considered him merely an epitomator or, often worse, a plagiarist. His texts, known to posterity as the Getica, the only discrete account of Gothic history from the ancient literary record, and the Romana, a breviary of Roman history from Creation up to 551, have usually not been thought to be his own, but rather summarized versions of other works that are now lost. Jordanes, as an author, was deemed irrelevant. His only significance was as a receptacle of other writers’ ideas. The present study argues against this approach; that Jordanes’ texts were original, that he was in command of what he wrote, and that he imbued his two histories with the political and cultural imperatives of his own time. Jordanes is remarkable for being the earliest barbarian voice to survive antiquity. His is the first recorded testimony from one of Europe’s indigenous ‘barbarian’ peoples, and the only one to come from within the Greco-Roman world. This is extraordinarily significant. Every other written account about barbarians issues from Greek or Roman authors who had no cultural connections to these peoples. Jordanes, a Goth writing about Goths, breaks this paradigm. But Jordanes was also Roman. He wrote in Latin, knew his Virgil, practiced Orthodox Christianity, lived in Constantinople, and spent his career in 1 the service of the imperial armies in the Roman Balkans. Jordanes’ voice was one that bespoke a Balkan-Roman world marked by cultural hybridity. This study analyzes Jordanes’ texts as products of an individual with a multivalent identity, and explores how his imbricated sense of self shaped his conception of a shared Roman-Gothic history; a vision of the past in which Roman and Gothic destinies were bound inextricably together. Before laying out a brief synopsis of the material to be covered in this study, it is necessary to make a few remarks about the arena of scholarship with which Jordanes is most closely associated. The field of ancient barbarian studies, in which Jordanes has played an especially prominent role, is a highly contentious one, sometimes bitterly so. For the sake of clarity, then, it will be helpful to state precisely what this study is not. It is not a history of the Goths. It is not concerned with the historicity of Jordanes’ texts or our ability to reconstruct the ancient Gothic past from them. No positions will be taken about the question of Gothic origins; that is, whether they hail from Scandinavia, Poland, or northwest of the Black Sea. Nor does it matter here whether Pytheas’ Gutones and Tacitus’ Gotones were Goths or if the Goths’ first appearance in the sources came much later in the third century. This is not to say that I lack my own leanings about these questions, but it is rather clear that positions taken on these issues