Up to now I have been telling you that you are better off reading the primary documents than Gibbon, with the caution that Cassius Dio, Herodian, Historia Augusta, and Lives of the Emperors, are the source of Gibbon's tabloid trash.
Here I have to tell you something different. Chapter 10 is about the Goths, and Gibbon refers to Cassiodorus and Jordanes, and then even Gibbon warns you that Cassiodorus, deliberately or to get pay or promotion, whomped up the Gothic past into something great and glorious, while Jordanes is an abbreviated version of Cassiodorus.
Cassiodorus also lived about 200 years after the Goths and Vandals invaded the empire; his great-grandfather fought the Vandals, his grandfather was an ambassador to Attila the Hun, and his father worked first for Odovacer and then for Theodosius the Great, both "barbarians" to Gibbon. So you would think he would have access to primary information and not have to whomp anything up.
But his Historia Gothica survives only in Jordanes' abridgement (so Gibbon didn't know what he was talking about because he never read Cassiodorus), and Jordanes is wrong. The Getae and Goths were two separate peoples. The Getae were related to the non-Germanic Thracians and spoke Dacian; the Goths were a Germanic people and spoke a clearly Germanic language. While Gibbon believes the Germans originated in the Baltic region, old ideas that Thraco-Dacian was related to Baltic languages are no longer considered acceptable.
The story Jordanes tells brings the Goths from Scandinavia south to the Vistula River in what is now Poland. They lived near the Sarmatians, Veneti, and Scyths at different times; Thucydides writes that the Getae of Thraco-Dacia lived "next to the Scythians" and were recruited to fight in the Peloponnesian War in Book II chapter 96, but this is about 500 years too early for the Goths. The Goths helped form the Chernyakhov culture that stretched from the Danube to the Don and impacted the Roman Empire in 238 CE.
If you want to know about the real Goths, ignore Gibbon's appendix. You know by now that there are over 200 years of later research, and that Gibbon relies on unreliable authority and can't resist the chance for a slur.
On the Vistula, the Goths became part of the Iron Age Wielbark culture.
1) Remember from a previous post that they could bring knowledge of ironworking with them from Scandinavia.
2) The Wielbark culture was agricultural, not a bunch of savage plunderers and pastoralists;
3) it lay on the Amber Road from the Baltic; amber could fetch any price you liked in any place you sold it so these people were not at all impoverished.
Wielbark may have spoken a Baltic language, which may have hybridized with Gothic; it moved into the region of the Przeworsk culture which may have used an early Slavic language and is related to the Vandals -- thus showing another problem with Gibbon who claims these were allied to the Goths. They were in conflict with each other, and this may have prompted the Vandal migration south and east into Hungary.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/325973847_Przeworsk_culture_society_and_its_long-distance_contacts_AD_1-350/link/5b311a21a6fdcc8506cc9761/download
Part of the mixup might be that both the Goths and the Vandals were Arian Christians when they converted, not Athanasian. Athanasius won the final battle. The Arians ruling Rome eventually converted over, but they didn't like it. What is important is that the Vandals went to Spain, made it Christian, then were driven out by the Visigoths and made North Africa Christian.
Interestingly, female line DNA testing supports the idea that the Goths brought their women from Scandinavia. In other words, unlike some migrations, they didn't arrive as hunters or traders and settle down and marry. They migrated in families. They moved around a lot, including to the southeast toward the steppes, but their main center was at Maslomecz, and when the migrants came back to it, they brought maternal DNA from the southeast. Having a main center provided high cohesion despite the out-marriages. This is why the Goth language is internally consistent and doesn't show signs of creolization, unlike English.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-019-43183-w
Then Gibbon mixes contexts again. The Edda is Norse. Not Gothic, Norse. Based on an oral tradition, it was recorded in medieval times as a collection of poetry, and in Snorri Sturlason's famous edition of the prose history. The Gothic sagas are separate, and there is an additional Norse saga dealing with the collision between the Goths and Huns. The Edda is clearly Norse in culture with tales of Odin; the Goths had Gapt who was the ancestor of the Amali dynasty. The Norse and Goths are different cultures.
Norse culture had significant Celtic underpinnings, as you may guess from the similarity of Norse and Celtic intertwined graphics. The Hallstatt and La Tene Celtic cultures spread from modern Austria to, of course, modern Ireland and their descendants left DNA all over Britain; even in the southeast, which was Saxon after it was Roman, up to 50% of DNA is Celtic. The Hallstatt culture existed on the west bank of the mouth of the Vistula while the Goths lived south and east of there.
https://journal.fi/scripta/article/view/67183
Gibbon tries to make it seem as if, once the Goths broke Valens at Adrianople, the other eastern cultures realized they had a chance for easy pickings. This assumes that the Goths promulgated the information. It's unrealistic. The Huns attacked the Goths for being in their way during a westward migration, not to get the Goths out from between them and Rome. The waves of people fleeing west were trying to get away from the Huns -- yet the Huns negotiated peace with Rome and Attila the Hun was sent to Rome for his education at the age of 12, in exchange for the Huns bringing up Flavius Aetius. The two of them met in battle on the Catalaunian Plains, pausing the invasion but not stopping it. The following year Attila sacked Aquileia.
As always, if you want a history of Germanic tribes, don't read Gibbon: a) use 20th and 21st century sources, preferably from a university press or something you find on Researchgate; b) check their bibliographies and think twice if they reference Gibbon; c) make sure they use archaeological material, not just classical authors.
No comments:
Post a Comment