DURING THE LATER centuries of the Roman Empire, writers described barbarian incursions from the east that slashed across their lands, including a fierce battle near the shores of the Black Sea in a.d. 251 that ended in the death of a Roman emperor and his son. Many of these attacks, they wrote, were perpetrated by people they called the Goths, who, by the end of the fifth century a.d., would control much of what remained of the western half of the Roman Empire, their reach extending from the Black Sea to the Atlantic Ocean. In the space of a just a few hundred years, they went from barbarian menace to kings of Europe.
Little is known about the Goths’ origins, and contemporaneous Roman authors struggled to explain their foe’s rapid rise. Later writers, too, drew on myths and scattered sources to reconstruct their ascent. Thus, when a self-styled sixth-century a.d. historian named Jordanes was asked to summarize a monumental work penned a few decades earlier by the Roman statesman Cassiodorus about the history of the Goths, the result was a book that contains both debatable assertions and information later borne out by historical and archaeological evidence. From the start, this endeavor, officially titled The Origin and Deeds of the Getae and commonly known as the Getica, was based in part on questionable secondary sources. Jordanes—who identified as a Goth himself—claims he had access to Cassiodorus’ 12-volume opus for just three days and had to write most of his own single volume from memory, cobbling together information from a variety of other Greek and Roman writers to fill in the gaps. Whether he knew it or not, even Jordanes’ primary source was far from authoritative. Cassiodorus’ work, which is long since lost, was at least partly fiction. It was commissioned by and intended to legitimize his patron, the Gothic king Theodoric (reigned a.d. 493–526), who ruled the new Gothic kingdom from the Italian city of Ravenna.
Jordanes begins his work by claiming that theDanzig/Gdańsk 0 100 even scared off the Persian ruler Xerxes and 700,000 of his men.
