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.
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 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.