Barbarian Tides: The Migration Age and the Later Roman Empire (review)

For several decades, Walter Goffart has stood at the front rank of historians of late antiquity in the English-speaking world. In his preface to Barbarian Tides, Goffart calls the book 'a sequel, a rethought, revised, much expanded, and wholly rewritten version' of his Barbarians and Romans (1980), which argued that the barbarian 'conquests' of Gaul and Burgundy were effected not through grants or confiscations of land, or through military billeting, but through the granting of rights to tax revenues for a portion of the tenured occupants' landed property. The present book is much more. Goffart assails, usually in a mode of exasperation or invective, two related notions: that the barbarian tribes classed by ancient authors as Germani understood themselves as such, and that these aggregated peoples are the lineal forebears of the modern German nation.

A lion in stature and, here, a lion in ferocity, Goffart is also a lion in preying on the aged and weak. He writes as if the spirit of German nationalism impelling the 'science of Germanic antiquity' since, by Goffart's reckoning, early modern times still holds sway with the same blithe innocence today. While 'Germanic peoples' persists as a blanket term for a contested and imprecisely defined tribal macro-grouping, the ethnographic and historiographical complications of the label have long been appreciated, and any scholar clinging to the neat equation of ancient and modern Germany would be far more of an outlier in the discussion than is Goffart. Barbarian Tides thus represents an exhaustive and powerful critique of a view already outmoded.

After some cranky words about the fashionability of 'ethnogenesis', Goffart's introduction lays out the anti-German thematics of the book and indicates the common concerns and convictions underlying the otherwise self-contained chapters that follow. The first of these considers the concept of the Migration Age, arguing that the movements of peoples in the fourth through the sixth centuries need to be recognized as the displacements and relocations of previously settled and fully indigenous populations, not the latest phase in the descent of a constitutionally nomadic race from an archaic boreal homeland. Here Goffart's point deserves to be heard, as the romantic vein of history he takes to task is hardly confined to popular accounts. In chapter 2 Goffart undertakes a literally point-by-point rebuttal of the view that Rome collapsed under constant attack from a coherent entity called 'the Germans'. Alexander Demandt's articulation of this position in Der Fall Roms is set forth as 'particularly estimable and up-to-date' (p. 24; Goffart translates the relevant pages in their entirety in an appendix to show he is being fair). But this text from 1984 represents a historiographical survey of opinion on Rome's demise. The major exponents of this thesis wrote a generation or more earlier.

Chapter 3 outlines Goffart's general case for the emergence of ancient Germans from a concoction of spotty and equivocal ancient sources and a modern propensity for myth-making. The following chapter then considers in depth Jordanes's Getica, a sixth-century history of the Goths based on a vastly longer and now lost original by Cassiodorus. Goffart proposes that the story of primeval Gothic migration from Scandinavia, widely thought to reflect Cassiodorus's reporting of the Goth's oral traditions, is instead an exotic fabrication and probably Jordanes' invention. The Getica, on this view, is Byzantine propaganda supporting Justinian's project of extinguishing Gothic resistance in Italy. Radically alien origins for the Goths helped to rationalise their destruction. This must be counted a brilliant piece of speculation, one that makes as good sense of the scanty facts as any on record.

In chapter 5 Goffart undertakes a case study in 'migration', the crossing of the Rhine in 405/406 by the Vandals, Alans, and Sueves and the subsequent fortunes of the invaders down to 420, when they were more...