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Introduction
- University of Pennsylvania Press
- Chapter
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Introduction A funny thing happened to the later Roman Empire on its way to the twenty-first century: it ran into a wave of "ethnicity" and "ethnogenesis,"! A leading historian informs us, for example, that "from the late fourth century onwards, ethnicity began to return to the power struggles within the Roman world,'? This was not something one used to be told. The dominant handbook of late antiquity in the 1960s was a massive work by A. H. M. Jones; it is doubtful that the term "ethnicity" ever darkens its pages and certain that "ethnogenesis " does not.' The standbys that accompanied college teaching at midcentury, such as Ferdinand Lot's The End of the Ancient World and the Beginning of the Middle Ages, spoke of Goths, Vandals, Franks, and other peoples, but ethnicity, let alone ethnogenesis, was not their concern. Henri Pirenne's famous Mohammed and Charlemagne, whose interest in barbarians is greater than sometimes suspected, disregarded ethnicity. J. M. Wallace-Hadrill's The Barbarian West did not have a pronounced ethnic flavor.' The turn toward ethnicity is striking. Did earlier historians miss something important? Where has this new preoccupation corne from and should we follow in its tracks? Herwig Wolfram's Geschichte der Goten, first published in 1979 and translated into English in 1988 as History ofthe Goths, presents itself as an example of "historical ethnography." The book was central to bringing ethnicity and ethnogenesis to the forefront of discussions. In focusing on the Goths, Wolfram, a historian by training, did not choose a neglected subject.' The Goths were much written about in connection with the other Migration Age peoples and the last centuries of the Roman Empire. Readers of English can learn about the Goths in J. B. Bury's The Invasions ofEurope by the Barbarians (1928) or in the translation by Edward James (1975) of Lucien Musset's Les Invasions, volume 1, Les vagues germaniques (1965).6 Everyone dealing professionally with this subject can hardly avoid relying on Ludwig Schmidt's very full and dependable Geschichte der deutschen Stamme bis zum Ausgang der Volkerwanderung (1938, 1941). The same ground has been ambitiously retraced by Emilienne Demougeot in the two-volume La formation de l'Europe et les invasions barbares (1969-79)/ Accounts of the "Germanic peoples" in late antiquity on a people-by-people basis 2 Introduction are plentiful; some nineteenth-century works of this kind, such as those by E. von Wietersheim and Felix Dahn, are still worthy of consultation." What is new in Wolfram's "historical ethnography" is the author's unprecedented interest in the Gothicness of Goths and how they got that way,and the credit accorded to a problematic sixth-century narrative that he believes embodies authentic tribal history. Readers are invited to subscribe to a sheaf of findings (argued in dense separate studies), many of them based on names interpreted by etymological and other philological reasoning-"the hidden meaning of names, genealogy, and myth"-findings that make the Goths look more exotic than before." "Ethnogenesis" has been variously defined." As presented in America, the concept allegedly redresses a great wrong inflicted by Romans and Greeks upon the peoples dwelling north of the Roman Empire: "The Germanic tribe, more than any other Germanic institution, has been the victim of an uncritical acceptance of Greco-Roman ideas concerning tribes inherited from both the Romans ' own early traditions of tribal origins and from Greek ethnography.... [T]hroughout the tribal history of the Germanic peoples, these groups were more processes than stable structures, and ethnogenesis, or tribal transformation ' was constant,"!' The contention is not only that the Romans were deeply mistaken in portraying tribes as fixed entities but that everyone else,too, through the ages, has been taken in by this illusion: "Until recently, our ideas about the 'Germans' were shaped by the Romans. The very term 'German' was Roman. And it was the Romans who were so sure that the Germanic tribes were 'ethnic groups' (gentes), that they insisted on thinking of these (in fact ever-changing) tribes as biological entities."12 These challenges to past errors suggest that students of the Migration Age should take a profound interest in tribes and tribe formations, that this subject is acutely important to understanding the role of the barbarians in late antiquity . Whether or not "ethnicity" returned to the Roman Empire in the fourth century is open to discussion, but there is no doubt-so it is alleged-that ethnicity should have a high priority in today...