Goths and Huns 563Hun empire, but quite characteristically, some rather mixed groups also appeared on the
map (Jordanes 1882, c.50, p. 126f.). Jordanes himself had come from one of them. As
we have seen, the Goths felt related to (although in fierce competition with) the Huns.
Ethnic hybridity is best attested among the elites, where intermarriage was common;
thus, Odoacer (whose father Edica had been one of the notables at Attila’s court) was
variously identified as Scirian, Thuringian, Hun, Herul, Rugian, or as belonging to the
otherwise unknown Turcilingi.
Therefore, the maps of the “Great Migrations,” with many colored arrows cutting
across all of Europe, have little to do with reality (Goffart 2009). According to them,
the Goths would start in Scandinavia and cross the Baltic into modern Poland; then
they would split, and the Visigoths would move to Romania, cross the Danube, and
meander through all of the Balkans and Italy, until they reached Southern France, and,
finally, Spain. The Ostrogoths would start in the Ukraine, with some sidelines showing
plundering as far as Greece and Asia minor, and then move westward under Hunnic
pressure to Hungary, march through most of the Balkan provinces similar to the Visigoths
before them, and end up in Italy. However, the impression of a logical progression of
one or two consistent groups is misleading. Very different groups appear as Goths in late
antique sources: pirates and seafarers in the Black Sea in the third century; steppe riders
or, at the same time, peaceful peasants north of the lower Danube in the fourth century;
Roman federate units after 376; groups of privileged officers at the Byzantine court; or
a class of wealthy landowners in Gothic Italy and Spain. “Gothic” migrations could take
various forms: the gradual shift of a settlement area when the Gutones (as they were then
called) of the second centuryADgradually abandoned the Vistula region; mass flight after
the Hun invasion; occasional migration of individuals or small groups along established
routes (e.g., to Byzantium); organized marches of federate troops, as under the command
of Alaric or Theoderic; the movement of large heterogeneous groups of warriors followed
by families and dependents; or the expansion of a post-Roman kingdom. Lines on a map
do not give an adequate impression of these successive events that do not constitute a
single “Gothic migration,” but could only be turned into a linear narrative in retrospect
(Pohl 2005). This does not mean that there were no migrations, or that we cannot say
anything about them. However, in most cases, one people or group experienced more
than one migration, and changed considerably in the process.
Did Ethnicity Matter?
As we have relatively few clear traces of self-identification, the answer to the much-
debated question of whether ethnicity mattered to the Goths has to rely mostly on
indirect traces. What we can clearly say is that ethnic identification was the main cog-
nitive tool for Roman authors to understand the barbarian raids of the third and fourth,
and the dramatic political changes of the fifth and sixth centuries. Ethnic agency took
center stage, not only in the historiography of the period, but also in panegyrics and
poems (e.g., Claudian’s bombasticDe bello Gothico), in letters and law codes. Greeks
and Romans had always perceived their periphery as an ethnic landscape, and distin-
guished between friend and foe according to ethnic categories, both on a regional and
on an ethnographic level. We have seen that the most generalizing terms were also the