INTRODUCTIONby Rome. But by 376 Gothic envoys had come to Valens in Antioch asking
to be allowed to cross the Danube into Thrace; Valens, engaged in prepara-
tions for renewed warfare against the Persians, was in no position to refuse,
and the Tervingi and Gruethingi crossed the Danube on a mass of boats, rafts
and canoes. Ammianus’ explanation is that they were being pushed by move-
ment of the Huns into their own territories^42 but the attractions of sharing
in Roman prosperity were also a major factor. Roman hopes of peaceful set-
tlement by the Goths, if such existed, were quickly dashed; the Goths began
to pillage Thrace and Valens hastily patched up peace with Persia and sent a
too-small force to deal with the situation. A battle damaging to both sides was
fought in 377, and in 378 Valens engaged the Goths at Adrianople without
waiting for the arrival of Gratian and the western army. The result was a disas-
ter for the Romans compared by Ammianus to the Roman defeat by Hannibal
at Cannae, with the emperor himself among the dead.^43
What used to be called the ‘barbarian invasions’ have been among the most
debated issues in late antique scholarship since the publication of the first
edition of this book.^44 Earlier scholarship was strongly marked by attempts
to trace an unbroken Germanic identity, but this and the old idea of massive
numbers of German invaders pressing on the frontiers of the empire has given
way since the 1990s to the concept of ethnogenesis, referring to the processes
whereby barbarian groups gradually acquired a self-conscious identity, largely
through their contact with the Romans;^45 this has gone alongside a revision-
ist interpretations of material evidence by archaeologists.^46 In the case of the
Ostrogoths a self-serving royal genealogy of the Amals was produced by Jor-
danes, a Gothic writer in sixth-century Constantinople, drawing on an earlier
work, now lost, by Cassiodorus. One of the key issues in the current debates
concerns the extent to which Jordanes’s account should be used by modern
historians.^47 The assumptions attached to the idea of ethnogenesis have also
come under criticism, and this too centres on the problematic concept of eth-
nicity. In fact the categories ‘Romans’ and ‘barbarians’ are themselves derived
from the tendentious accounts in our Roman sources and did not of them-
selves correspond to real differences; indeed, the ‘barbarians’ usually aspired
to the advantages of being Roman. Using the common designation of ‘Ger-
manic’ imports ethnic assumptions, and even the term ‘barbarian’ is perhaps
now best used simply to denote ‘non-Roman’, without ethnic connotations.
This sensitivity to issues of identity and self-definition also involves a rethink-
ing of the concept of frontiers, as can be found in much of the scholarship
since the early 1990s, for example in the series of conferences with the title
Shifting Frontiers. These are difficult issues, and indeed ethnicity and identity
remain major topics for both east and west in late antiquity.^48 The de-empha-
sizing of barbarian identities may have been taken too far, and the minimiz-
ing of invasion and conflict in the story of Roman-barbarian relations in the
west in late fourth and fifth centuries has itself provoked a reaction, notably
from Peter Heather and Bryan Ward-Perkins, who again stress the ‘fall’ of the
western empire in the fifth century under the pressure of barbarian invasion.^49