228 Swain
the Republican and early Imperial periods, barbarian societies beyond the
frontiers were profoundly influenced by the economy and culture of their
Roman neighbours. And from the 3rd century onward, many of these peoples
lived within and served the empire as farmers, soldiers, and citizens.140 The
Ostrogoths were, in significant ways, a product of late Roman politics and
military policy. Rome had, a century earlier, supplied the Goths with their reli-
gion and written language. Rome had granted the Pannonian Goths land on
which to settle. It was from Rome that both the Pannonian and Thracian Goths
sought to extract employment and funds. And it was a Roman state appara-
tus that Theoderic, himself the product of a Roman education in the imperial
capital, curated and promoted more than any other barbarian king. The Goths
and those signs and practices that made them Gothic were demographically
and culturally permeable. The instances of Italo-Roman participation in the
Gothic military and the Gothic absorption of various barbarian peoples bear
this out.
But flexibility and permeability do not mean that Gothic identity did not
exist, or that Goths did not exist before the Romans invented them. Groups
with coherent identities can incorporate external elements while still main-
taining their sense of distinctiveness.141 Italo-Romans would have had to join
the Gothic army in staggeringly high proportions to undermine its culturally
Gothic identity, and there is no evidence that this ever happened. In fact there
is proof against it. Given time, the Gothic and Roman communities would
have continued to merge. Perhaps the success of Theoderic’s stewardship
of the Roman state combined with the Roman identity of the vast majority of
the population would have seen the full assimilation of the Goths into a post-
imperial Roman order. But in historical fact the Ostrogoths only ceased to exist
because of an act of imperial aggression. Given this, we must be careful not
to project backward our knowledge of their eventual demise and let it colour
views of the evanescence or fragility of Gothicness.
And this brings us to the second recommended step. We face two obstacles
in coming to terms with Gothic identity: poor sources and the fact the Goths
do not exist today. This is a substantial degree of remove. In certain regards this
distance can aid us: detached from any personal, political, or contemporary
entanglements we can better do the work of dispassionate historical analysis.
Conversely, it can render a subject a mere abstraction. Our subject, though, is
people and the very question of their peoplehood. Declaring the non- existence
of a people by means of philological arguments is an act that should give us
140 Whittaker, Frontiers; Woolf, Becoming Roman.
141 See Woolf, “Tales of the Barbarians”.