Goths And Gothic Identity In The Ostrogothic Kingdom 207
efforts to present his foreign military rule to Italians as a seamless return to
the Roman status quo.18 Finally, some scholars have argued that there existed
among Goths a deeply held sense of Gothic identity that was bolstered by
distinctive cultural traits, among them the Gothic language, Arianism, mili-
tary status, demographic segregation, annual donatives from the king, and a
possible sense of ethnicity or at least royal dynastic genealogies.19 It has been
argued, though, that these indicators of Gothicness are merely distortions of
our Roman sources which, following the conventions of classical literary tradi-
tion, articulate difference among social groupings in ethnic terms even when
those differences were merely political, religious, or regional.20
Broadly speaking, the various positions currently in play fall within the
parameters just outlined, and focus on specific contested aspects of Ostrogothic
history, namely the nature of the Goths prior to the Italian conquest, Gothic
settlement in Italy, the separateness of Gothic and Italian professional roles,
the Gothic response to imperial invasion, religion, and the Gothic language.
What follows is a discussion of these interpretive flashpoints and their impli-
cations for our understanding of Gothic identity in the Ostrogothic kingdom.
The Goths before Italy
Just who the people were who ruled Italy from 493 to 552 has rather a lot to do
with who they were before they arrived. How did they form as a group? Did
they share a long history?21 Were they ‘a people’ by the time they won Italy?
18 Heather, “Gens and Regnum”.
19 Wolfram, Goths; Moorhead, Theoderic; Heather, “Gens and Regnum”.
20 Amory, People and Identity; Arnold, Theoderic and the Roman Imperial Restoration.
21 This is also a complicated issue that cannot be treated fully here. In short, there are two
questions at hand: what is the earliest evidence for a people called Goths? And did these
people have anything to do with the people who ruled in Italy under Theoderic? Writing
in the late 1st century AD, Pliny recounts a report of the 4th-century BC Pytheas who
spoke of Gutones (Natural History 4.14.99). In ca. AD 98, Tacitus mentions Gotones
(Germania 44.1), and the 2nd-century Ptolemy writes about Γúθωνεζ (Geography 3.5.8).
These sources, in conjunction with Jordanes’ 6th-century account and archaeological evi-
dence in Poland, have prompted some to argue that there is evidence for the existence of
Goths in the 1st century AD (Kazanski, Goths; Heather, Goths). Others suggest that these
associations are too loose: the ethnonyms Gotones, et al. are not demonstrably analogous
with the Goths, and the arguments for Polish archaeological evidence are ‘text-hindered’,
meaning that, without Jordanes’ accounts of the Goths’ migration to the Baltic, nobody
would have thought the Polish material to be Gothic (Kulikowski, Rome’s Gothic Wars,