208 Swain
The story of the formation of Theoderic’s following in the Balkans is long and
complicated and cannot be told in full here.22 But certain essentials must be
considered. The origins of the group known as the Ostrogoths is placed either
in the context of the Roman Balkans following the collapse of the Hunnic
hegemony in the 450s or centuries earlier in northern Europe, well outside the
territory or influence of Rome. The latter position is grounded in the belief that
Theoderic’s Amal dynasty had ruled the ethnically distinct Ostrogoths for many
generations before 493.23 The main evidence for this is a long Amal genealogy
provided by Jordanes, himself a Goth and author of a Gothic history written in
Constantinople in 551.24 Jordanes used the Gothic history of Cassiodorus, now
lost, which was commissioned by Theoderic and believed by some to have con-
tained legitimate tribal memories including the Amal genealogy.
The historicity and even Gothicity of this royal genealogy, however, have
been impugned by arguments that it is the product of sheer fabrication mixed
with the account of the 4th-century Roman historian Ammianus.25 These argu-
ments are made by those who prefer a Balkan provenance for the Ostrogoths,
which is the majority view.26 Now, among those who aver Balkan origins, there
are two main ways of understanding Ostrogothic coalescence. Both see it
occurring in the chaotic period following the break-up of Attila’s short-lived
confederation and as the amalgamation of different groups into a supergroup
known as the Ostrogoths, but they understand the identity of these people in
different ways. One position holds that in the 450s a group of Goths previously
ch. 3). These dissenters propose that the earliest evidence for the Goths comes from the
3rd century: e.g. a 208 Latin inscription from Roman Arabia probably indicating Gothic
auxiliaries (L’Année épigraphique 1911, no. 244); the mid 3rd-century Canonical Letter of
Gregory Thaumaturgus mentions the Goths in the aftermath of their first major incur-
sion into Roman territory (Patrologia Graeca 10.1020–1048); the lost Scythica of Dexippus
detailed Rome’s 3rd-century wars with the Goths (fragments in F. Jacoby, Die Fragmente
der griechischen Historiker vol. IIA, Leiden 1926, pp. 452–80). The following discussion
will show that there are those who believe that the 3rd-century Goths and the Goths of
Ostrogothic Italy shared some measure of cultural and political relation. (Heather, Goths).
Another view suggests that the Italian Goths were connected in no way to earlier groups
with the same name (Amory, People and Identity).
22 For fuller treatments, Heather, Goths and Romans; id., “Gens and Regnum”; id., Restoration
of Rome; Moorhead, Theoderic; Amory, People and Identity.
23 Wenskus, Stammesbildung und Verfassung; Wolfram, Goths.
24 Jordanes, Getica 79–81, ed. Mommsen.
25 Heather, “Cassiodorus and the Rise of the Amals”.
26 Balkan Ostrogothic origins are today preferred, at least in Anglophone scholarship, e.g.
Heather, Goths and Romans; Amory, People and Identity.