214 Swain
Apennines.60 Dispersing the Goths throughout the peninsula would have
reduced their military effectiveness.61
This picture of clustered military settlement has implications for Gothic
identity. Procopius’ observation related to the mid 530s at the outset of
the imperial invasion and suggests that, a generation after the creation of the
Ostrogothic kingdom, Goths in Italy were still living in largely Gothic commu-
nities. They had not integrated into the rest of Italian society. Procopius, who
spent a number of years in Ostrogothic Italy while on campaign with Belisarius,
implies throughout his narrative that Goths were distinct from Italians. It has
been argued that Procopius’ account is a rhetorical distortion, a tribalizing
ethnographic topos.62 But no convincing motive has been given for this dis-
tortion: the distinction is made in all contemporary sources writing about the
war, regardless of their politics. Others trust in Procopius’ status as an eyewit-
ness and believe that the distinction reflects the way that his contemporaries
perceived reality. In this case, an argument for Gothic identity can be made.
Similar to disagreements over settlement and grave goods, debates about
Gothicness have also concerned such seemingly mundane things as hats
and hairstyles. In the Ostrogothic context, a case in point is the Senigallia
Medallion, a commemorative coin upon which Theoderic is depicted sport-
ing a moustache.63 Some have argued that this particular type of facial hair
proclaimed, perhaps defiantly, a distinctly ‘Gothic’ appearance in conscious
contradistinction to a more typical ‘Roman’ one.64 This, they argue, was clear
proof of Gothic identity. It has been pointed out, though, that our only evi-
dence of moustachioed Goths is limited to images of Theoderic and his nephew
Theodahad. Other Ostrogothic kings appear clean-shaven or with beards, and
the same goes for earlier depictions of Goths such as those on the Column
of Arcadius. Moreover, it turns out that numismatic and statuary evidence
yield more than a few instances of Romans with moustaches, suggesting that
there is nothing distinctively Gothic about this type of facial hair.65 But even
if there was something Gothic about the moustache, it is unclear how contem-
poraries, Roman or Gothic, would have understood it in the wider context of a
Roman culture that regularly appropriated foreign habits of dress and personal
60 Heather, “Merely an Ideology?”, p. 41.
61 Deliyannis, Ravenna in Late Antiquity, p. 110.
62 Amory, People and Identity.
63 For general discussions of the medallion: Grierson and Blackburn, Medieval European
Coinage, p. 35; Wroth, Catalogue, p. xxxii.
64 McCormick, Eternal Victory, p. 269; Ward-Perkins, Fall of Rome, p. 73.
65 Arnold, “Theoderic’s Invincible Mustache”.