220 Swain
while others remained or became barbarians. The traditional Roman world-
view was thereby maintained. In the end ‘Roman’ in its inherent malleability
and adaptability became the primary characteristic of ‘Gothic’.98
Another model even more emphatically blurs lines between Goths and
Romans. Indeed it claims that ‘Goth’ and ‘Roman’ are but rhetorical and ideo-
logical abstractions in our sources, and unreflective of social realities. The peo-
ple living in what historians term Ostrogothic Italy were substantially the
same, retaining differences derived only from regional or economic variations.
Here, the ‘Goths’ who conquered Italy were the hybridized Balkan mercenary
army described earlier. They took on ethnographically inspired names such
as ‘Goth’ to differentiate themselves from other peer armies. After their con-
quest of Italy, their leader Theoderic maintained this ethnographic rhetoric
as part of a governmentally sanctioned ideological programme. In an effort
to regularize relations between the invading army and the Italian population,
Theoderic propagated an ideology that cast the army as ‘Goths’ and civilians
as ‘Romans’. The latter would create and purvey respectable culture (civilitas)
while the former would protect it with arms. The rhetoric was meant, “to fuse
the former extera gens of the Goths to the social structure of the res publica”,
and thereby to establish a consensus of governance among the settlers and
indigenous population.99 Historians, however, have failed to disentangle ide-
ology from social reality, with the result that prevailing models understand
Ostrogothic Italy to have been populated by two distinct peoples. Rather dif-
ferently, Theoderic’s army and their descendents became enmeshed in local
Italian societies and quickly grew indistinguishable from everyone else. The
‘Gothic’ army, which recruited from the whole population, was not the bastion
of an ethnically separate people.100 The army might have inculcated a military
identity among its members, but this identity like all social identities in Italy
were functions of profession and locality, not ethnicity.
Imperial Invasion and Gothic Cohesion
One imagines that a full-scale imperial invasion would serve as a conve-
nient historical barometer for testing the ephemerality or substantiality of
Gothicness in Italy. If ‘Gothic’ were merely an ideological concept, it seems
likely that it would have buckled under imperial pressure. If it were a coherent
98 Arnold, Theoderic and the Roman Imperial Restoration, especially ch. 5.
99 Amory, People and Identity, pp. 50, 43.
100 Ibid., p. 165.