Map of the Gothic invasions of 267–269 AD (according to the two invasions theory)
The Goths had a momentous impact on Roman history, appearing
as if out of nowhere in the early decades of the third century. When we first
meet them, it is in the company of other barbarians who, together, made
devastating incursions into the eastern provinces of the Roman empire. The mid
third century, particularly from the 240s till the early 300s, was an era of
constant civil war between Roman armies, civil war that in turn encouraged
barbarian invasions. Contact with the Roman empire, and particularly with the
Roman army, had helped to militarize barbarian society, and opportunistic raids
all along the imperial frontiers exploited Roman divisions and distraction in
the civil wars. When the Goths first appear, it is in this world of civil war
and invasion. Unfortunately for the modern historian, it is not always easy to
distinguish third-century Goths from other barbarians. The problem stems from
the way ancient writers talked about barbarians in general and the Goths in
particular.
‘Scythians’ and Goths
To the Greek authors who wrote about them, the Goths were
‘Scythians’ and that is the name used almost without exception to describe
them. The name ‘Scythian’ is very ancient, drawn from the histories of
Herodotus, which were written in the fifth century B.C. and dealt with the
Greek world at the time of the Persian Wars. For Herodotus, the Scythians were
outlandish barbarians living north of the Black Sea in what are now Moldova and
Ukraine. They lived on their horses, they ate their meat raw, they dressed in
funny ways, and they were quintessentially alien not just to the world of the
Greeks, but even to other barbarians nearer to the Greek world. Greek
historical writing, like much of Greek literary culture, was intensely
conservative of old forms, and canonized certain authors as perfect models to
which later writers had to conform. Herodotus was one such canonical author and
his history was regularly used as a template by later Greek historians. In
practice, this meant that authors writing 500 or 1,000 years after Herodotus
talked about the world of their own day in exactly the same language, and with
exactly the same vocabulary, as he had used all those centuries before.
For Greek writers of the third, fourth and fifth centuries
A.D., barbarians who came from the regions in which Herodotus had placed the
Scythians were themselves Scythians in a very real sense. It was not just that
classicizing language gave a new group of people an old name; the Greeks and
Romans of the civilized imperial world really did believe in an eternal
barbarian type that stayed essentially the same no matter what particular name
happened to be current for a given tribe at any particular time. And so the
Goths, when they first appear in our written sources, are Scythians – they lived
where the Scythians had once lived, they were the barbarian mirror image of the
civilized Greek world as the Scythians had been, and so they were themselves
Scythians. Classicizing Greek histories often provide the most complete
surviving accounts of third- and fourth-century events, and the timelessness of
their vocabulary can interpose a real barrier between the events they describe
and our understanding of them. However, the testimony of our classicizing texts
sometimes overlaps with that of less conservative writings that employ a more
current vocabulary. Because of such overlaps, we can sometimes tell when
actions ascribed to Scythians in some sources were undertaken by people whom
contemporaries called Goths.
The Earliest Gothic Incursions
Because of this complicated problem of names in the sources,
we cannot say with any certainty when the Goths began to impinge upon the life
of the Roman empire, let alone precisely why they did so. The first securely
attested Gothic raid into the empire took place in 238, when Goths attacked
Histria on the Black Sea coast and sacked it; an offer of imperial subsidy
encouraged their withdrawal. In 249, two kings called Argaith and Guntheric (or
possibly a single king called Argunt) sacked Marcianople, a strategically
important city and road junction very near the Black Sea. In 250, a Gothic king
called Cniva crossed the Danube at the city of Oescus and sacked several Balkan
cities, Philippopolis – modern Plovdiv in Bulgaria – the most significant.
Philippopolis lies to the south of the Haemus range, the chain of mountains
which runs roughly east-west and separates the Aegean coast and the open plains
of Thrace from the Danube valley. The fact that Cniva and his army could spend
the winter ensconced in the Roman province south of the mountains gives us some
sense of his strength, which is confirmed by the events of 251. In that year,
Cniva routed the army of the emperor Decius at Abrittus. Decius had persecuted
Christians, and Lactantius, a Christian apologist of the early fourth century,
recounts with great relish how Decius ‘was at once surrounded by barbarians and
destroyed with a large part of his army. He could not even be honoured with
burial, but – despoiled and abandoned as befitted an enemy of God – he lay there,
food for beasts and carrion-birds’.
The Black Sea Raids
Gothic raids in Thrace continued in the 250s, and seaborne
raids, launched from the northern Black Sea against coastal Asia Minor, began
for the first time. What role Goths played in these latter attacks is unclear,
as is their precise chronology. The first seaborne incursions, which took place
at an uncertain date between 253 and 256, are attributed to Boranoi. This
previously unknown Greek word may not refer to an ethnic or political group at
all, but may instead mean simply ‘people from the north’. Goths did certainly
take part in a third year’s seaborne raids, the most destructive yet. Whereas
the Boranoi had damaged sites like Pityus and Trapezus that were easily
accessible from the sea, the attacks of the third year reached deep into the
provinces of Pontus and Bithynia, affecting famous centres of Greek culture
like Prusa and Apamea, and major administrative sites like Nicomedia. A letter
by Gregory Thaumaturgus – the ‘Wonderworker’ – casts unexpected light on these
attacks. Gregory was bishop of Neocaesarea, a large city in the province of
Pontus, and his letter sets out to answer the questions church leaders must
confront in the face of war’s calamities: can the good Christian still pray
with a woman who has been kidnapped and raped by barbarians? Should those who
use the invasions as cover to loot their neighbours’ property be
excommunicated? What about those who simply appropriate the belongings of those
who have disappeared? Those who seize prisoners who have escaped their
barbarian captors and put them to work? Or, worse still, those who ‘have been
enrolled amongst the barbarians, forgetting that they were men of Pontus and
Christians’, those, in other words, who have ‘become Goths and Boradoi to
others’ because ‘the Boradoi and Goths have committed acts of war upon them’.
Ten years later, these assaults were repeated. Cities around
the coast of the Black Sea were assaulted, not just those on the coast of Asia
Minor, but Balkan sites like Tomi and Marcianople. With skillful seamanship, a
barbarian fleet was able to pass from the Black Sea into the Aegean, carrying
out lightning raids on islands as far south as Cyprus and Rhodes. Landings on
the Aegean coasts of mainland Greece led to fighting around Thessalonica and in
Attica, where Athens was besieged but defended successfully by the historian
Dexippus, who would later write an account of these Gothic wars called the
Scythica. Though only fragments of this work survive, Dexippus was a major source
for the fifth- or early sixth-century New History of Zosimus, which survives in
full and is now our best evidence for the third-century Gothic wars. As Zosimus
shows us, several imperial generals and emperors – Gallienus, his general
Aureolus, the emperors Claudius and Aurelian – launched counterattacks which
eventually brought this phase of Gothic violence to an end. Gothic defeat in
268 ended the northern Greek raids, while Claudius won a smashing and much
celebrated victory at Naissus, modern Niš, in 270.
Aurelian and a Problematic Source
In 271, after another Gothic raid across the Danube had
ended in the sack of several Balkan cities, the emperor Aurelian (r. 270–275)
launched an assault across the river that probably had considerable success.
Aurelian was an extremely capable soldier, and one who spent his five-year
reign in continuous motion from one end of the empire to the other, rarely out
of the saddle, and rarely pausing between campaigns. A Gothic war is entirely
in keeping with the evidence for Aurelian’s movements, and a late
fourth-century collection of imperial biographies which we call the Historia
Augusta records that Aurelian defeated and captured a Gothic king named
Cannobaudes. Here, however, we run into the sort of problem with the sources
that we will encounter more than once in the pages that follow. The Historia
Augusta is the only Latin source we have for large chunks of third-century
history, and even where it refers to events known from Greek historians, it
often preserves details that they do not. If it could be trusted, its
circumstantial and anecdotal content would be invaluable. Unfortunately, the
whole work is heavily fictionalized, its anonymous author sometimes using older
– and now lost – texts as a jumping off point for invention, sometimes making
things up out of thin air. The biographies of late third-century emperors are
the least reliable part of the work, and some of them contain no factual data
at all. For that reason, even though he appears in many modern histories of the
Goths, we cannot be entirely sure that this Gothic Cannobaudes was a real
historical figure.
In this case, however, we are able to confirm at least part
of the Historia Augusta’s testimony from another type of evidence altogether,
because inscriptions make clear that Aurelian did definitely campaign against
Goths. From a very early stage in Roman history, whenever a Roman general won a
victory over a neighbouring people, he would add the name of that people to his
own name, as a victory title. When the Roman Republic gave way to the one-man
rule of the empire, the honour of such victory titles was reserved for the
emperor, and whether he won a victory personally, or whether a general won it
in his name, it was the emperor alone who took the victory title. In this way,
a Persian campaign would allow the emperor to add the title Persicus, a
campaign against the Carpi would make the emperor Carpicus, and so on. Since
these victory titles became part of the emperor’s name, they were included in
the many different types of inscriptions, official and unofficial, that
referred to the emperor. This provides a wealth of information for the modern
historian, because victory titles often attest campaigns that are not mentioned
by any other source. Thus we will sometimes be able to refer to a particular
emperor’s Gothic campaign only because an inscription happens to preserve the
victory title Gothicus – as in the present case, Aurelian’s use of the name
shows that he did in fact fight against the Goths and felt able to portray that
campaign as a success. We can also infer that success from the fact that his
Gothic victory was still remembered a hundred years later, and from the rather
limited evidence for Gothic raids in the decades immediately following his reign:
although we hear of more seaborne raids in the mid-270s that penetrated beyond
Pontus deep into Cappadocia and Cilicia, after that Goths disappear from the
record until the 290s, by which time major changes had taken place in the
empire itself.
Explaining the Third-Century Invasions
As the past few pages have demonstrated, the earliest
evidence for Gothic invasions of the empire is not well enough attested to
allow for much analysis, but that does not mean we should underestimate its
impact. The letter of Gregory Thaumaturgus gives us a rare glimpse into just
how traumatic the repeated Gothic raids into Asia Minor and other Greek
provinces could be. But it does not answer basic questions of causation: what
drove these Gothic raids, what made them a repeated phenomenon? The
Graeco-Roman sources are content to explain barbarian attacks on the empire
with an appeal to the fundamentals of nature itself: to attack civilization is
just what barbarians do. That sort of essentialist explanation can hardly be
enough for us. Rather, we need to seek explanations in the historical context.
Now it happens that the third century was a period of massive change in the
Roman empire, which saw the culmination of social and political developments
that had been set in motion by the expansion of the Roman empire in the course
of the first and second centuries A.D. Against this background, the first
appearance of the Goths and the Gothic raids of the third century become
comprehensible. Roman expansion had transformed the shape of Europe and the
Mediterranean basin. It affected not just the many people who became Romans for
the first time, but also the political constitution of the empire and even the
many different peoples who lived along the imperial frontiers. One by-product of
these changes was a cycle of internal political violence in the third-century
empire that produced and then exacerbated the instability of the imperial
frontiers.
The Roman empire had been a monarchy since the end of the
first century B.C., when Augustus (r. 27 B.C.–A.D. 14), the grand-nephew and
adoptive heir of Julius Caesar, put an end to a full generation of civil war
that had ripped the Roman Republic apart. Augustus brought peace to the empire,
but it came at the expense of the free competition amongst the Roman elite that
had created a Roman empire to begin with. In its place, Augustus founded an
imperial dynasty that lasted until A.D. 68. By that year, when the regime of
the detested emperor Nero collapsed and he himself committed suicide, three generations
had passed since the end of the Republic. The imperial constitution was fully
entrenched – what mattered most was the relationship of the emperor to the
powerful clans of the Roman elite, particularly the senatorial families of Rome
itself, who now competed amongst themselves for the emperor’s favour and the
offices and honours it bestowed. Until 68, emperors had been made at Rome, and
loyalty to the dynasty of Augustus had been an essential element in their
creation. The civil wars of A.D. 68/69 changed that forever: their eventual
victor was Vespasian, a middle-aged commander born of a prosperous but
undistinguished Italian family and raised to the imperial title in the eastern
provinces of the empire, just as some of his immediate rivals had seized the
purple in Spain or Germany. This revealed what Tacitus called the arcanum
imperii, the ‘secret of empire’ – that an emperor could be made outside Rome.
Italy remained the centre of the empire, but it was no longer the sun around
which provincial planets revolved. These provinces increasingly had a life of
their own and political influence that could, in time, impose itself on the
Italian centre.
To be sure, the provinces might be very different from one
another, and they might stand in different relationships to the imperial
capital in Rome. Some provinces, like Spain, southern Gaul, or the part of
North Africa that is now Tunisia, had been part of Rome’s empire for a century
or more. Others, like Britain, much of the Balkans, or what is now Morocco were
only a generation away from their conquest by Roman armies. Well into the late
third century, these different provinces continued to be governed according to
many differing ad hoc arrangements that had been imposed on them when they were
first incorporated into the empire. But all the imperial provinces were more
and more integrated into a pattern of Roman life and ways of living, much less
conquered territories administered for the benefit of Roman citizens in Italy.
Indeed, the extension of Roman citizenship to provincial elites was an
essential element in binding the provinces to Rome. As provincial elites became
Roman citizens, they could aspire to equestrian or senatorial rank, and with it
participation in the governance of the larger empire. Already by A.D. 97, a
descendant of Italian immigrants to Spain named Trajan had become emperor.
Trajan’s successor Hadrian was likewise of Spanish descent, while his own
successor and adopted son came from Gallia Narbonensis, the oldest Roman
possession in Gaul.
Roman Citizenship and Roman Identity
These provincial emperors are the most impressive evidence
for the spread of Roman identity to the provinces, but the continuous
assimilation of the provincial elites into the Roman citizenship was ultimately
more important in creating the sense of a single empire out of a territorial
expanse that stretched from the edge of the Arabian desert to Wales, from
Scotland to the Sahara. These imperial elites could communicate with one
another, linguistically and conceptually, through a relatively homogeneous
artistic and rhetorical culture. This culture was founded on an educational
system devoted almost exclusively to the art of public speaking, the rhetorical
skills that were necessary for public, political life. Mainly Greek in the old
Greek East, frequently Graeco-Roman in the Latin-speaking provinces of the
West, this elite culture nurtured an aesthetic taste devoted, in Greek, to the
fashions of the Classical and early Hellenistic period and, in Latin, to those
of the very late Republic and early empire. It thereby provided a set of
cultural referents and social expectations shared by Roman citizens and
Graeco-Roman elites from one end of the empire to the other, and allowed them
to participate in the common public life of the empire at large, even if they
came from wildly divergent regions.
The use of Roman law, which came with the acquisition of
Roman citizenship, provided a framework of universal jurisdiction that, for the
elites who used it, also overcame regional differences. Because of the growing
elite participation in the Roman world and its governance, those lower down the
social scale began in time to feel some measure of the same integration, helped
along by the hierarchies of patronage that permeated the whole Roman world. The
cult of the Roman emperors, and of the personified goddess Roma, was another
effective means of spreading the idea of Rome and participation in a Roman
empire to the provinces. Greg Woolf has examined in detail how incorporation
into an ordered network of provincial government – with the assimilation of
local elites into Roman citizenship – could transform an indigenous society. In
northern and central Gaul, less than two generations after the organization of
the local tribal territories into a Roman province, both old Celtic noble
families and the larger Gallic population had learned to express traditional
relationships of patronage and clientship, power and display, in Roman terms,
eating off Roman tableware, living in Roman houses, and dressing as Romans
should. The same process is observable in the Balkans, at a slightly later date
but at the same relative remove from the generation of the conquest. In the
Greek world, ambivalent about its relationship to a Latin culture that was
younger than – and partially derivative of – Hellenic culture, assimilation was
more complicated, but even if Latin culture had little visible presence, the
sense of belonging to a Roman empire was very strong in the ancient cities of
the East.
This convergence on a Roman identity within the empire
culminated in a measure taken by the emperor Caracalla in A.D. 212. Caracalla
was himself the heir of an emperor from Africa – Septimius Severus, a man who
could attest indigenous Punic ancestry in the very recent past. Much given to
giganticism and delusions of grandeur, Caracalla undertook all sorts of massive
building projects, and it is in this light that we should understand his
decision to extend Roman citizenship to every free inhabitant of the empire in
212. The effects of this law, which we call the Antonine Constitution from
Caracalla’s official name of Antoninus, were varied. It both acknowledged the
convergence of local elites on a Roman identity and encouraged its
continuation, but it also created the dynamic of political violence which
dominated the middle and later third century. Once all inhabitants of the
empire were Romans, any of them could actively imagine seizing the imperial
throne if they happened to be in an opportune position to do so. This was a radical
step away from the earlier empire in which only those of senatorial status
could contemplate the throne. The Graeco-Roman reverence for rank and social
status was extraordinary, and there was a world of difference between accepting
the son of a provincial senator as emperor and accepting a man whose father had
not even been a Roman citizen. And yet by the middle of the third century, such
recently enfranchised Romans not only seized the throne, but their doing so
quickly ceased to occasion surprise and horror among the older senatorial
nobility.
Warfare and the Rhetoric of Imperial Victory
If the expansion of citizenship and the broadening
definition of what it meant to be Roman permitted such men to imagine
themselves as emperor, it was increasing military pressures that made their
doing so practicable. Much earlier, in the era of Augustus when Roman
government was for the first time in the hands of one man, the security of
monarchical rule was by no means guaranteed. The authority of the emperor – or princeps,
‘first citizen’, as Augustus preferred to be called – rested on a number of
constitutional fictions related to the old public magistracies of the Republic.
More pragmatically, however, the authority of Augustus and his successors
rested on a monopoly of armed force: that is to say, it rested on control of
the army. Empire could not exist without army, and it is hardly an exaggeration
to say that the whole apparatus of imperial government developed and grew ever
more complex in order to redistribute provincial tax revenues from the interior
of the empire to the military establishments on the frontiers. These armies
were the ultimate sanction of imperial power, and they needed not only to be
paid but also to be kept active: soldiers were far less inclined to mutiny or
unrest when they were well supplied and occupied in the business they were
trained for, rather than in more peaceable pursuits. This made periodic warfare
consistently desirable.
The regular experience of warfare, in turn, fed into the pre-existent
rhetoric of imperial victory and invincibility which provided part of the
justification for imperial rule: the emperor ruled – and had the right to rule
– because he was invincible and always victorious in defending Rome from its
enemies. Thus even after imperial expansion stopped early in the second
century, the need for Roman armies to win victories over barbarians was
ongoing. The result was a constant stream of border wars, which allowed
emperors to take victory titles and be seen to fulfill their most important
task – defending the Roman empire from barbarians and from the eastern empire
of Parthia, the only state to which Roman emperors might reluctantly concede a
degree of equality. As we shall see in a moment, the militarization of the northern
frontier had for many years had a profound effect on the barbarian societies
beyond the Rhine and Danube, but at the start of the third century, a more
acute transformation took place on the eastern frontier, again as a result of
Roman military intervention.
Usurpation, Civil War and Barbarian Invasions
When Alexander Severus was killed in 235, rival candidates
sprang up in the Balkans, in North Africa and in Italy, the latter promoted by
a Roman senate insistent on its prerogatives. Civil war ensued for much of the
next decade, and that in turn inspired the major barbarian invasions at which
we have already looked, among them the attack by the Gothic king Cniva that
ended in the death of Decius at Abrittus in 251. Decius’ successors might win
victories over such raiders, but the iron link between invasion and usurpation
was impossible to break. This is clearly demonstrated in the reign of Valerian
(r. 253–260), who was active mainly in the East, and that of his son and
co-emperor Gallienus (r. 253–268) who reigned in the West. Our sources present
their reigns as an almost featureless catalogue of disastrous invasions which
modern scholars have a very hard time putting in precise chronological order.
We need not go into the details here, and instead simply note the way foreign
and civil wars fed off each other: when Valerian fought a disastrous Persian
campaign that ended in his own capture by the Persian king, many of the eastern
provinces fell under the control of a provincial dynasty from Palmyra largely
independent of the Italian government of Gallienus. Similarly, every time
Gallienus dealt with a threat to the frontiers – raids across the Rhine into
Gaul, across the Danube into the Balkans, or Black Sea piracy into Asia Minor
and Greece – he was simultaneously confronted by the rebellion of a usurper somewhere
else in the empire. Thus Gallienus had to follow up a campaign against
Marcomanni on the middle Danube by suppressing the usurper Ingenuus, while the
successful defence of Raetia against the Iuthungi by the general Postumus
allowed him to seize the imperial purple and inaugurate a separate imperial
succession which lasted in Gaul for over a decade. Even when Gallienus
attempted to implement military reforms to help him counter this cycle of
violence, the reforms themselves could work against him: he created a strong
mobile cavalry that allowed him to move swiftly between trouble spots, but soon
his general Aureolus, who commanded this new force, seized the purple for
himself and Gallienus was murdered in 268, in the course of the campaign to
supress him. As we have now come to expect, his death inspired immediate
assaults on the frontiers, by ‘Scythians’ in the Balkans and across the Upper
Danube into the Alpine provinces as well.
Again, a full list of invaders and usurpers is an arid
exercise and one unnecessary here. The successors of Gallienus – Claudius,
Aurelian, Probus, and their many short-lived challengers – faced the same
succession of problems as their predecessor had done. Claudius successfully
defeated an invading army of Scythians twice, at Naissus and in the Haemus
mountains, and won for himself the victory title Gothicus which assures us that
those Scythians were Goths. We have already seen that Aurelian won a Gothic
campaign, but his energies and attentions were constantly distracted by other
invasions, some reaching as far as Italy, and by the civil wars in which he
suppressed the independent imperial successions in Gaul and the East. Aurelian
fell to assassins, and so too did his immediate successor Tacitus, the latter
struck down while in hot pursuit of Scythian – perhaps Gothic – raiders deep in
the heart of Asia Minor. Though Probus managed to hold the throne for a full
six years, he too was killed in a mutiny that broke out in the face of yet
another Balkan invasion, and his praetorian prefect Carus was proclaimed
emperor by the legions.
