Origin stories of the Goths

The Goths are first noted as living north of the Roman empire's frontier on the Lower Danube in an area which had previously been home to Getae, Carpi, Bastarni and Sarmatians. Much earlier the regions east of the Getae were inhabited by the Scythians, and the term "Scythian" was still used in classical times to refer to inhabitants of the area. All of the surviving Gothic origins stories included elements which connected the Goths to at least some of these previous inhabitants of "Scythia". Already in the first half of the third century, Dexippos, whose history has only survived in fragments, referred to the Goths of his time as Scythians, although from the surviving fragments he did not necessarily intend to assert that all Scythians had the same origins.^[2][3]

The first surviving rationales for equating Goths with Scythians or Getae were by early Christian scholars, Ambrose (about 340–397), Orosius (about 375–420) and Jerome (about 347–420). Ambrose equated the Scythians and Goths with the Biblical Gog and Magog — barbarians who come from the extreme north, where there are islands.^[4] Ambrose, in his De Fide II.xvi explains that "Gog" the ruler of "Magog" mentioned in the Book of Ezekiel represented "the Goths" (hoc est Gothis). Gog was the subject of a prophecy in the Bible of an invader from the north, who will come on horseback as a mighty army, and be defeated. Gog and Magog were also associated with islands because God would "send fire on Magog, and among them that dwell carelessly in the isles".^[5]

According to Arne S. Christensen, one precursor of Ambrose's equation of the Goths with the Biblical Gog and Magog was Josephus (died about 100), who equated the Scythians with the descendants of biblical Magog, who he understood as a person, not a country. This was based upon a passage in the Book of Genesis.^[6] A connection between this ancestral Genesis Magog, and the prophesied Gog from Ezekiel, who ruled a country named Magog, or "Gog and Magog" from the similar 1st century AD Book of Revelation prophecy, was made explicit in Jerome. This paved the way for other writers to connect specifically to the Goths, as Scythians, to the biblical account of the ancestry of the Scythians as interpreted by Josephus, although Jerome himself did not do this.^[7]

Orosius is among early writers to equate the Goths with Scythians, listing them along with the Huns and Alans as the "Scythians" of his time.^[3] Jerome, like his contemporary Orosius, equated the Goths to the earlier Getae, but did not equate them to Gog and Magog, only stating that scholars before him and Orosius had made this equation.^[4] Saint Jerome however specifically rejected this equation of the Goths with Gog and Magog.^[8] (Nevertheless, Herwig Wolfram believes that with this assertion "he probably invented the identification of the Goths as Getae".^[3]) Their contemporary, Saint Augustine, argued that Gog and Magog should not be read as Ambrose had, as Goths, but seen as representing peoples all over the world, not any single specific barbarian people.^[9]

Another late 4th century writer who routinely called the Goths "Getae" was the poet Claudian (died about 404).^[10]

Much later, Isidore of Seville (died 636), in his own History of the Goths, suggested that the connection of the Goths to Magog in Ezekiel must have been assumed by previous authors because of the similarity in sound between "Gog" and "Goth". Similarly, he noted that the word for the Scythians (Skuthoi in transliterated Greek), was itself also similar to the name of the Goths (Guthoi). Isidore did not see these similarities of names as false leads, believing that these indicated the true origins of the Goths.^[11]

Procopius placed the Goths in the category called "Gothic nations" or "Gothic peoples" (Ancient Greek: Γοτθικὰ ἔθνη). Procopius also seems to have deliberately avoided using the term "Scythian" for the Goths, which he saw as a more general term used for all the nations of the region north of the Black Sea, including newcomers like the Huns and Cimmerians. Instead, according to Procopius, the ancient Gothic peoples were called Sauromatae and Melanchlaeni. Procopius therefore believed there was a continuity between the Gothic peoples of his times, and predecessors who originally lived in the eastern part of their range near the River Don in what is now Russia. While registering the fact that some authors called these Gothic peoples "Getic peoples", which would connect them instead to the ancient Getae of the Lower Danube in the western part of the Gothic range, he didn't follow that approach in his own writing.^[12]

According to Procopius, the names changed over time, but the Gothic peoples were distinguished from one another by nothing else at all because "they all have white bodies and fair hair, and are tall and handsome to look upon, and they use the same laws and practise a common religion". More specifically, the Gothic peoples of his time, the 6th century, were all of the Arian faith, and had one language called Gothic, and it seemed to him that "they all came originally from one tribe, and were distinguished later by the names of those who led each group". According to him, the most important Gothic peoples in his own time were the Goths (ruling Italy), the Vandals, Visigoths, and Gepids.^[13] Also designated as Gothic peoples by Procopius were the Sciri and Alans and some other peoples who came to dominate the western Roman military before Odoacer took control in the 5th century.^[14] Furthermore, he described the Rugii of his time as a Gothic people who had joined the Goths of Theoderic the Great when they in turn entered Italy, but they maintained some independence.^[15] Procopius also noted an isolated Gothic people called the Tetraxitae, who lived on the western shores of the Sea of Azov. They became isolated in the 5th century when the Visigoths and Vandals, who he believed to have also originated in the "Scythian" area, had already moved away and conquered Libya and Spain.^[16] The Tetraxitae were still there in the 6th century. (They were not Arians, but rather orthodox Christians, and so he wondered whether they had converted, though he admitted to not being able to give an answer.)^[17]

The early Greek historian Herodotus had already written about the Getae on the Lower Danube, as well as the Melanchlaeni and Sarmatae near the Don, about 1000 years earlier. He specifically described the Melanchlaeni, whose name means "black cloaks", as a non-Scythian people, who practiced the customs of the Scythians. They lived north of the "Royal Scythians" of his time, who lived between the Gerrhus river (Molochna), the Don, and Sea of Azov. The Sauromatae of Herodotus were the early Sarmatians, living in his period to the east of the Royal Scythians, on the eastern side of the Don. According to him they spoke a barbarous form of the Scythian language.^[18] The Sarmatians were a large group of peoples, and several of the Sarmatian peoples such as the Roxolani and Iazyges later moved westwards, becoming the "Scythian" neighbours of the Romans and Getae on the Lower Danube.

According to modern scholars, other evidence confirms that both the Sarmatian Alans and the Goths themselves lived near the Don and the Sea of Azov until the late 4th century and the arrival of the Huns, after which large numbers moved westwards into the Roman empire. However, it is not correct that the Vandals were among these peoples. Older Roman records clearly show that the Hasdingi Vandals who led the invasion of Northern Africa in the 5th century AD were already established near the Roman frontier in what is now Hungary during the Marcomannic Wars in the late second century, before the Goths and Alans arrived there, and they apparently arrived from the north, not the east. The Silingi Vandals who travelled with them to Gaul, Spain and Africa were apparently located near the Elbe in the second century, as reported by the geographer Ptolemy. Of the "Gothic peoples" who invaded Africa, only the Alans came from a region near the Sea of Azov.^[19]

In the time of Jordanes, the Goths lived mainly in or near the Roman empire itself, but his account described thousands of years of dramatic mass migrations and military conquests, and several ancestral homelands and name changes.

Jordanes' Getica followed the tradition of simply equating the Goths to the classical Getae. However, he also followed the traditions that had them descended from the Scythians further east, and he also accepted the idea from Bible commentaries that the ultimate origins of the Goths lay in the islands of the far north. For his equation of the Getae and the Goths, even in the title of his work, he explicitly cited the authority of Orosius.^[20] Jordanes had also read Josephus, and apparently saw his account of the origins of the Scythians as descendants of the Biblical Magog in Genesis as compatible with his own account, though he questioned why Josephus had not specifically named the Goths, and discussed their beginnings.^[21]

Differently to other Gothic origins stories however, Jordanes named at least two specific northern places where the ancestors of the Goths had lived more than a thousand years earlier, the island of Scandza and the southern Baltic coast near the mouth of the Vistula. For his geographical information he cited Latin and Greek authors, but scholars are uncertain about the precise origins of the various details of Jordanes' migration stories. There is debate about whether he used real Gothic legends or simply synthesized older Latin and Greek works. Jordanes himself, in the prefaces to his Romana and Getica, mentions that his project of writing the Getica involved first reading the now lost, and much larger (12 volume) history of the Goths written by Cassiodorus, in Italy, who worked for the Ostrogothic regime. Indeed, he had been asked by a friend to abridge it. He had access to it for three days, he said.