Jordanes: critic of phyletism?

Goths at the Battle of Hadrianople

One of the books I have been reading recently is De origine actibusque Getarum, a unique and precious document dating from the reign of Justinian of the Eastern Roman Empire. It is unique and precious because it is the only surviving document by a barbarian – in this case, an Eastern Teutonic Goth – about the history of his own people. Jordanes of Alania [Gk. Ιορδάνης ο Αλανός, Goth. Ïaurdaneis 𐌹𐌰𐌿𐍂𐌳𐌰𐌽𐌴𐌹𐍃] was a military secretary or notarius who was living in Byzantium at the end of the Gothic Wars. His grandfather Paria had been such a secretary to the Alan tribal leader Candac, and Jordanes had apparently continued that tradition as secretary to the Ostrogothic lord Gunthigis Baza. He had taken up residence in Constantinople and had been writing a history of Rome at the time when he was supposedly requested by a friend, Castalius, to similarly write a history of his own people. He wrote it in 551 AD, and it was apparently a politically-sensitive document, given that it was a narration of the history of a people with whom Constantinople was at war.

Jordanes has long been considered something of a second-rate hack author, a barely-literate barbarian better suited to the sword than the pen, who was completely dependent for his De origine on the now-lost history of the Goths written by Cassiodorus. A great deal of critique has been made of Jordanes’ Latin grammar, of his mistaken identification of the Thracian Getæ with the Goths, and of his ‘plagiarism’ of Cassiodorus. For much of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the chief interest in Jordanes was from Germanicists and mediævalists who used Jordanes as a source on the identity and history of the ‘barbarian kingdoms’ from which the Germans claimed descent. Even in this discourse he was considered the intellectual and academic inferior of Tacitus. Thankfully some of this reputation has been revisited, as at least some of the negativity surrounding Jordanes has been owing to the general anti-Byzantine bias of Western academia. James O’Donnell of Georgetown and Brian Swain of Kennesaw State have done some interesting work recovering Jordanes as a political voice and literary critic in his own right, with Swain in particular noting Jordanes’ evident literary interest in the Æneid and his awareness of the contemporary controversy over Origenism.

O’Donnell and Swain make a good point, though both of them voice cautions about attempts to ascribe too narrow a political view to the author. The De origine actibusque Getarum is an inescapably political document, having been written from Constantinople, in Latin, by a Goth, about the Gothic people, during a time when Goths were not the most popular subject in Eastern Rome. Obviously Jordanes had to take a bit of care when writing it, which is why he adds his exculpatory encomiums to Justinian at the end of his narration and his disavowals of adding to or subtracting from the corpus of his subject matter in the postscript.

But his history, for all that it has been criticised (particularly in Romania) for his ‘errors’ of historical fact, has a particular and significant narrative value. Jordanes – though he has other philosophical, political and theological commitments which must be heeded – attempts to in some degree defend the honour of his people through this historical treatment. In fact, he appropriates Virgil, Plato and the commentaries on Origen to argue against both the false universality of Hellenism and the ‘phyletist’ – to anachronistically deploy an analogy thirteen hundred years in the offing – understanding of the places of Greekness and Romanity in the classical world.

If there is any one firm political commitment that stands out in the Getica, it is the commitment to Orthodox Christianity. Jordanes speaks of Saint Cyprian of Carthage as ‘our own bishop and venerable martyr in Christ’, for example, and issues condemnations of Arianism. This is noteworthy in that it places Jordanes firmly in a minority position vis-à-vis his own people, most of whom were Arians following Wulfila. Jordanes is occasionally given to snark at the expense of historical figures, but he saves his bitterest polemic for Emperor Valens, whom he blames for leading the Gothic people astray from becoming true Christians:

138. When the Emperor Valens heard of this at Antioch, he made ready an army at once and set out for the country of Thrace. Here a grievous battle took place and the Goths prevailed. The Emperor himself was wounded and fled to a farm near Hadrianople. The Goths, not knowing that the Emperor lay hidden in so poor a hut, set fire to it (as is customary in dealing with a cruel foe), and thus he was cremated in royal splendour. Plainly it was a direct judgement of God that he should be burned with fire by the very men whom he had perfidiously led astray when they sought the true faith, turning them aside from the flame of love into the fire of hell.

One of Jordanes’s projects in the Getica is to build up an ancient historical pedigree for his people going back to their origins on the ‘island’ of Scandza. He accomplishes this by establishing linkages between the Goths of distant antiquity, and the peoples among whom they lived: in particular, the Scythians, the Thracians and the ‘Getæ’ (a term which Jordanes uses interchangeably with ‘Goths’). These identifications allow Jordanes to claim for the Goths the Amazon queens Lampedo and Marpesia, the Scythian warrior-queen Tomyris, and the legendary Thracian philosopher-kings Zalmoxis and Deceneus.

In Swain’s view, these identifications also allow Jordanes to set up a direct parallelism between the Goths and the Romans using the Æneid as a literary template, in which the Thracian tribes stood as foils to the Trojan adventurers at the heart of the story. This parallelism would have had profound resonances for any Greek- or Latin-speaking audience – and, indeed, profoundly subversive ones. The œconomic exploitation and enslavement of the starving Goths at the hands of Lupicinus and Maximus, and the subsequent betrayal and attempted murder of Fritigern, is placed in the centre of Jordanes’ narrative, and it deliberately echoes and parallels the episode in the Æneid in which the Thracians murder the Trojan Polydorus, forcing Æneas to flee. This episode is not only meant to evoke sympathy for the Goths under Fritigern. It also would have served to give the Goths the prestige of a culture with claims to literacy and philosophy and a disciplined soldier-tradition, and thus a more central place in the world according to Hellenistic or late-classical thought. In effect, Jordanes was deliberately blurring the distinction between ‘barbarian’ and Greco-Roman.

This distinction-blurring for the benefit of the Goths did not, however, prevent Jordanes from erecting and sharpening that same distinction between the Goths and the other barbarian tribes around them. Jordanes routinely belittles other tribes as dim-witted, crude, illiterate, undisciplined and animalistic, including the Huns, the Franks, and even the Goths’ linguistic kissing-cousins the Gepids. It also did not prevent Jordanes from criticising particular Gothic historical figures when it suited him. But the fact that his narrative set out to provide a parallel standing for the Goths alongside the Romans deserves some careful consideration.

It’s not outside the realm of possibility that in the Getica, Jordanes was issuing a thinly-veiled challenge – from a perspective that was both explicitly Chalcedonian Christian and distinguishably literate in the founding mythology of Rome – to the ideology of Justinian, which was based in the notion of reconquering the West and restoring it to a universal Romanitas. The task of Jordanes, which even as it lauded Justinian and Belisarius for their efforts in uniting the Gothic and Roman peoples, nevertheless placed the Gothic and Roman peoples on an equal footing. Even if he was unwilling to do this for other barbarian peoples, Jordanes had still thrown down a gauntlet against one of the chief unspoken prejudices of the Hellenistic mind.

And here the Orthodoxy of Jordanes, though we have no reason at all to think it less than sincere, serves him an additional purpose. Despite his political challenge to Justinianic imperial ideology, he could by no means stand accused of Arianism or any other theological aberration. His invocation and deft avoidance of the Origenist controversy in the introduction to the Getica – which borrowed a great deal in style from the preface of Rufinus’s translation of Origen’s letters into Latin – shows that he was not insensible to this possibility; and thus he takes pains to establish himself on the side of doctrinal correctness. Further: he places Christianity and the Great Commission outside the claims of nation-building in his doctrinal criticism of Emperor Valens. Jordanes does not place an overbearing finger on this point, but it’s clear that in his view that being linguistically and culturally Roman is not a necessary prærequisite for Christianity.

This is an important point to get in our day and age. Is celebrating Greek independence the priority for us, or the Annunciation of Christ to the Holy Theotokos? Are ‘barbarians’ spiritually inferior to Hellenes? Is it necessary to culturally ‘Romanise’ before adopting Christianity? These are questions which are nearly fifteen hundred years old, but even in an indirect form they were being explored by the Gothic notarius. Though belittled for being too Byzantine in our own recent past, ironically Jordanes may prove a valuable intellectual ally in our own day against the sin of phyletism.