11-09-2009, 10:14 PM
Quote:If we look at the legenday roots of the Romans, the Gauls, and the Britons, we discover the Trojan tie. Then why did Jordanes/Cassiodorus choose a rinky-dink mythical isle in the middle of no-where, with its dubious peoples and pine-studded shores? It doesn't ring very heroic at all. More like a heritage of cow-paths and bee-hives.
You and I know today that Scandzia was a "rinky-dink" island in the middle of nowhere, but the ancient Greeks and Romans hadn't visited it, and they considered the edges of their known world to be very exotic and extraordinary, so maybe their story about coming from a remote island in the Baltic Sea would have actually been awe-inspiring. Remember, some say that Caesar's motive for invading Britain was simply to make the Roman people astonished that he would have the audacity to "cross Ocean."
Let's say hypothetically, a few decades after Pytheas first mentioned the island of Thule, some tribe emerged from the steppes telling a fanciful story about how they originally came from Thule. I think that to the Greeks, this sort of tall tale would have been more shocking than simply saying "we lived in the steppes north of the Black Sea."
This is purely speculation, but maybe the Gothic stories about emerging from Scandzia were just playing off Greco-Roman preconceptions about the outer edges of their known world. Stories about a warrior-class hardy enough to embark on a long journey from a remote island in the Baltic to eventually march on Italy and Spain would be pretty astonishing to contemporary Roman audiences, IMO.
I'm not saying the Gothic oral histories are tall tales, but I could understand the motivation for telling a tall tale about how their long journey began in "exotic" Scandinavia.
