Sub-Roman Britain (Cavalry etc)

[Alanus]

Jordanes also has an agenda, but for a historian.. And credible? A lot isn't.

Hello, Robert

That's a very good point. But should we be looking at the errors of Jordanes or actually at Cassiodorus, whom Jordanes copied?

There's been a lot of "Jordanes-bashing" lately by revisionist historians. Some just avoid the subject, like Heather and Matthews. I guess everyone knows my thoughts on Heather. :roll: Here is a guy you wouldn't want in your legio! Then we have Kulikowski who dismisses Jordanes as bunk, particularly the passages about the Greutungi kingdom in what is now Russia. Then-- Ka-blam!-- someone discovers a Gothic prince's grave in Sarmara. Oops. Kulikowski is red-faced. :oops:

All the new guys are laughing at ethogenesis, and then Kulikowski says, "Iuthungi [Greutungi], Iazyges, or Tervingi, for example-- which seem to designate groups that shared a sense of kinship and engaged in common actions for that reason." Well, to me that sounds a lot like ethnicity or at least common culture.

Recently, Professor Barbero has sided with Wolfram, yet perhaps more carefully. To him, Goths speak Germanic and physically resemble Germans. Well, so did many Sarmatians who intermarried with Goths, specifically the Taifali (whom Kulikowski fails to mention above). Barbero gives us the best Roman-Gothic interaction to date; and he shows the high numbers of Gothic officers that controlled the Roman army exactly at the time when Rome (supposedly) pulled out of Britain. If the Equites Taifali did enter Britain at this time, their likely commanders would have been Taifali or Gothic, not Italian Roman. And they would have carried a Germanic language influence onto the isle, aka the "th."

In all fairness, then, we still have two scholarly "camps" on the Gothic question, and cannot sumarily dismiss Jordanes even though he is problematic and sandwiched legend into history. Simply because there is a hazy line between the two; and history depends on the views of the men who wrote it, or who are revising it. :wink: