Customer Reviews

Goths and Romans, 332-489 (Oxford Historical Monographs)

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Although originally published nearly a decade and a half ago, Dr. Heather's assessment of this period of Romano-Gothic interaction is at the top of the field and remains directly applicable to any serious study of the topic.

Dr. Heather approaches this important Late Antique topic, which has not been adequately studied by English speaking scholars in my opinion, by offering a detailed critique of the primary sources that we are forced to use in our attempt to recreate the history of the Goths. He constantly reminds us that Gothic history, for the most part, was written by Roman authors who viewed them merely as barbarians. In addition, Dr. Heather forces us to consider also the reliability of our written sources in attempting to create a plausible historical narrative.

Beginning with the reign of Constantine the Great, Dr. Heather attempts to show that Roman interactions with Goths followed a well-established pattern that modified due to factors outside their relationship, like the introduction of the Huns in the steppe region. With this in mind, he offers a very reliable recreation of the time period with regard to imperial policy, especially the reigns of Theodosius the Great and Arcadius, although his analysis is necessarily skewed towards the more important regions in the East.

Dr. Heather's analysis of the Goths is necessarily weakened by a lack of contemporary sources dealing directly with the Goths in the mid fifth century, when the Goths assimilated into the Hun Empire of Attila. But it picks up and argues persuasively regarding the rise of Theodoric and his approach towards Italy in 489.

Overall, very well researched (modified from an Oxford DPhil dissertation), reliable, and perhaps the most authoritative monograph produced on the topic in English.

Even with a background in classical studies, I've always been much more interested in the supposed "barbarians" who gave the Greeks and the Romans so much trouble, especially the Visigoths and the Franks -- perhaps because I have all sorts of Gothic, Frankish, and Celtic DNA in me. Like so many studies of this type, Heather's work began as his doctoral thesis on the effects of the Goths on the empire of Rome, especially in Greece and the southern Balkans, where the Goths first ran into the Romans and the Amalring family began to reach its greatest power. He was also interested in looking more closely at the history of the Goths written c.550 by a scholar named Jordanes, of whom almost nothing is known -- but whom Heather is convinced was more of a publicist than an uninterested historian. Not a bad supposition for any writer of that period, actually. But since every writer on the Goths and their motivations and actions since then has been based very heavily on Jordanes, reevaluating his influence has probably far-reaching consequences. Along the way, though, the author was pulled off course by his growing fascination with the Goths themselves, and this study takes him places he hadn't expected to go. The result is to see the Gothic invaders (or militant migrants) as a people who might have blended more easily than most into the Roman world and its seductive culture, but whose ruling clans made sure their people retained their self-identity. This was especially true of those Goths who joined with Attila in the 5th Century. In fact, it is due probably to the continued influence of the Amals and the Balthi that we even consider the Goths an important and separate people. For a thoroughly scholarly work heavily laden with footnotes, this is still a very readable work and I can recommend it to anyone who shares my interest in Late Antiquity and the Early Medieval period.