Van Nuffelen and Van Hoof (hereafter V., rendered plural) have produced the first ever scholarly translation of Jordanes’ breviary of Roman history, called the Romana, and the first English translation in over a century of his Gothic history, known as the Getica. V. provide a long introduction, and their translation is so thoroughly footnoted that it borders on being a commentary, which is all to the good because Jordanes, as an author, has been neglected despite the fame of his Getica.
Jordanes just might be the best known late ancient author who is given the least attention. There is not a late Romanist or early medievalist who has not read (at least parts of) him, and he is even a fixture on undergraduate syllabi. Still, few engage closely with his texts. Jordanes is almost never discussed alongside his literary coevals, this despite recording events up to the moment he wrote (551/2), something rare – and bold – in Roman historical writing. He was a Roman Goth who wrote histories of Goths and Romans precisely while Rome was at war with the Goths, and yet he is not considered an important source for the Gothic War in Italy, Roman-Gothic relations or the Justinianic period. And to put an even finer point on it, he is the only author from within the Roman world to claim a Gothic (or any other barbarian) identity, but this remarkable feature of his person goes almost entirely unexamined. How can this be?
Two centuries of often tendentious scholarship have turned Jordanes into such an inscrutable, phantasmic figure that most do not know what to make of him, and so ignore him. In the Getica's preface Jordanes says that (1) he had been asked to summarise the Gothic history of Cassiodorus and (2) his own text also drew from many other Greek and Latin authors and included much of his own authorship. Nineteenth-century scholars of Germanic antiquity accepted the former and refused the latter. They assumed that Cassiodorus, an Italo-Roman statesman who served several Gothic monarchs, preserved Gothic tribal memories in his (now lost) history of the Goths and that Jordanes was a conduit for that material. Subsequent studies further erased Jordanes’ authorial presence, sharpening the image of the Getica as an ostensible trove of Gothic orality. This paradigm was finally challenged in the 1980s, when Anglophone scholars argued for Jordanes’ autonomy and situated him within a mid-sixth-century Constantinopolitan context (B. Croke, CP 82 [1987]; W. Goffart, The Narrators of Barbarian History [1988]). Crucial though this work was, Jordanes’ restored voice was now said to be a mouthpiece for anti-Gothic, Justinianic triumphalism, and even his claimed Gothic ethnicity was rendered meaningless and subordinated to the point of erasure to his Roman identity. Just as he seemed set to re-emerge, Jordanes disappeared yet again, and this time his texts were demoted to the status of boilerplate imperial propaganda. Despite this revisionism, the last three decades never saw Jordanes integrated into general discussions of the period, which suggests that the field was not convinced of either the old or the new model. V.'s translation, notes and introduction, soon to be joined by this reviewer's monograph, the first to treat Jordanes as an independent author, announce that a new tide in Jordanean scholarship is rolling in.
To sum up V.'s nuanced analysis, Jordanes was an independent author, despite his heavy reliance on sources, and a voice among a chorus of others who reacted with concern and criticism to the crises of the latter part of Justinian's reign. Conflict with Persia, revolts in Africa, military reversals in Gothic Italy and ecclesiastical instability leading up to the Second Council of Constantinople form the backdrop and impetus for Jordanes’ project. The Romana, a brief, Rome-centred history of the world, lauds past imperial achievements, but strikes a disillusioned tone by presenting Rome as ‘a shadow of its former self’ (p. 17). Jordanes implicates Justinian in this criticism, but does so out of his commitment to Roman military strength, not antipathy towards the emperor. The Getica is a more optimistic text that offers a positive view of the Goths and links the Gothic and Roman pasts. V. root Jordanes’ perspective in his biographical context: he was a Goth, served in Moesia as secretary to the Roman general Gunthigis, himself an Amal Goth, and both are to be associated with the corps of federate troops who were by this time units in the regular Roman army comprised of Romans and non-Romans (barbarian immigrants and their descendants). V. argue that Jordanes’ positive portrayal of the Goths and their alliances with Rome, as well as his several fond mentions of the marriage of Justinian's cousin Germanus to Theoderic's granddaughter Matasuentha, were not meant to promote the reconciliation of Romans and Goths as peoples, as much as they were expressions of the more limited concerns and loyalties of federate troops and their enthusiasm for ‘the integration of the Gothic elite into that of the Roman empire’ (pp. 19, 42).
V. do not hedge about Jordanes being a Goth, as some have (and some have even denied it), but say it is unknown and unimportant whether his ancestors were Goths or if he merely grew up among them; what matters is his loyalty to them as well as to the empire. Still, Jordanes says that he ‘derives’ his ‘origin’ from the Goths (trahenti originem), words he applies elsewhere to individuals and peoples to describe hereditary descent (Getica 316, cf. 78–9; 95; 124; 146). Jordanes here uses the language of ethnic affiliation.
Jordanes’ anti-Arianism is well known, but V. have revealed his anti-monophysitism in his open rejection of the theopaschite formula accepted by Justinian and Pope John II (Romana 258). Jordanes, it is argued, numbered among the ‘hard-core defenders of the council of Chalcedon’ (p. 6).
Jordanes has usually been treated in isolation from other authors, but V. situate him in the intellectual terrain of his literary forebears (Ammianus, Orosius etc.) and contemporaries (Procopius, Cassiodorus and the common source behind Marcellinus Comes’ continuator and Jordanes). V. also add to our understanding of the Getica's indebtedness to Cassiodorus, long the central question of scholarship, through a sober and restrained analysis that identifies Cassiodoran derivations while still asserting the primacy of Jordanes’ authorship. Further, there is a systematic discussion of Jordanes’ sources, the best since Mommsen, and which now supersedes that. In it V. advance new arguments for Jordanes’ source usage, notably the following: Jordanes made use of Cassiodorus’ Tripartite history and possibly his Chronicle; the climactic battle against Attila came not from Priscus, but from Cassiodorus and Prosper; sections ascribed to Dio Chrysostom came instead from Cassius Dio; recently discovered fragments of Dexippus reveal his presence in portions previously ascribed to Ablabius and Ammianus.
Footnotes in the translation reliably demarcate Jordanes’ sources and report if and how he changed them. Careful attention to his deployment and alteration of sources is essential for understanding Jordanes’ purposes, especially in the Romana, which is mainly a patchwork of excerpts from other texts. The plentiful footnotes also provide historical background, note Jordanes’ factual errors and correct them (helpful in a text as error-prone and tendentious as the Getica), supply historiographical comparanda, cite scholarship, address manuscript and translation challenges, and offer a myriad of other elucidations. Latin was possibly not Jordanes’ native tongue, and his language bears a late Latin, sometimes vernacular style. V.'s translation ‘seeks to convey to the reader a sense of the generally low stylistic register in which Jordanes wrote … we do not obscure the often repetitious nature of his vocabulary’ (p. 102). Concerning the accuracy of the translation, several spot checks revealed no errors.
A centuries-old thicket of polarising scholarship has made these texts seem a foreboding wood best avoided. V.'s new translations and discussions will help dispel lingering trepidation and encourage newcomers to integrate the Romana and Getica into our understanding of the momentous sixth century. Jordanes is too singular a voice to be left unheard, and it will be fascinating to see what comes next.
