Goths, Huns, and Romans: Race and Gender at the End of the Western Empire, in the Historical Writings of Ammianus Marcellinus and Jordanes

Prof. Nicole Lopez-Jantzen
Associate Professor of History
Borough of Manhattan Community College

RSVP for Zoom link: rkousser@gc.cuny.edu

This talk will discuss historical depictions of Goths and Huns during the “Age of Attila,” (fourth through early sixth centuries), a period in which the steppe peoples played an increasingly important role in the Roman Empire, from the work of the Roman historian Ammianus Marcellinus, expressing normative ideas about barbarians in the traditional center of empire, Rome, to Jordanes, a man of Gothic descent writing in the new imperial core of Constantinople. An analysis of the representation of Goths and Huns affirms that late antique Romanitas, or Romanness, is gendered, so that to be a Roman is to have access to hegemonic masculinity, or to dominate and conquer others, while Romans dehumanized and racialized said others. Jordanes’s desire to distance the Goths from other barbarians and associate them instead with the Romans in the Goth’s mythological past also shows that despite the reinforcement of the dichotomy between the Roman and the barbarian in the third century, Romanitas remained an aspirational identity, one which male Goths, as well as free Roman woman, could not fully realize, but attempted to approach, to limit who could exercise dominion over them. Lastly, it will discuss how in the late antique Roman and post-Roman Mediterranean, Romanness functioned much like whiteness does today.