Getarum, and was also written in 551. He informs us that while
he was engaged upon the Romana a friend named Castalius
invited him to compress into one small treatise the twelve books—now
lost—of the senator Cassiodorus, on The Origin and Actions
of the Goths. Jordanes professes to have had the work of Cassiodorus
in his hands for but three days, and to reproduce the sense
not the words; but his book, short as it is, evidently contains
long verbatim extracts from the earlier author, and it may be
suspected that the story of the triduana lectio and the apology
quamvis verba non recolo, possibly even the friendly invitation
of Castalius, are mere blinds to cover his own entire want of
originality. This suspicion is strengthened by the fact (discovered
by von Sybel) that even the very preface to his book is
taken almost word for word from Rufinus’s translation of Origen’s
commentary on the epistle to the Romans. There is no doubt,
even on Jordanes’ own statements, that his work is based upon
that of Cassiodorus, and that any historical worth which it
possesses is due to that fact. Cassiodorus was one of the very
few men who, Roman by birth and sympathies, could yet
appreciate the greatness of the barbarians by whom the empire
was overthrown. The chief adviser of Theodoric, the East
Gothic king in Italy, he accepted with ardour that monarch’s
great scheme, if indeed, he did not himself originally suggest
it, of welding Roman and Goth together into one harmonious
state which should preserve the social refinement and the
intellectual culture of the Latin-speaking races without losing
the hardy virtues of their Teutonic conquerors. To this aim
everything in the political life of Cassiodorus was subservient,
and this aim he evidently kept before him in his Gothic history.
But in writing that history Cassiodorus was himself indebted
to the work of a certain Ablabius. It was Ablabius, apparently,
who had first used the Gothic sagas (prisca carmina); it was he
who had constructed the stem of the Amals. Whether he was a
Greek, a Roman or a Goth we do not know; nor can we say when
he wrote, though his work may be dated conjecturally in the
early part of the reign of Theodoric the Great. We can only
say that he wrote on the origin and history of the Goths, using
both Gothic saga and Greek sources; and that if Jordanes used
Cassiodorus, Cassiodorus used, if to a less extent, the work of
Ablabius.
Cassiodorus began his work, at the request of Theodoric, and therefore before 526: it was finished by 533. At the root of the work lies a theory, whencesoever derived, which identified the Goths with the Scythians, whose country Darius Hystaspes invaded, and with the Getae of Dacia, whom Trajan conquered. This double identification enabled Cassiodorus to bring the favoured race into line with the peoples of classical antiquity, to interweave with their history stories about Hercules and the Amazons, to make them invade Egypt, to claim for them a share in the wisdom of the semi-mythical Scythian philosopher Zamolxis. He was thus able with some show of plausibility to represent the Goths as “wiser than all the other barbarians and almost like the Greeks” (Jord., De reb. Get., cap. v.), and to send a son of the Gothic king Telephus to fight at the siege of Troy, with the ancestors of the Romans. All this we can now perceive to have no relation to history, but at the time it may have made the subjugation of the Roman less bitter to feel that he was not after all bowing down before a race of barbarian upstarts, but that his Amal sovereign was as firmly rooted in classical antiquity as any Julius or Claudius who ever wore the purple. In the eighteen years which elapsed between 533 and the composition of the Getica of Jordanes, great events, most disastrous for the Romano-Gothic monarchy of Theodoric, had taken place. It was no longer possible to write as if the whole civilization of the Western world would sit down contentedly under the shadow of East Gothic dominion and Amal sovereignty. And, moreover, the instincts of Jordanes, as a subject of the Eastern Empire, predisposed him to flatter the sacred majesty of Justinian, by whose victorious arms the overthrow of the barbarian kingdom in Italy had been effected. Hence we perceive two currents of tendency in the Getica. On the one hand, as a transcriber of the philo-Goth Cassiodorus, he magnifies the race of Alaric and Theodoric, and claims for them their full share, perhaps more than their full share, of glory in the past. On the other hand he speaks of the great anti-Teuton emperor Justinian, and of his reversal of the German conquests of the 5th century, in language which would certainly have grated on the ears of Totila and his heroes. When Ravenna is taken, and Vitigis carried into captivity, Jordanes almost exults in the fact that “the nobility of the Amals and the illustrious offspring of so many mighty men have surrendered to a yet more illustrious prince and a yet mightier general, whose fame shall not grow dim through all the centuries.” (Getica, lx. § 315).
This laudation, both of the Goths and of their Byzantine conquerors, may perhaps help us to understand the motive with which the Getica was written. In the year 551 Germanus, nephew of Justinian, accompanied by his bride, Matasuntha, grand-daughter of Theodoric, set forth to reconquer Italy for the empire. His early death prevented any schemes for a revived Romano-Gothic kingdom which may have been based on his personality. His widow, however, bore a posthumous child, also named Germanus, of whom Jordanes speaks (cap. 60) as “blending the blood of the Anicii and the Amals, and furnishing a hope under the divine blessing of one day uniting their glories.” This younger Germanus did nothing in after life to realize these anticipations; but the somewhat pointed way in which his name and his mother’s name are mentioned by Jordanes lends some probability to the view that he hoped for the child’s succession to the Eastern Empire, and the final reconciliation of the Goths and Romans in the person of a Gotho-Roman emperor.
The De rebus Geticis falls naturally into four parts. The first (chs. i.–xiii.) commences with a geographical description of the three quarters of the world, and in more detail of Britain and Scanzia (Sweden), from which the Goths under their king Berig migrated to the southern coast of the Baltic. Their migration across what has since been called Lithuania to the shores of the Euxine, and their differentiation into Visigoths and Ostrogoths, are next described. Chs. v.–xiii. contain an account of the intrusive Geto-Scythian element before alluded to.
The second section (chs. xiv.–xxiv.) returns to the true history of the Gothic nation, sets forth the genealogy of the Amal kings, and describes the inroads of the Goths into the Roman Empire in the 3rd century, with the foundation and the overthrow of the great but somewhat shadowy kingdom of Hermanric.
The third section (chs. xxv.–xlvii.) traces the history of the West Goths from the Hunnish invasion to the downfall of the Gothic kingdom in Gaul under Alaric II. (376–507). The best part of this section, and indeed of the whole book, is the seven chapters devoted to Attila’s invasion of Gaul and the battle of the Mauriac plains. Here we have in all probability a verbatim extract from Cassiodorus, who (possibly resting on Ablabius) interwove with his narrative large portions of the Gothic sagas. The celebrated expression certaminis gaudia assuredly came at first neither from the suave minister Cassiodorus nor from the small-souled notary Jordanes, but is the translation of some thought which first found utterance through the lips of a Gothic minstrel.
The fourth section (chs. xlviii.–lx.) traces the history of the East Goths from the same Hunnish invasion to the first overthrow of the Gothic monarchy in Italy (376–539). In this fourth section are inserted, somewhat out of their proper place, some valuable details as to the Gothi Minores, “an immense people dwelling in the region of Nicopolis, with their high priest and primate Vulfilas, who is said also to have taught them letters.” The book closes with the allusion to Germanus and the panegyric on Justinian as the conqueror of the Goths referred to above.
Jordanes refers in the Getica to a number of authors besides Cassiodorus; but he owes his knowledge of them to Cassiodorus. It is perhaps only when he is using Orosius that we can hold Jordanes to have borrowed directly. Otherwise, as Mommsen says, the Getica is a mera epitome, laxata ea et perversa, historiae Gothicae Cassiodorianae.
As to the style and literary character of Jordanes, every author who has used him speaks in terms of severe censure. When he is left to himself and not merely transcribing, he is sometimes scarcely grammatical. There are awkward gaps in his narrative and statements inconsistent with each other. He quotes, as if he were familiarly acquainted with their writings, a number of Greek and Roman writers, of whom it is almost certain that he had not read more than one or two. At the same time he does not quote the chronicler Marcellinus, from whom he has copied verbatim the history of the deposition of Augustulus. All these faults make him a peculiarly unsatisfactory authority where we cannot check his statements by those of other authors. It may, however, be pleaded in extenuation that he is professedly a transcriber, and, if
