Family life was largely lived outdoors among the members of the tribe. Many women labored at the hearth throughout the day to prepare traditional meals, but freewheeling, tattooed adventuresses roamed Gothia’s villages, too. By Alaric’s youth, generations of warrior men and women who lived nearby and shared the land, like the local tribe of the Agathyrsi, had long raised horses and hunted the open steppes, ranging as far away as central Asia. They inked their skin with blue-black dye, the sting of the iron needle a point of native pride and one that caused credulous Greeks and Romans to wonder, as Pliny did, why anyone would choose to write “on their own bodies.”
Men in Gothia hunted, fished, explored the rivers, felled trees, and scavenged in the “swamps and forests,” which, as Jordanes reminded his audience, were an important center of communal activity, the equivalent of Gothia’s cities. Being surrounded by nature, in fact, was likely what taught Gothic children, both boys and girls, to be inquisitive about themselves and about others.
Goths of Alaric’s day passed down the memory of many of these pioneering but now-nameless ancestors. Some of the Goths were astrologists. Others were herbalists who experimented with the natural properties of Gothia’s native herbs, grasses, and trees, like the willows near Alaric’s home. Romans called the willow salix, in Latin. Alaric’s word for it, like much of his people’s literature, was never written down. But fifteen hundred years later, a synthetic compound that enhanced what the willow’s leaves and bark do best—alleviate headaches, aches, and pains—was finally developed by a German scientist. He won the Nobel Prize. (Salicylic acid, which is naturally derived from the willow, is the key ingredient in aspirin.)
Within the largely unstructured hours of the young Gothic children’s life, adults taught them, during excursions to the forest, which stream was “sweet and fit to drink as far as half-way down its course” and which other bodies of water to avoid, Jordanes explains. On fishing trips, a child might study the nets, making mental notes about which kinds of fish were full of “fine flavor, without bones.” No doubt these were the cartilaginous fish of the region, such as lampreys, eels, and sharks. For adults, days were marked by the time it took to journey from one river to the next. A child’s classroom, it’s safe to say, was outdoors; his parents and local villagers were akin to teachers. Throughout the year, those adults might have taught their sons and daughters how to distinguish a dainty roe deer from a majestic red one or how to creep around a lurking fox. On hikes inland to the mountains, Gothic children’s eyes might have grown wide with fear as they spotted the terrifying wingspan of a vulture, learning how to tell that bird apart from an eagle, with its white tail. (Thanks to the work of zooarchaeologists, bones from these raptors have been identified in excavations at the Danube site of Dichin, near Gothia’s ancient borders.)
Back home, where the landscape could appear deceptively uninteresting, even a casual stroll could offer pleasing encounters with nature. Chickens and geese ranged freely. Ducks dwelled in Gothia’s bogs, and in the river, there were water voles, beavers, and screeching weasels, whose squeals may have sent children doing the same. All of these species’ bones have been dug up around the delta. Sometimes they survive in fragments—a jaw bone or a claw—but as evidence, they fill out Jordanes’s accounts of everyday life.
Right around the time Alaric was born, in the 370s, a series of grisly homicides disturbed one of the tribal areas far upstream. The territory was quite distant from Gothia, at the source of the Danube, a place Jordanes described as having “a great rushing sound.” The tribe of people affected were called Alemanni, not Goths, but word of the violence that struck at the safety of their community likely came to Gothia.
Night after night, some of the best young Alemanni were murdered in their sleep and decapitated, their corpses left outside their huts and tents to rot. Each day, members of the tribe awoke to more news: another body had been found. The situation worsened: one day, the chief’s son went missing, and suspicion fell on the Romans, who dwelled in the vicinity. A short time later, the mystery was cleared up when, in a stunning revelation, the culprit was revealed to be a disgruntled tribesman named Charietto. He “towered over everyone,” it was said, with nerves that “matched his size.” According to the Roman writers who documented the killings, Charietto murdered his people to punish them for their unwillingness to compromise with the Roman government. In desperation, he even kidnapped the chief’s son to use as a pawn during negotiations.
It’s difficult to hear about this rash of killings and not imagine the fear Gothic parents may have felt for their children at the hands of strangers, outsiders, and madmen. Beyond the Roman border, these were tight-knit villages. People recognized one another’s faces and routines during the daylight hours. And after the Gothic wagons quieted down at night, the villagers met one another again around the fire for a meal. The strumming of a cithara enlivened the woods as bards sang about King Berig and people shared the evening’s food.
Centuries later, Jordanes’s account of those fireside meals has proved to be rather important. The same cups and plates—drab-looking gray beakers and matte-orange dishware—show up in excavated tombs across central and eastern Romania, Moldova, and southern and central Ukraine.* The shapes of these containers differ just enough from Roman wares to make them distinctive and readily identifiable, and although some occasionally mimic the appearance of well-known Roman forms, the chemical composition of the clay used to make them is unlike anything produced in Roman workshops. Their presence in the archaeological record rapidly diminishes with proximity to southern Russia and eastern Poland, and they generally look different from the dishes Roman settlers had brought to Dacia. Most of these ceramics have been dated to the fourth century—the third century A.D., at the earliest.
From the pattern of the ceramics’ distribution and the date of their manufacture, archaeologists have been able to deduce the definition of Gothia’s territorial boundaries during Alaric’s lifetime. No boundary is impermeable, of course, even when separated by walls and fences. And the artistic expression of a people’s culture, like their ceramics, rarely fits snugly within a line, however neatly drawn. Some of those humble Gothic dishes, archaeologists know, did cross the Danube border and are occasionally found in excavated Roman settlements south of the river, a point of archaeological curiosity that suggests that the Goths’ sphere of influence reached beyond their own political territory. In fact, the presence of Gothic-style ceramics on Roman land can be explained as the sign of a robust trade between Goths and Romans, as testimony to their shared taste in styles of kitchenware, or as the everyday household cups and plates of Gothic individuals and communities who had crossed the river. Not all of these Goths would have been slaves or refugees. Throughout the fourth century, many Goths went south by choice.
In the end, what’s astonishing about Alaric’s rather hidden childhood is not that nearly all information about it was lost but that young Alaric survived at all. Like Charietto, numerous headhunters stalked the woods near his home. And just as in old Dacia, slave traders lurked near the water he played in. In his youth, civil war ravaged the Terving tribe, to which Alaric’s family belonged, and terrifying nomads from the central Asian steppes, Huns, invaded Gothia’s northern borders, even disturbing towns and communities as far east as China. During one intense period of conflict, the despondent Gothic chief of the Greuthung tribe, who had been unable to protect his people from the marauding Huns, killed himself out of shame.
Many Gothic families, in both the north and the south, eventually made the decision to leave their homes. By 376, thousands of them had fled Gothia for Rome. Like generations of immigrants before them, each would become a refugee, a profugus. That simple Latin word, which generally referred to a “wanderer,” resonated deeply with Romans, who remembered it from their school days. The unmatched storyteller of the first century B.C., the poet Virgil, had made it an inseparable part of Rome’s national identity when he enlisted it to describe the her
o Aeneas in his epic poem The Aeneid. Generations of schoolchildren memorized the opening lines of Virgil’s poem and, in doing so, taught themselves that Rome’s founders had been immigrants.
Yet a widespread affinity for Virgil never guaranteed that the Roman people would formulate a sympathetic response to the Gothic crisis. As one fourth-century commentator pointed out, Virgil specifically said that Aeneas had immigrated “by fate,” fato. Without that important caveat, Servius explained, readers might have misjudged the poem’s protagonist and transformed him into a dangerous criminal or a murderous invader—the implication being that, in fourth-century Rome, immigrants were frequently disparaged as both.
This generalized hostility probably explains why, as Goths crossed the border in 376, lacking much money with which to purchase food or water—what the Romans recognized as “life’s necessities”—many fell victim to the border guards, who preyed on the immigrants’ vulnerabilities. Goths in the camps were sold second-rate dog meat as food and promised better meals if they handed over their sons. For twenty-four months, these indignities went unaddressed by the government. The new immigrants were acting like wild animals who had escaped from their cages, Romans said. Goths made decent cooks and butlers, but why were they camped in their wagons on Roman land?
Demoralized Gothic men, the heads of families, learned to be wary. Dinner invitations were extended by enthusiastic Roman soldiers, with a pretense of camaraderie, only the Goths never came home after the purported meal. Violence against foreigners, even state-sponsored acts of murder, had become an ugly part of Roman life. Even foreign dignitaries could be eliminated, if the circumstances so demanded.
Unbeknownst to the Goths during these years, Emperor Valens, fearing the defection of Armenia as a key ally against Persia, ordered one such assassination, targeting Armenia’s young king, Pap. Two years before Goths boarded boats to cross the Danube, the rising star of Armenia had to use a makeshift raft to save his own life. The emperor invited Pap to the Roman city of Tarsus, purportedly to persuade him to adopt a more aggressive stance toward their mutual Persian neighbor. In fact, the emperor planned to murder him. As soon as Pap suspected Valens’s treachery, the young Armenian and his entourage fled home through the Syrian desert. Trapped by the Euphrates River, they raided farmhouses, stole mattresses, and rigged the beds together with inflated wineskins to improvise a float. Pap crossed the river and thought himself safe. He was not. Roman spies used forged documents to lure the king to a “banquet” that would feature wine and “drummers, flutists, lyre-players, and trumpeters.” During the middle of the meal, Rome’s representatives walked out, mercenaries were sent in, and Pap was felled with one stroke of an axe, as “the wine of the [king’s] cup mingled with the blood from his throat.”
At the Danube border, nervous Roman cities increasingly often locked their gates when they saw ragged Gothic mothers with children coming to the markets. Jordanes says that some Gothic parents relinquished their children to slavery during these hard years because they concluded it was “better to lose liberty than life.” One Roman called the human trafficking morally unjustifiable. “Even if they were the judges of their own case,” he opined, the actions of the soldiers “could not be acquitted by any excuse.” But solutions were slow to come.
Valens’s government finally intervened. Rome agreed to offer the refugees handouts of food and arranged for some of the hundreds of thousands to settle on open fields. Christian writers praised the emperor, after his death, for his “compassion.” But his measures proved insufficient to address the ongoing horrors of famine, slavery, and immigrant deaths.
More trauma followed when, sometime that year or early in 377, the border patrol began indiscriminately separating Gothic boys from their parents. The government had decided upon this policy of forced relocation to ensure that the young Goths grew up pledging “faithfulness” to the values of their new home. The plan, instituted by Emperor Valens, was to distribute the Gothic children “into various towns to prevent them, when grown to manhood,” of plotting what many Romans feared would be an “insurrection.” According to the Roman writers who lived to witness this episode, the government’s policy applied to Gothic boys eight to ten years old—“those persons,” it was said, “who were too young for war.” Following the usual Roman military practice, many of the older boys were likely enrolled as cadets.
The young Gothic boys were identified, processed, and sorted, the impersonal nature of the border guards’ tasks little different from the inhumanity of the colonial-era Dacian slave trade. In fact, many Roman soldiers capitalized on the general confusion to acquire their own slaves. They separated Gothic wives from their captured husbands and took possession of unmarried Gothic girls. One Roman soldier, it was reported, “was smitten by a fair and pretty boy,” who endured a different fate from his peers, all of whom the Roman government classified as “hostages.”
State resources were soon allocated to implement the border separation policy in full. An office of the Roman government was set up to oversee the relocation program, and a military appointee received a government salary to manage it. The rugged plateaus and cities beyond the Taurus Mountains, in Roman Asia, were identified as suitable holding pens for the children. Gothic children were forced to say good-bye not only to a familiar landscape of childhood memories but to their actual parents, grandparents, and siblings. No documentation was ever kept, as far as historians know, that would have identified the children or helped reunite them with their families. An obvious paper trail, in fact, is quite likely what the Roman government wanted to avoid. Cruelty was the intention. Many Gothic parents never saw their sons again.
In the late summer of 378, the distracted fifty-year-old emperor Valens, tabling his military plans to lead an attack against Armenia and Persia, decided to visit the Danube frontier to address the growing crisis. Gothic spokesmen asked for permission to farm on more Roman land, as they felt it would give their families hope for a better future. But Valens was in no mood to bargain. The land they wanted belonged to the Roman people, and he could no longer help them. When it became clear that the two sides would not reach a settlement, the aggrieved Goths circled their wagons. Rome readied its legions. On a field at Adrianopolis in early August, some distance beyond the eastern capital’s outer territory, tens of thousands of Roman and Gothic soldiers died in a pitched battle.
On the night of August 9, 378, Valens, pestered and weary, was likely asleep when Gothic arsonists torched the Roman farmhouse where he was lodging, close to the battlefield. The roof of the property fell under the weight of the flames. One version of the incident says he was killed in the fire. Jordanes contradicts that account, saying Valens actually died the day before on the battlefield. But as a Gothic historian, he might have scrubbed the murder scene to exonerate his people. The real tragedy of Adrianopolis was that the story of a murder by arson under the cloak of night appeared to confirm the Romans’ ugliest fears about the Goths. These people, the Romans told themselves, were savages.
Within the year, the young Gothic boys separated from their parents were dead. In the wake of the farmhouse massacre, lingering doubts about the benefits of the program had convinced the Roman official in charge, Julius, to end it on his own initiative—with Gothic blood. He ordered officials in Asia Minor to call a public assembly. A false promise was made to assist the Gothic boys financially. Town councils were instructed to gather the refugee children. Julius ordered archers to be “mounted upon the roofs of the houses in the respective marketplaces.” When the boys were led forth, they were murdered, one by one.
The lone Gothic source that survives, written by Jordanes, omits this episode, but the Roman people who learned of it never forgot about the stolen childhoods of the Gothic youths. The ancient writer who gives the most complete surviving historical account of the tragedy, the radically revisionist historian Zosimus, wrote well after Alaric’s life. An outspoken champion of the older empire, Zosimus lived in the early sixth ce
ntury during an age of political instability and Christian overreach, and he romanticized the Roman Empire’s earlier history: a time of competent rulers, stable government, and religious toleration. Frustrated by the realities of his own day, he published a work called A New History, which offered a blistering critique of the empire’s ills. In it, he lamented the loss of Roman territory and savaged the empire’s Christian leaders for their intolerant zealotry.
Skeptics protest that no writer working two centuries after the fact could definitively have documented what happened during the border separation crisis of the 370s. And Zosimus, it is true, was not an eyewitness to those events. Moreover, news of the atrocities was barely mentioned in contemporary reports at the time, which means that Zosimus might have fabricated some details. Even the magisterial Roman historian of Alaric’s youth, Ammianus Marcellinus—heir to the noble tradition of Latin history writing begun by Livy and Tacitus and author of a weighty tome on the fourth century—buried this episode in a brief aside. He praised Julius’s “wise plan” to hold the young foreigners in detention but was vague about the moment when Roman public squares were turned into a killing field.
The reticence of the Roman sources prior to Zosimus is also unsurprising. Given Rome’s usual reluctance to understand the predicaments of foreigners and the relentless mockery immigrants endured at the hands of poets and writers, it makes good sense that Romans in Alaric’s day never really wanted to confront the tragedy. Roman writers frequently did claim to prize objectivity—but usually only if it suited their own personal agendas and glorified the empire.
Zosimus, on the other hand, was an avowed troublemaker. As a historian, he chose to expose some of his culture’s dark memories when most of his audience would have preferred such scandalous details to remain hidden. Provocation was his goal. From the pages of his A New History, he gave his sixth-century Roman audience a different way of remembering the life of the Roman Empire: not just as a series of military victories and cultural triumphs but also as a sequence of political setbacks, missed opportunities, and disappointing leaders.
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