HEATHER, P.,
Goths and Romans 332-489.
Clarendon Press, 1991. 394p. Cloth with dust wrps. Lower part pages near spine slightly pinched. Signature form Professor Carl Deroux on free endpaper. Series: Oxford Historical Monographs. 'Heather puts forward a large number of new interpretations which are both original and convincing. The most important is surely his reassessment of Jordanes' 'Gothic History' in the light of recent work on orally transmitted historical traditions in various societies. This tends to show that pre-literate groups preserve stories of the past to explain the present, and the the story of the past, when it is not fixed by writing changes to adapt to changes in the present. The history of the Goths as fixed first by Cassiodorus, and largely but not entirely following him by Jordanes, combines elements derived from classical historians with an oral tradition which has become focused on the emergence of the centralized rule of the Ostrogothic kingdom of theodoric of the Amal family. This had been built up in stages since 450, but was backdated to the third or fourth centuries. (...) there is much more than could be mentioned that is both new and plausible, particularly in the reconstruction of the story of Theodoric's Goths.' (J.H.W.G. LIEBESCHUETZ in Journal of Roman Studies, 1993, pp.259-60).
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