ABSTRACT
Goffart’s 1980 book Barbarians and Romans forever changed the shape of the debate about the Germanic peoples and their roles in transforming the late Roman world. Goffart made contributions in three distinct areas. First, he showed that it is simply impossible to speak of “the barbarian invasions.” There was no coherent process to which that name can be attached and the individual barbarian peoples do not have knowable histories reaching back centuries. We have already seen in Part I how Goffart and Wolfram disagree on how to read the sources that bear on the question of ethnogenesis. In reading these pages one will see that Goffart had not yet begun to focus his thinking on those problems, although he makes some general remarks on the subject. Be that as it may, Goffart’s erasure of the “lines on the map” (see again Map 3) has convinced virtually everyone. Goffart’s second contribution here is his insistence on a “short” history for the barbarian encounter with Rome. Similarly, one will want to reflect on Goffart’s “short” history. Goffart’s third contribution is only suggested in this chapter. It forms the central argument of his book as a whole. Goffart gradually came to have doubts about the reigning explanation for barbarian settlement inside the western provinces. He began to build up a different interpretation based on the transfer to the barbarians of tax revenues. In other words, the Romans accommodated the barbarians on essentially Roman terms and by means of Roman institutional mechanisms. The reader will want to have in mind the ways in which the argument over ethnogenesis relates to Goffart’s rejection of the very idea of the barbarian invasions.
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