ABSTRACT
There have been few studies of gender in the Ostrogothic kingdom, and these have tended to focus on the reign of the Ostrogothic queen Amalasuintha or investigated perceptions of Gothic manliness and unmanliness using eastern sources, namely Procopius’s Wars and Jordanes’s Getica. This chapter offers an intervention by examining the ideologies of gender in the Ostrogothic Kingdom. Using primarily the works of Ennodius and Cassiodorus, it consistently demonstrates a position that denies the later claims of the Justinianic court. Goths, it will be shown, were celebrated as the manliest of men, even as Belisarius was besieging Naples, while the Romans, both past and present and in the east and west, were unmanly, either effeminate and weak soldiers or civilian damsels in distress, who needed heroic Goths to rescue and defend them in order to live in peace and to prosper.
