Jordanes

Jordanes (flourished 6th century ad) was a historian notable for his valuable work on the Germanic tribes.

Jordanes was a Goth who, although not a scholar, devoted himself to writing history in Latin. His first major work, De origine actibusque Getarum (“On the Origin and Deeds of the Getae”), now commonly referred to as the Getica, was completed in 551. At the time, Jordanes probably lived in a Roman province on the lower Danube River. In the title of the work, Jordanes confuses the Goths with the Getae, a wholly distinct people. Jordanes’ other extant work is the chronicle De summa temporum vel origine actibusque gentis Romanorum (“The High Point of Time, or the Origin and Deeds of the Roman People”), also completed in 551 and called the Romana. The Getica is by far the more valuable work, because it is the major contemporary source on both the Goths and Huns. It is a 1-volume summary of the 12-volume history of the Goths by the 6th-century writer Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus. Jordanes claims that he was able to reproduce only the general sense of Cassiodorus’ work because he had access to it for only three days. He states that he added material from certain Greek and Latin authors but that the beginning and the end are entirely his own. Although the book is exceedingly disjointed, it preserves the legends of the origin of the Goths in Scandinavia and traces their migrations and wars through the period of the Ostrogothic king Ermanaric’s 4th-century empire in what is now Ukraine.

Jordanes is especially valuable on the Huns, because his chief source on them is the work—now known only in fragments preserved by other writers—of the Greek historian Priscus, who had traveled among the Huns in 449. Jordanes cites the beautiful lyric sung by the Huns at Attila’s funeral (453) and relates much information about the collapse of his empire in the last half of the 5th century.

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The Romana is an outline of world history that records the growth of Rome from the time of its legendary founder, Romulus, to the Byzantine emperor Justinian (reigned 527–565).