The transformation of the Roman Empire in the fifth and sixth centuries poses some of the knottiest questions in history. The role of divided communities, peoples and ethnicity in this transformation looks like the toughest of these knots in our ethnicity-obsessed world today. This case-study of one of the most famous barbarian groups, Theoderic's Goths in Italy between 489 and 554, does not pretend to solve the ethnicity question, merely to make what I hope will be a thought-provoking, if occasionally polemical, contribution to the current lively debates. In questioning certain entrenched assumptions and vocabulary relating to the barbarians of late antiquity, I do not propose a new single model, only a new method of inquiry. The evanescent and ever-changing Goths of sixth-century Italy provide only one glimpse of the varieties of community and the impact of ethnographic texts on late antique Mediterranean and European societies. The Italian developments need not mirror the experience of the other barbarian groups in other parts of the Empire.

I hope that this book synthesizes several areas of research that have remained somewhat out of touch with one another: notably the theories of the German and Austrian ethnogenesis historians, the recent British and American work on late Roman frontier regions and military culture, and the deep enquiries into texts, manuscripts and literary strategies of early Byzantinists and early medievalists from the late 1960s onward.