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Full-Text Articles in Ancient History, Greek and Roman through Late Antiquity
The Identity Of Late Barbarians: Goths And Wine, Walter Stevenson
The Identity Of Late Barbarians: Goths And Wine, Walter Stevenson
Classical Studies Faculty Publications
Wine, symbol of civilization in the Mediterranean for millennia and still a profound cultural marker in Europe today, is not often associated with the Goths.1 But there is evidence allowing us to add this Northern European barbarian people to the tapestry of ancient wine production2 at the same time that they were beginning to cultivate the first European barbarian literature with the translation of the Bible into the Gothic language.
Sozomen, Barbarians, And Early Byzantine Historiography, Walter Stevenson
Sozomen, Barbarians, And Early Byzantine Historiography, Walter Stevenson
Classical Studies Faculty Publications
Sozomen, writing in mid-fifth century Constantinople, stands out as an exception proving the rule in Byzantine historiography. He is the first and last Christian Byzantine historian to make a serious effort at ethnography.5 When we consider how quickly Christianity was spreading outside the boundaries of the eastern Empire in the fourth and fifth centuries it is striking how little mention barbarians and their evangelization earn in the early ecclesiastical histories.6 To illustrate this point I will begin by showing that Sozomen’s predecessors, Eusebius, Rufinus, and Socrates, de-emphasized the natural interest that the historical genre had expressed in ethnography, …