The Greuthungi are a name that almost only one author knows: Ammianus Marcellinus, a Roman officer and historian of the fourth century. Around them stands the most famous early Gothic king, Ermanaric, whose realm is enormous in tradition and contested in scholarship. This article sets the testimonies side by side, keeps text, archaeology and interpretation apart, and says so wherever the sources contradict each other.
The Greuthungi, also spelled Greutungi or Greuthungs, count as one of the two great branches of the Goths north of the Black Sea in the fourth century. The other is the Tervingi (Ammianus writes Theruingi); in his text the two names stand side by side like a pair. Behind both lies what the Romans generally called “Goths”, and behind that umbrella term again a mixture of groups of different origin. The deeper prehistory of the Goths, including the question of Scandinavia as a starting point, is treated in the article on the Goths; this one is about the eastern branch and the year in which its world broke apart.
There are proposals for the name, but no proof. A link to a Germanic word for sand, gravel or grit (Old English grēot) is often considered, giving something like “the people of the stony or gravelly plains”. The name of the Tervingi, by contrast, is connected with forest. Both are linguistic conjectures that cannot be tested against the record, and Herwig Wolfram’s reading as “steppe people” is one reading among several. A Scandinavian origin of the name has also been suggested. Anyone who finds a single confident translation in a book is reading a hypothesis.
The attestation itself is thin. Ammianus Marcellinus, a Greek-speaking officer from Antioch who completed his Latin history in Rome, names the Greuthungi in several places. The poet Claudian knows them under the same label at the end of the century, and in later writing the name disappears. Since the sixth century “Ostrogoths” usually means the same people, but whether that is right is one of the central disputes, and I return to it in the last third.
The state of the evidence governs every sentence one may write about the Greuthungi, so here is who supplies what.
Ammianus Marcellinus wrote in the late fourth century, close in time but not on the spot. He was not an eyewitness of events on the Dniester but relied on reports from others. His Book 31 opens the Gothic catastrophe and is the only contemporary source for Ermanaric’s end. That he describes the Huns with prejudice is well known; on the Greuthungi he can hardly be checked, because he is the only source.
Jordanes wrote around the middle of the sixth century, some 175 years after the events, probably in Constantinople. His Getica condenses, by his own account, a lost work by Cassiodorus. For Ermanaric he supplies the list of peoples, the story of the executed Sunilda and a version of the death that differs from Ammianus. Jordanes wants to give the Goths a glorious past. That does not make him invented, but it does not make him neutral either.
Claudian, a court poet under Honorius, mentions the Greuthungi and Ostrogoths around 399 as settlers in Phrygia. He shows that the name was still alive when the land by the Black Sea was long lost. Zosimus, a Greek historian of the early sixth century, writes about the years after 376 and names Alatheus and Saphrax in another shape (Allotheus in his text). Add Edward Gibbon’s footnotes from the eighteenth century, which preserve Claudian’s line, and modern scholarship, above all Herwig Wolfram and Peter Heather, who stand apart in their interpretation.
A note on method: I read Ammianus in an English translation (Rolfe), Jordanes in Mierow’s English version and Zosimus in an English online translation. I did not work through any of these texts in Latin or Greek. Where a point rests on wording, the source list at the end says what I actually saw.
Before the Huns appear, the Greuthungi turn up in Ammianus only at the margins. In Book 27 he describes the campaigns that Emperor Valens led against the Goths north of the Danube (Ammianus 27.5). In the translation I read, Valens attacks “the warlike people of the Greuthungi”, who “lived very far off”, and the opponent is put to flight. Here lies a known problem. The prince who appears in this passage is Athanaric, and elsewhere (31.3) Ammianus expressly calls Athanaric the leader of the Tervingi. That a Tervingian leader should fight Greuthungi here has occupied scholars; whether it is a slip of Ammianus, a corruption in the manuscripts or a confusion of context I cannot say from my reading, and I have not checked how editors treat the passage. At any rate the passage should not be used as a safe witness for the position of the Greuthungi in 369.
A geographical frame is secure enough. The Tervingi lived in the west, closer to the lower Danube and in regions that now belong to Romania and Moldova; the Greuthungi lived further east, in the steppe and forest-steppe zone of present Ukraine, with the Dniester (Ammianus’ Danastius) as the boundary river. Ammianus himself describes the Danastius as a river flowing across the plain between the Hister (the Danube) and the Borysthenes (the Dnieper). The Black Sea lies to the south, and to the east come the Alans, whom Ammianus names as neighbours of the Greuthungi.
This distribution is a Roman perception. Which groups understood themselves as Greuthungi, how firm the allegiance was, and whether other groups existed beside the two great ones is recorded nowhere. Later scholarship often treated the two names like states. The sources do not support that: Ammianus speaks of kings, judges and retinues, not of territorial bodies.
Ermanaric, Ermenrichus in Ammianus, Hermanaricus in Jordanes, Eormanric in Old English, appears in Ammianus’ text at a single place: the account of the Hunnic onslaught in Book 31. There he is a “most warlike king” feared by his neighbours, with “extensive and rich cantons”. That is all Ammianus gives. He does not say how long Ermanaric ruled, whom he had subjected, or that his realm reached the Baltic. Nor does he expressly call him king of the Greuthungi, but he places the events in direct neighbourhood to them: the Alans, struck first by the Huns, are described as bordering the Greuthungi, and Ermanaric’s land lies behind them. The common equation “Ermanaric was king of the Greuthungi” is therefore an inference from context, not a sentence in the text. It is plausible and held almost universally.
The passage everything else rests on is a single paragraph (Ammianus 31.3.1–2). In it the Huns first overrun the land of the Alans. The survivors join them, and together they move against Ermanaric’s territory. He holds out for a while. Then rumour exaggerates the danger, and he ends his fear by voluntary death.
“… and so he put an end to his fear of such great perils by a voluntary death.”Ammianus Marcellinus, Res gestae 31.3.2, read in J. C. Rolfe’s English translation (Perseids) (public domain; own rendering, following the English wording, not the Latin)
On the year Ammianus says nothing. The events are usually set in 375 or 376; that too is a back-calculation from the Tervingi crossing the Danube in 376. Whether Ermanaric really killed himself, or whether the Romans, hearing only rumours, reported as suicide a death that was in truth a defeat with an unclear outcome, cannot be decided. Worth noting is that Ammianus himself names “rumour” as the trigger.
Jordanes sounds quite different. In chapters 23 and 24 of the Getica, Hermanaricus follows King Geberich and is introduced as the noblest of the Amals, the Gothic royal line. Jordanes compares him to Alexander the Great and has him subdue a string of northern peoples. The list, in the version I read, runs: Golthescytha, Thiudos, Inaunxis, Vasinabroncae, Merens, Mordens, Imniscaris, Rogas, Tadzans, Athaul, Navego, Bubegenae, Coldae. He then fights the Heruli at Lake Maeotis, kills part of them and subjects the rest; Jordanes names their leader Alaric. He attacks the Venethi, later called Antes and Sclaveni, and finally subdues the Aesti on the shore of the “German Ocean”. In the end he is lord over “the peoples of Scythia and Germany”.
How sound is that? Here lies the problem of interpretation. The list is checked nowhere. Several names are otherwise unknown or attested in this form only here, and every attempt to link them to later groups on the Volga and in eastern central Europe (for instance Merens and Mordens to Finnic or Mordvinian groups, the Venethi to the later Slavs) rests on name-sound. I have not tested these equations myself and do not pass them on as findings. To this comes what Jordanes says about himself: he follows an older Gothic tradition that sings the praise of the Amals. A king who rules from the Baltic to the Black Sea and is an Alexander belongs to the family narrative of a royal house that ruled in Italy at Jordanes’ time or had just fallen.
Two camps stand opposed in scholarship. Herwig Wolfram saw in Ermanaric a ruler who really reached far, from the Baltic to the Black Sea and eastwards. Peter Heather objects that such a realm would have been larger than any known Gothic unit of the fourth century, that it would have left more traces in the Roman sources, and that the tradition is not reliable enough for a literal reading. That is how the encyclopaedic summary I used reports the positions; I did not check them in the original works. What remains, put cautiously: Ammianus attests a mighty, feared king with rich land at the edge of the steppe. Everything beyond that, especially the extent to the Baltic, rests on Jordanes and on how much of his list one reads as history.
The Aesti deserve a remark because they appear so often in books on Ermanaric. The article on the Aesti deals with who was meant by that name on the Baltic coast. Here it is enough to say that Jordanes’ line that Ermanaric subdued them is a sentence, not an event with place and time.
Archaeologically the region in question falls within the Chernyakhov culture (also Sântana de Mureș–Chernyakhov culture), named after sites near Kyiv and in Transylvania. It belongs to the third to fifth centuries and spreads over parts of present Ukraine, Romania, Moldova and Belarus. Typical are larger villages in river valleys, farming of wheat, barley and millet, cattle keeping, wheel-thrown pottery beside hand-made ware, bone combs, and cemeteries with inhumations next to cremations. Weapons are rare in the graves. Roman amphorae show trade with the Mediterranean. The site of Budesty stands out, its area given as about 35 hectares; I know that figure only from a summary.
Whether one may call this culture “Gothic” is disputed. For a long time German and Polish scholars linked it with the Goths, Soviet scholars with early Slavs. Today the prevailing view is that the culture grew together from several populations: Sarmatians, Getae-Dacians, people of Roman stamp and immigrant groups beside them. Peter Heather has stressed immigration from the Wielbark region on the lower Vistula; Guy Halsall and Michael Kulikowski deny this and consider a mainly local origin possible. A small 2019 genetic study of three samples attributed to the culture found European ancestry and a possible Gothic link, though its authors themselves regard the culture as ethnically mixed. That too comes from summaries, not from the study.
One point matters for our question that archaeology does not supply. It can date villages and graves, but it cannot show which village belonged to the Greuthungi and which to the Tervingi. The names come from texts, the finds from the earth, and the boundary between the two branches is marked on no map of finds. The culture ends in the fifth century. Traditionally that is blamed on the Huns; newer approaches stress that the collapse of the political order that carried the culture may have mattered more than mass emigration.
Jordanes tells Ermanaric’s end differently from Ammianus (Getica 24.129–130). Before it he places the story of the Huns, whom he traces back to expelled sorceresses said to have mated with desert spirits, and the tale of the doe that leads Huns through the Maeotic marshes. That is legend with a source reference (he cites Priscus), not an account of fact.
Then comes Ermanaric. A people under his rule, the Rosomoni, betray him. He has a woman named Sunilda, wife of the traitor, torn apart by wild horses. Her brothers Sarus and Ammius (also written Immius) avenge her and thrust a sword into his side. He survives, wastes away and dies, according to Jordanes, at the age of 110. Meanwhile the Hunnic king Balamber falls upon the land of the Ostrogoths, who, Jordanes says, had already separated from the Visigoths after a quarrel. The wound had weakened Ermanaric, and so the Huns were able to overcome the Ostrogoths.
The two accounts cannot simply be reconciled. Ammianus has no assassination attempt and no Sunilda; Jordanes has no suicide. The figure 110 is a literary motif, great age for great men, and does not serve as the lifespan of a historical person. That Jordanes names a Hunnic king Balamber whom Ammianus does not know shows that he draws on a tradition of his own. Whether that tradition rests on real memory, we do not know. Anyone looking for a middle path may assume that the Sunilda story comes from a body of legend that circulated among Goths and later served to explain the collapse; it cannot be proved.
In Ammianus Ermanaric is followed by a man named Vithimiris. He resists the Alans for a while, relying on Huns he has bought over with money. After several defeats he falls in battle. That is Ammianus 31.3.3. His son Viderich (Viderichus, elsewhere Vithericus) is a child, and the two commanders Alatheus and Saphrax run affairs for him. Both are, as Ammianus writes, experienced and brave. They cannot hold out and withdraw cautiously to the Danastius.
An important detail follows in the next paragraph. Athanaric, leader of the Tervingi, learns of the events. He had already been in conflict with Valens, who had fought him for allegedly supporting the usurper Procopius. Athanaric decides to stand against the enemy, camps at some distance from the Greuthungian stockade by the river, and sends Munderic and Lagarimanus twenty miles ahead to scout. So Ammianus’ text shows an army seeking shelter behind a rampart (vallum), a series of lookouts, and a Tervingian leader defending on his own while his eastern neighbours are already beaten. In this account the Huns cross a ford by night and surprise Athanaric, who withdraws into the mountains and builds walls, and many Goths flee to Thrace. That is the chain of events scholarship relies on.
What this account does not give: numbers. How many Greuthungi went with Alatheus and Saphrax, how many stayed behind or joined the Huns, is recorded nowhere. The overall picture is the retreat of a group under a child king and two guardians. In Zosimus, Alatheus and Saphrax appear under other auspices; more on that below.
In the summer of 376 the Tervingi under Fritigern and Alavivus appear at the Danube and ask for admission to the empire. Valens grants it, and the chaos of the handover, the Goths’ hardship and Lupicinus’ violence at Marcianopolis lead to revolt. That is the Tervingian story; it is told in the article on the Tervingi. The Greuthungi enter that story as the second party.
In 31.4.12 Ammianus names Vithericus, the young king of the Greuthungi, together with Alatheus, Saphrax and a further leader called Farnobius. They come to the bank of the Danube and send envoys to the emperor asking for the same friendly reception. The envoys are turned away because, according to Ammianus, the interest of the state seemed to demand it. Afterwards, he reports, the Greuthungi cross the river regardless, while Roman troops were tied up elsewhere and the patrol boats lay idle, in badly built craft. I could not resolve the exact paragraph order in the online version; it lies at the transition from 31.4 to 31.5.
Two things stay open. The first is chronology: whether the Greuthungi crossed still in 376 or only in 377 Ammianus does not state expressly in the passage I read; scholarship mostly places it in the turmoil of 377, which I have not checked. The second is composition. According to Ammianus, Fritigern and the Greuthungi camp apart from one another and do not form a unit; their union in the joint revolt comes later. Whether the Greuthungi joined Fritigern or whether it was only a loose alliance is likewise only hinted at in Ammianus.
From here on the story is that of the Goths inside the empire. On 9 August 378 Valens loses battle and life at Adrianople. According to the secondary literature I read, the Greuthungian cavalry under Alatheus and Saphrax took part in that victory (Ammianus 31.12 describes the battle; I did not check the wording myself).
The trail of the two commanders does not vanish. Zosimus tells (4.34) of two Germanic groups, one under Fritigern, the other under “Allotheus and Saphrax”. Emperor Gratian lets them cross the Danube into Pannonia and Upper Moesia on condition that they leave the Celtic provinces. Their aim, says Zosimus, was Epirus and the Greek cities. Beforehand they had attacked Athanaric, the “head of the royal family of Scythia”, and driven him from his position. Athanaric flees to Theodosius, who receives him and, after his early death, has him buried with royal honours; that so impressed the barbarians, says Zosimus, that they went home without further raids.
Zosimus writes a good century and a half later, and his chronology is brief. That Alatheus and Saphrax appear in Pannonia around 380 is a reconstruction from Zosimus and Jordanes; their further fate also remains unclear. Either Gratian scattered them or they made their own peace and settled in Pannonia. I read that in a modern summary, not in the source text.
Another name appears in the sources. Zosimus reports (4.35 in the numbering of the online edition I read) a leader Aedotheus who had gathered a large force from peoples of the Danube region and from more distant lands. As he crossed the river, Promotus, the commander in Thrace, inflicted a massacre so that “the river was filled with dead bodies”. The name is linked in scholarship, as Odotheus, with the Greuthungi, and the survivors are said to have come later as settlers to Phrygia. The Zosimus text I read does not say so; the link to the Greuthungi is a modern assignment, and the year 386 also comes from secondary literature.
The last great appearance leads to Phrygia. In his invective against the eunuch Eutropius (In Eutropium 2, around 399) Claudian describes the Phrygian countryside as inhabited by Ostrogoths and “mixed” Greuthungi. Gibbon quotes the line in a footnote: Ostrogothis colitur mistisque Gruthungis Phryx ager. I have seen it only through Gibbon, not in Claudian’s text. In 399 the leader of these settlers, Tribigild, rises against Emperor Arcadius and ravages Asia Minor; his kinsman or countryman Gainas proves fatal to Eutropius. Zosimus (5.13) describes Tribigild’s ravages but calls his troops only “barbarians”. That they were Greuthungi is stated by Claudian and in modern accounts, not in the Zosimus passage I read.
In the textbook version the Tervingi later become Visigoths and the Greuthungi later Ostrogoths. That is convenient and rests on Jordanes. He says in Getica 14.82 that the Goths who held the eastern part and whose king was Ostrogotha were called Ostrogoths, the rest Visigoths; for the origin of the name he cites Ablabius and leaves open whether a king’s name or a region decided it. In chapter 130 (Getica 24) he then says of the Goths who lived in the east and were called Ostrogoths that they succumbed to the Huns after Ermanaric’s death. In the sections I searched, the name Greuthungi does not occur in Jordanes. The name Ostrogothi, in turn, does not occur in Ammianus.
It follows that the equation is an inference from two sources that never name each other. It is natural, because both mean the eastern Gothic group and both name Ermanaric. Wolfram holds the Greuthungi and Ostrogoths to be largely the same people. Heather argues that the evidence speaks against the Ostrogoths simply being Greuthungi under another name. I know both positions from summaries. The matter is complicated by the fact that the Ostrogoths who rule Italy in the time of Theoderic the Great are, on a widespread interpretation, a group that grew together anew in the fifth century under Hunnic overlordship; how much of the fourth-century Greuthungi lives on in it is open. In Jordanes (Getica 174) the Ostrogoths are still under Hunnic pressure in Scythia.
The Romans too knew the double form. Claudian writes of Greuthungi and Ostrogoths side by side, as if they did not mean quite the same, and uses the word Ostrogoths only once. Wolfram reads the paired form as a sign of close kinship. I cannot prove anything.
A general warning follows. The label “East Germanic” for Goths, Vandals, Gepids and Heruli is an ordering by linguistics and scholarship; the ancient authors speak neither of East Germans nor of a common origin of all these groups. Jordanes has the Gepids appear as kin of the Goths who fell into a quarrel with the Goths under Ostrogotha (Getica 17.98–99), and anyone reading that sees the Gepids as part of the same story; as a source for common descent it will not do. On the origin of the name of the Goths and what links them with the Gutones on the Vistula and the Gotlanders, see the articles on those peoples; it is no secure thread.
No historical Goth has gone so long and so far into poetry as Ermanaric. That he did shows how deeply his fall lodged in the memory of the Germanic peoples. It does not show what actually happened. I therefore distinguish three levels.
Old English poetry. The poem Widsith, a catalogue of rulers and peoples in the voice of a wandering singer, says at the start: “Ætla weold Hunum, Eormanric Gotum”, Attila ruled the Huns, Eormanric the Goths. The narrator says he was with Eormanric and received a ring from him; elsewhere Eormanric is called a “wrāþes wǣrlogan”, rendered as a cruel oath-breaker. The poem Deor calls him a grim king, and Beowulf speaks of Eormenric’s wiles. I know these passages from summaries, not from the manuscripts. Striking is that his fame was still alive in England, far from the Black Sea, half a millennium later.
Norse poetry. In the Edda Ermanaric appears as Jǫrmunrekkr. His execution of the woman who is called Sunilda in Jordanes becomes the story of Svanhildr, daughter of Sigurd and Gudrun, whom he has trampled by horses; her brothers, sung in the lays Guðrúnarhvǫt and Hamðismál, set out to avenge her and die in the attempt. The Prose Edda, the Völsunga saga, a skaldic verse and Saxo Grammaticus also know the matter, if the summary I read is right. Important: in poetry the vengeance on Ermanaric and the Hunnic onslaught have become two different stories; the brothers in the Edda are no longer Rosomoni but Sigurd’s kin. The poet has built the tale into the heroic legend of the Nibelungs and Volsungs.
German poetry. In the Dietrich epics (Dietrichs Flucht, Rabenschlacht, Alpharts Tod) Ermenrich is the wicked uncle who drives Dietrich of Bern into exile. In time that is impossible: Dietrich of Bern goes back to Theoderic the Great, born a century after Ermanaric’s death. The legend has merged two figures from different eras. The Thidreks saga likewise makes Ermanaric the killer of his own wife on a counsellor’s advice. The Nibelungenlied itself tells of Dietrich in exile at Etzel’s court; whether it treats Ermenrich at length I did not check. Ermanaric belongs more to the Sigurd cycle of the Edda and to Dietrich epic than to the Middle High German Nibelungenlied. The Annals of Quedlinburg also tell the story, according to a summary.
What follows? The oldest testimony, Ammianus, knows neither betrayal nor Sunilda. The legend knows both, but legend is not a source; it is afterlife. A plot from the Edda or a Dietrich epic cannot be projected back onto 375. One can only say: the name of the last great Gothic king before the Hunnic onslaught became a vessel for tales of broken faith and revenge, and these tales travelled through the Germanic-speaking world.
Anyone looking for Ermanaric and the Greuthungi finds a chain of events without places. There is no name of a town, no graves that could be assigned to a king, no inscription. The Romans saw the Goths from the Danube, and their interest lay in the threat to the frontier, not in the inner order of the groups. Ammianus names kings, judges, retinue leaders. How their power worked, whether Ermanaric ruled all Greuthungi or only part of them, who Alatheus and Saphrax were and how they came to their role, remains open. Jordanes’ line of kings, the Amals, is likewise a construction of the court at Ravenna or Constantinople; for the fourth century it is a source for the self-image of later rulers.
It is worth weighing the evidence. Of the dozens of peoples Jordanes has Ermanaric subdue, not one has a testimony in a source from the time. For Ermanaric himself there is one paragraph by a contemporary. For his afterlife, by contrast, there are songs in at least three languages. That imbalance is the real lesson: the myth is many times larger than the man we can grasp.
A regional link to Aachen and the Alsdorf area cannot be shown for the Greuthungi, and I do not invent one. The Goths who came into the empire after 376 operated in Thrace, Pannonia and later in Italy, Gaul and Spain, not on the Lower Rhine.
The wider frame and related peoples: The Goths, Gepids, Vandals, Heruli, Gutones, Gotlanders, Aesti and Vidivarii.
The Goths · The Tervingi · The Gutones · The Vidivarii · The Gepids.
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