This is a scholarly study of the collision of Goths and Romans in the fourth and fifth centuries. Gothic tribes played a major role in the destruction of the western half of the Roman Empire between 350 and 500, establishing successor kingdoms in southern France and Spain (the Visigoths), and in Italy (the Ostrogoths). Our historical understanding of this Migration Period' has been based upon the Gothic historian Jordanes, whose mid-sixth-century...