Getae and Dacians? Are they the same? Or is this unknowable?

[Rumo]

Hi Drago?,

Your examples, unfortunately, are not very relevant. Both are about armies made up from different groups that normally would not work together. Persians and Greeks fighting together are not typical for an army with one Heeressprache. See Paul’s example about Hannibal – what single command language would they all be familiar with?

One of the best examples (and more relevant to this discussion I think) for one single command language is the Roman army. The language in the Roman army was Latin, regardless of the linguistic background of the troops. We know this because of the military treatises written after the fall of the Western Roman empire. These documents originated in the mainly Greek speaking part of the empire, were written in Greek, but especially the commands which we know from the late-6th/early-7th c. Strategicon are clearly in Latin. The Heeressspraache of the Roman army continued to be Latin until the 10th century (Rance, Treadgold).

While I agree with you that a single command language was not necessarily the case for some armies in Antiquity (especially when mercenaries and allies were involved), I think that the Roman example provides proof that professional (standing) armies were more likely to have a command structure with one command language.

Hello Robert,

Thank you for your input but I'm arguing for Gothic (focusing on their early centuries, when Goths ruled the territories north of lower Danube) armies having no Heeressprache (my actual claim being that there was no common language covering the entire ?ernjachov culture - see map above), so I find Xenophon's account quite relevant. Persian armies like many other ancient armies (Hannibal's too - as you point out it had no single common language, it's hard to believe all those Gauls were fluent in Punic) were a mixture of nations (for Persian army see also Herodotus, VII.60-100), speaking different languages. Translators and multilingual officers were common, not only to communicate within the army, between its segments, but also to negociate with the enemy, to obtain precious information from the natives, etc.

In ancient world I find the Roman army rather the exception than the rule. The Roman army was a very complex institution and I don't know on what grounds it can be argued that north-Danubian Gothic armies were even remotely similar. Sure, once the Goths entered the Roman service they learned the Roman ways and the differences became smaller.

You also make a good point about Strategikon. However, according to Rance the Latin Heeressprache lasted only until the 7th century (p. 269), though it echoed even in 10th century texts.
An important question would be if in this case the soldiers actually understand a language or just use some codes with limited functionality. I have my doubts that all Roman soldiers around 600 were fluent in Latin, as the language was already fading from public usage in the east. Forgive my analogy (it's not meant to offend, just to illustrate the difference), telling a dog to roll over, it doesn't mean the dog actually understands or speaks English, even if it performs the action it was ordered to. I find no reason to assume such "meta-linguistic" commands weren't used in multilingual armies, regardless if they were words in some language, shouts, whistles, or virtually any signal which could be unequivocally perceived by soldiers as a specific order. But this is not a common language being spoken and understood.

The picture that we know from Fritigirn, Alaric and all the way up to Totila is not very different; one war-leader, whose army grew if he was successful, but whose army could vanish if his soldiers chose to follow a different leader. Very Germanic btw, we see similar patterns with the Franks, Alamanni and Vandals.
It would seem very strange to me that in those times, commands would have been given in other language than Gothic.

I believe the common language of the Late Empire barbarians was in most cases Latin. The traces of written Germanic dialects are scarce. It's weird that even few runic inscriptions are known from ?ernjachov space, there are none (to my knowledge) in Ostrogothic Italy. The mentions of spoken Gothic in Italy are also few, and in most cases it's about bilinguals anyway. Italy was mostly Latin speaking and most probably the Ostrogothic armies had also local recruits. I find rather the Goths using Latin than everybody else learning Gothic.