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

[Rumo]

Hi Alan,

First, we have no indication, linguistally, that the Goths didn't use Gothic as a command language within Theodoric's Italian Kingdom or in the Visigothic Kingdom of Toulouse. The Visigoths, in particular wrote their (quite famed) laws in Gothic, and it would seem odd if they chose Latin for an official military language.

You're correct, we have no direct evidence Goths didn't use a Germanic idiom in Gothic Italy or Spain, but we know they used mostly Latin in several important aspects of their daily lives. Their codes of laws were written in Latin (Euric's code was also in Latin!), their history was written in Latin (Getica, Chronica Regum Visigothorum), their epitaphs were mostly in Latin, their documents (letters, contracts, etc.) were in Latin and last but not at least, they eventually learned the languages of their lands, as from early Middle Ages until today the languages of Spain, southern France and Italy were Romance languages, not Germanic. Conversely the evidence of written and spoken Germanic idioms is scarce.
You quoted Heather so let me quote Wolfram from The Roman Empire and its Germanic peoples (actually translated from German by Thomas Dunlap):

• The army on the march held out the promise of social mobility and attracted the native underclasses. At the time of migration this attraction seemed very useful, as it helped to relieve the chronic shortage of man-power. But in Italy, Gaul, Spain, and Africa the coloni were needed in the fields and not on the battlefield. Theodoric the Great, for example, staked his future on consolidating and stabilizing his kingdom, which is why he prohibited the Roman peasant underclasses from joining a Gothic army.
  However, the old attraction was still alive when the Gothic kingdoms were fighting for their survival. At the battle of Vouillé, a contingent of Roman magnates from the Auvergne with the free and unfree clientes fought on the side of the Visigoths. This unit was led by a Catholic senator and son of the former bishop of Clermont. The Ostrogothic King Totila not only accepted Roman slaves and coloni into the Gothic army, he even mobilized them against their senatorial masters with promises of freedom and ownership of the land. In so doing the king gave the Roman underclasses a chance and an excuse to do what they had been ready and willing to do since the third century: "to become Goths" out of despair over their economic and social condition.

In Balkans, Italy or Spain I find much more likely that these "new Goths" weren't all learning a Germanic language (to use it in the army), but the Germanic and other barbarian speakers eventually lost their language to Latin/Romance. Especially in those late Gothic kingdoms under crisis as their armies gained suddenly a large body of new recruits. Goths were all who fought for the Gothic kings, as Wolfram put it:

• Thus being a Goth, enjoying the "freedom of the Goths" and marching in the Gothic army were one and the same thing.

Secondly, the "dumb brute dog" idea dismisses strategum, the preplanned discussions between commanders prior to battle. And these certainly occurred. We see this kind of advanced planning early in the campaigns of Cnivea, give-and-take until he led Roman forces into a swamp-- a battle in which both emperor Decius and his son were casualties. We see it again with Fritigern as he successfully baited Valens into a three-sided trap. Preplanning required discussion in a language mutually understood, even if the strategic map was scratched in dirt by a stick. So the command language was singular in both planning and again on the battlefront, and it had to be Gothic. In both illustrations these were "north-Danubian Gothic armies," even though Fritigern's army fought on Roman soil.

I never said Goths had no strategy. When I was discussing Strategikon it was about orders. I believe in any army of those times several things are true, including these two: a) few people give orders, most people obey orders and b) orders are not subject to debate. Thus, even with no translators, a system of codes (and not a real language) seems to be enough. Strategikon may be considered evidence for that. The Greek, Armenian or Semitic speaking soldiers fighting against Avars or Sassanids were receiving orders in Latin, though most probably many of them weren't fluent in this language. Moreover, words like fulcum are actually of Germanic origin, should we believe all those Roman soldiers were also speaking some Germanic dialect?

As for "had to be Gothic", the examples provided in this thread (Persians, Carthaginians, the barbarian armies faced by Romans in the Dacian and Marcomannic wars) show that it was often the case that large and arguably skilled armies were led with help of bilinguals (sometimes mere translators, not necessarily commanders). There's simply no evidence that the barbarian armies of Cniva or the half-Roman armies of Totila had a single common language, and at least in the latter case if they had one, that was Latin.

The Gothic army in this period had a near-Roman structure: from a decanus (the lowest commander) to the thiudfadus (commander of 1,000 men).

The structure you're mentioning is from the late Visigothic kingdom, not from north-Danubian Gothia. However a "decimal system" doesn't make an army "near-Roman", though I agree that late Gothic armies were similar with contemporary Roman ones.

I must sign off soon, so I'll drop one more quick comment:

I find frequent mention of the Cernjachov Culture on this thread. It seems illogical to hold Cernjachov up as significantly influenced by the Dacians. We know exactly who the ruling linguistic hierarchy was. "It has become clear that the so-called Sintana de Mures/Cernjachov Culture can be associated with the spread of Gothic power." (Heather and Matthews, GITFC, p. 50)

While I agree with you that Dacian influence was somewhat limited in north-Danubian Gothia (?ernjachov space), I disagree with your interpretation of that quote. The text is about (political) power, not about language.