Publisher's Synopsis
The Getica begins with a geography/ethnography of the North, especially of Scandza. He lets the history of the Goths commence with the emigration of Berig with three ships from Scandza to Gothiscandza, in a distant past. In the pen of Jordanes (or Cassiodorus), Herodotus' Getian demi-god Zalmoxis becomes a king of the Goths. Jordanes tells how the Goths sacked "Troy and Ilium" just after they had recovered somewhat from the war with Agamemnon. They are also said to have encountered the Egyptian pharaoh Vesosis. The less fictional part of Jordanes' work begins when the Goths encounter Roman military forces in the 3rd century AD. The work concludes with the defeat of the Goths by the Byzantine general Belisarius. Jordanes concludes the work by stating that he writes to honour those who were victorious over the Goths after a history of 2030 years. Claudian was a Roman poet, who worked for Emperor Honorius and the latter's general Stilicho. A Greek-speaking citizen of Alexandria and probably not a Christian convert, Claudian arrived in Rome before 395. He made his mark with a eulogy of his two young patrons, Probinus and Olybrius, thereby becoming court poet. He wrote a number of panegyrics on the consulship of his patrons, praise poems for the deeds of Stilicho, and invectives directed at Stilicho's rivals in the Eastern court of Arcadius. These efforts resulted with such gifts as the honor of the rank of vir illustris, a statue, and a rich bride selected by Stilicho's wife, Serena. Despite his Greek origins, Claudian wrote in Latin and is one of the best late users of the language in poetry. Critics consider Claudian a good poet, if not absolutely first-rate. He is elegant, tells a story well, and his polemical passages are occasionally unmatchable in sheer entertaining vitriol; but his writing is tainted by preciousness, a flaw of the literature of his time, and his being extraordinarily cold and unfeeling. From a historical standpoint, Claudian's poetry is a valuable, however distorted, primary source for his period. Since his poems do not record the achievements of Stilicho after 404, scholars assume he died in that year. The historical or political poems connected with Stilicho have a separate manuscript tradition to the rest of his work, and this is believed to indicate that they were published as a separate collection, perhaps by Stilicho himself after Claudian's death.
