G&R55 1 2008 politics of race

doi: 10.1017/S0017383507000319

MAXIMINUS THRAX AND THE POLITICS OF RACE IN LATE ANTIQUITY

M A X I M I N U S T H R A X A N D T H E P O L I T I C S O F

R AC E I N L AT E A N T I QU I T Y

J A S O N M O R A L E E

The anonymous Epitome de Caesaribus (25.1) introduces the emperor
C. Julius Verus Maximinus (235–8

) for the first time as

‘Maximinus Thrax’. This is now a generally acceptable name for the
emperor, despite the fact that it appears only once, here in the fourth
century. So iconic is this geographical label, however, that the curious
treatment of his origins by the most detailed sources, Herodian and
the Historia Augusta, can be obscured. While both state that his birth-
place was Thrace, they also point out that his origins were racially
mixed. Herodian, a contemporary historian, calls Maximinus the son
of mixobarbaroi, ‘mixed-barbarians’; a century and a half later, the
Historia Augusta, in a long, largely fanciful biography, calls him a
semibarbarus, a ‘half-barbarian’. His brief rule was therefore remem-
bered as inaugurating a precedent that would come to plague the
empire for decades: an emperor of dubious, even mongrel origins,
elected by the troops, would bring cruelty and chaos to the state. This
article considers how the Historia Augusta in particular used racial
terms to highlight the difference between the legitimate rule of the
senate and the illegitimate subversion of its authority by a
half-barbarian from the periphery of the empire. This racial profile
was fully formed only in the fourth century and is reflected in a range
of other sources, demonstrating that contemporary political concerns
brought to the fore debates on the dangers of racial mixing. This dim
view of the emperor’s origins, as will be shown, was reinterpreted and
re-evaluated in the sixth century as barbarians became legitimate
players in the western empire.

The study of an emperor’s racial origins is at once an old-fashioned

line of inquiry and a topic of increasing interest in current

Greece & Rome, Vol. 55, No. 1, © The Classical Association, 2008. All rights reserved
doi: 10.1017/S0017383507000319

* I thank Illinois Wesleyan University for granting me leave to research this article in spring

2006. Earlier versions were delivered at the invitation of LaRes (Late Antique Religions and
Society) at the University of California, Berkeley (May 2006) and the Israeli Society for the
Promotion of Classical Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel (May 2007). The
content has been improved by the comments at these occasions and through the careful reading
and comments of Benjamin Isaac, James J. O’Donnell, Courtney B. Booker, Guy Geltner,
Ronald Mellor, and Asha Nadkarni.

scholarship.

Racial hybridity has preoccupied scholars and the public

since the early nineteenth century.

For some, including celebrated

historians of Greece and Rome, the study of peoples of ‘racial
mixture’ added scientific and historical proof to the assumption that
Europeans possessed superior blood and culture to colonial popula-
tions throughout the world. It was not until light was cast on the
horrors of the National Socialist research projects and eugenic poli-
cies that this line of research was publicly condemned.

Still, research

continues on ‘racial mixture,’ but largely from within mixed-race
communities themselves and the disciplines of ethnic and postcolonial
studies, focusing primarily on identity, identity politics, and the
critique thereof.

In the last ten years, scholars of Greece, Rome, and

late antiquity have likewise focused on ethnicity in the fields of law,
literature, art, and archaeology. Cultures, once seen in conflict, now
appear in negotiation. No longer is Romanization seen as a steam-
roller, flattening locals into toga-clad mandarins.

Scholars of antiquity are turning to the term ‘hybridity’, as it has

been redefined by postcolonial critics, to account for the intersections
of peoples and cultures that imperial rule normally imposes on terri-
tory.

In this sense, hybridity is not primarily a racial designation, as it

has been in the past, but rather a ‘location’ in the margins of cultures.
In these margins, the subject has agency, based on his ability to stitch
together disparate, often contradictory, elements from both cultures,

MAXIMINUS THRAX AND THE POLITICS OF RACE IN LATE ANTIQUITY

The terms race and racial are used in this essay following the definitions established in

Benjamin Isaac, The Invention of Racism in Classical Antiquity (Princeton, NJ, 2004), 15–38.
Here and throughout his study, Isaac shows that racial prejudice in antiquity was based on the
imagined immutability of character as determined by geographical origins.

For a recent overview of the pernicious connection between European nationalism and

scholarship on barbarian ethnogenesis, see P. J. Geary, The Myth of Nations. The Medieval
Origins of Europe (Princeton, NJ, 2002).

R. J. C. Young, Colonial Desire. Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race (London and New

York, NY, 1995).

The bibliography is immense, so I note here just three titles focused on different regions

and nations: Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, Mixed-Feelings. The Complex Lives of Mixed-Race Britons
(London, 2001); Suzanne Bost, Mulattas and Mestizas. Representing Mixed Identities in the Amer-
icas, 1850–2000 (Athens, GA, 2005); José F. Buscaglia-Salgado, Undoing Empire. Race and
Nation in the Mulatto Caribbean (Minneapolis, MN, 2003).

C. Antonaccio, ‘Hybridity and the Cultures Within Greek Culture’, in C. Dougherty and

L. Kurke (eds.), The Cultures Within Ancient Greek Culture. Contact, Conflict, Collaboration
(Cambridge, 2003), 57–74, esp. 59–60; A. S. Jacobs, Remains of Jews. The Holy Land and Chris-
tian Empire in Late Antiquity (Stanford, CA, 2004), 8, 17; D. Boyarin, ‘Hybridity and Heresy:
Apartheid Comparative Religion in Late Antiquity’, in A. Loomba, S. Kaul, M. Bunzl,
A. Burton, and J. Esty (eds.), Postcolonial Studies and Beyond (Durham, NC and London, 2005),
339–58. All of these scholars derive their understanding of the term hybridity from H. Bhabha,
The Location of Culture (London and New York, NY, 1994). For the intersection of the study of
antiquity and postcolonial analysis, see now B. E. Goff (ed.), Classics and Colonialism (London,
2005).

to fashion his own identity, thus challenging ideologically imposed
notions, such as, in our case, Romans and barbarians.

The word that

is often used to describe this negotiation is ‘acculturation’. Though
valuable as an ostensibly distanced and nuanced way of under-
standing the spectrum of identity in antiquity, the investigation of
hybridity in the ancient world can obscure the fact that those in the
margins have emerged as phantoms of the literary imagination,
conjured by authors from selective and inventive readings of their own
sources. For these phantasmal hybrids, there is no agency, no negotia-
tion, no acculturation, no resistance; and yet, as literary figures, they
are able to reveal significant points of tension in the Roman imagina-
tion.

In this case, the Maximinus Thrax of the Historia Augusta

allows us to see how the author and his contemporaries viewed racial
mixing.

Today it seems that the problematic details of Maximinus Thrax’s

origins found in Herodian and the Historia Augusta are largely side-
stepped, along with most of the historical tradition. The tendency is
to focus instead on the emperor’s class deficiencies. For example, M.
Rostovtzeff calls Maximinus a ‘Thracian peasant’ who was ‘a brave,
able, and strong soldier’. In his pivotal study of the social and
economic conditions of the Roman empire, Maximinus haunts the
final pages of his chapter on the ‘military anarchy’. This ‘Thracian
soldier’ started a degree of ‘unprecedented cruelty’, a ‘terrorism’ that
was orchestrated to butcher not only the ‘imperial nobility’ but more
significantly the municipal ‘bourgeoisie’.

Though avoiding the

language of revolution, A. H. M. Jones likewise labels Maximinus a
‘peasant’, while Alexander Demandt, in his own survey of the period,
characterizes him as a ‘Thracian farmer’s son’ (‘thrakischer
Bauernsohn’).

This is certainly a valid approach, which captures the

class-based challenge posed by the Soldatenkaiser in the third century
to the senatorial aristocracy. None of these authors, however,
discusses what was clearly of importance in the sources: how the
emperor’s racial origins were coupled with his lowly status. Together,

MAXIMINUS THRAX AND THE POLITICS OF RACE IN LATE ANTIQUITY

P. J. Geary, ‘Ethnic Identity as a Situational Construct in the Early Middle Ages’,

Mitteilungen der anthropologischen Gesellschaft in Wien 113 (1983), 15–26.

The invention of phantasmal hybrids in late antique religious polemics is made clear by

Jacobs (n. 5) and Boyarin (n. 5).

M. Rostovtzeff, The Social and Economic History of the Roman Empire, second edition, rev.

by P. M. Fraser (Oxford, 1966), i.439, 452. This view is directly challenged by J. Drinkwater, in
CAH XII, second edition (Cambridge, 2005), 60.

A. H. M. Jones, The Later Roman Empire, 284–602. A Social, Economic, and Administrative

Survey, orig. pub. 1964 (Baltimore, MD, 1986), i.21; A. Demandt, Geschichte der Spätantike.
Das römische Reich von Diocletian bis Justinian (Munich, 1998), 21.

race and class preface a significant unifying theme in Herodian
and the Historia Augusta for audiences more than a century distant
from the tumultuous events of 238. Here, as in the rest of this
article, Maximinus’ importance in his own day and his actual origins
are of less interest than his role in late antique historical writing and
the political and cultural debates that perhaps informed its
production.

Maximinus from Herodian to the Historia Augusta

Herodian states that Maximinus was a Thracian farmer from a village
of mixobarbaroi, or ‘mixed-barbarians’ (6.8.1).

Maximinus was

therefore lowly and racially mixed (mixobarbaros). This definition was
typical of the use of the term since the fourth century

BCE

, signifying

racial and cultural inferiority.

Indeed, the use of mixobarbaros in this

sense continued for quite a long time. In the seventh century, for
example, the historian Theophylact Simocatta twice refers to Phocas,
another usurper of questionable origins, as a ‘mixed-barbarian tyrant’
(mixobarbaros tyrannos), and in both cases calls him a centaur, the
savage race of hybrids from the mythological past.

For Herodian,

the term mixobarbaros thus meant mongrel.

This characterization,

moreover, is an important supportive framework for the rest of
Herodian’s portrait. The emperor’s racial defect becomes an explana-
tion for his defective principate:

Once Maximinus had taken over the empire, he caused a great change, exercising his
power cruelly and causing widespread fear. He tried to make a complete transforma-
tion from a mild tolerant autocracy to a savage tyranny, conscious of the hatred

MAXIMINUS THRAX AND THE POLITICS OF RACE IN LATE ANTIQUITY

Translations are from Herodian. Historian of the Empire, ed. and tr. C. R. Whittaker, 2

volumes, Loeb Classical Library 454, 455 (Cambridge, MA, 1969–70). The translations have
occasionally been adapted. Whittaker translates mixobarbaros as ‘semi-barbarous’, implying
cultural deficiency.

R. Hosek, ‘Die Mischbevölkerung’,’ Listy Filologické 106 (1983), 155–9; A. A. Lund,

‘Hellenentum und Hellenizität: Zur Ethnogenese und zur Ethnizität der antiken Hellenen’,’
Historia 54 (2005), 1–17, esp. 13–14.

Historiae Dialogus 4: Phocas is here called the Calydonian tyrant, a mixobarbaros anthrôpos,

from the Cyclopean race (kuklôpeion genos), and finally a centaur; this series of unfortunate
comparisons is repeated at Hist. 8.10.4, but with no reference to the Cyclops. Translated by
Michael and Mary Whitby, The History of Theophylact Simocatta: An English Translation with
Notes (Oxford, 1988), 3, 225. Their translation, to my mind, correctly uses ‘mongrel’ for
mixobarbaros. For the eleventh century use of the term, see C. M. Brand, ‘The Turkish Element
in Byzantium, Eleventh–Twelfth Centuries,’ DOP 43 (1989), 19 and n. 75.

See below the section entitled ‘Maximinus and the moderns’ for divergent interpretations

of hybrid terms such as mixobarbaros and semibarbarus.

against him for being the first man to rise from the most humble origins to such a
fortunate position. But by nature [physei], his character and birth [genos] were
barbarian.

7.1.2, adapted

Throughout Herodian’s narrative, Maximinus’ barbarian origins are
contrasted to the noble birth (eugeneia) of his rivals, Maximus,
Balbinus, and Gordian III (8.7.4, 8.8.1, 8.8.4). The latter, for
instance, claimed descent from the Gracchi and the emperor Trajan.
To underscore this contrast, Herodian concludes his history with a
lament on the loss of men of noble birth (eugeneia) and merit (8.8.8).

Herodian builds to this conclusion throughout his history by calling

attention to the threat of racial mixture to the imperial house. If his
sources did not put suitable emphasis on this theme, Herodian
happily invented his own dramatic details. Herodian’s account of
Caracalla’s marriage plans is a case in point. Caracalla sought to
arrange a diplomatic marriage with the Parthian king, a marriage that
both rulers considered a union between barbarian and non-barbarian.
According to Herodian, while the emperor’s letter to the king stressed
the military and economic potential of the alliance, the king stressed

that a Roman marriage to a barbarian was not suitable since they had nothing in
common, they did not understand each other’s language and had different habits of
food and dress. The Romans had plenty of patrician families…from which (Caracalla)
could choose a daughter. The racial purity of neither should be contaminated [dein
mêdeteron genos notheuesthenai].

4.10.5

Cassius Dio (79.1), Herodian’s probable source for the episode,
mentions only that Caracalla proposed a marriage alliance and that
the king refused because he was aware of Caracalla’s true intentions.
In Herodian’s fanciful version (4.11.4–9), the king finally accepted
the marriage alliance. Caracalla, however, did not arrive at the cere-
mony in good faith. His troops slaughtered the Persians and the king
narrowly escaped. Caracalla informed the senate that he had routed
the barbarians of the east, just as his hero Alexander had done centu-
ries earlier. Even though the comparison was clearly laughable, the
senate, cowed into submission, voted Caracalla a triumph. The reader
is led to conclude that only a bad emperor, such as Caracalla, would
have considered such a transgression. The marriage would have
produced a race of mixobarbaroi, half-barbarians, to rule the empire.
Herodian even suggests that the barbarian king had better sense than
the insane emperor. Like Tacitus’ Germans, Herodian’s barbarians
could occasionally remind the Romans of their old-fashioned virtues.

MAXIMINUS THRAX AND THE POLITICS OF RACE IN LATE ANTIQUITY

The author of the Historia Augusta used Herodian as his major

source for Maximinus’ biography.

Herodian not only provided the

historical

details

that

the

biographer

embellished, but

also

historiographical themes, such as the threat that barbarian blood
posed to the proper running of the empire. This threat is signaled at
the opening of the biography. Maximinus is introduced to the reader
as a farm boy raised in a village neighbouring barbarian territory and
born

of a barbarian father and mother, the one, men say, being of the Goths [e Gothia], the
other of the Alans. At any rate, they say that his father’s name was Micca, his mother’s
Ababa. And in his early days Maximinus himself freely disclosed these names; later,
however, when he came to the throne, he had them concealed, lest it should seem that
the emperor was sprung on both sides from barbarian stock.

1.5–7, adapted

This accords in a vague sense with Herodian’s statement that
Maximinus was from a genos of Thracians and mixobarbaroi. But the
author’s elaborations on Herodian’s brief statement, including the
names and origins of his parents, are imaginative and anachronistic.
For one thing, as Ronald Syme pointed out, the use of ‘Gothia’ does
not appear before the fourth century.

But other scholars believe that

the biographer had better sources at hand or accurate knowledge of
barbarian nomenclature to prove the historicity of the names Micca
and Ababa. Nevertheless, still attractive, though not provable, is Ernst
Hohl’s simpler assertion that the biographer invented the names by
bisecting Herodian’s mixobarbaroi: mixo became Micca; barbaroi,
Ababa.

There is a lingering question, however, of why the biographer

sought to create such specific origins for the emperor and why he
fashioned him as a half-barbarian young man who hardly spoke Latin:
‘This youth, half-barbarian [semibarbarus] and scarcely yet master of
the Latin tongue, speaking almost pure Thracian’ (2.5). The biog-
rapher’s profile of the emperor as a boorish tyrant is based on the

MAXIMINUS THRAX AND THE POLITICS OF RACE IN LATE ANTIQUITY

Translations are from The Scriptores Historiae Augustae, tr. D. Magie, 3 volumes, Loeb

Classical Library 139, 140, 263 (Cambridge, MA, 1921–32). They have occasionally been
adapted. Hohl’s commentary is still useful: Maximini Duo Iuli Capitolini, ed. E. Hohl (Berlin,
1949), but it has been monumentally surpassed by A. Lippold, Kommentar zur vita Maximini
Duo der Historia Augusta (Bonn, 1991). For the purposes of this paper it is assumed that the
Historia Augusta was written by one author c. 400. See Lippold, 23–54, for a review of the issue
of authorship.

R. Syme, Emperors and Biography. Studies in the Historia Augusta (Oxford, 1971), 182.

Hohl (n. 14), 30. After reviewing the scholarship on the question of the names Micca and

Ababa, Lippold (n. 14), 193–206, suggests that both names are indeed possible, but cannot be
ascribed to Maximinus’ parents with certainty, therefore doubting Hohl’s solution.

alleged fact of his half-barbarian origins. To make his case, the biogra-
pher manufactures a pair of barbarian parents for Maximinus. The
parents, born of two barbarian tribes, do indeed constitute in a literal
way ‘mixed-barbarians’. He thus correctly understood Herodian’s
intention to expose Maximinus as a half-barbarian, and he did the
same by both inventing specific barbarian origins for the emperor and
by labeling him a semibarbarus, here clearly meaning both ‘half-
barbarian’ and ‘half-savage’. Faithful to this theme, the author
ascribes particular awareness of his own defective origins to the
emperor, stating that Maximinus was indeed proud of his barbarian
parents until he became emperor, when he preferred to conceal the
fact that he was ‘born from barbarian blood on both sides’ (utroque
parente barbaro genitus) (1.7).

Like his source Herodian, the biographer contrasts Maximinus’

barbarian blood with the noble blood of his rivals. To find the root of
Maximinus’ cruelty, the author attributed to the emperor paranoid
thoughts of racial inferiority:

As a matter of fact, he (Maximinus) was convinced that the throne could not be held
except by cruelty. He likewise feared that the nobility [nobilitas], because of his low
barbarian birth [propter humilitatem generis barbarici], would scorn him, remembering
in this connection how he had been scorned at Rome by the very slaves of the nobles
[a servis nobilium], so that not even their stewards would admit him to their presence;
and as is always the way with fatuous beliefs [stultae opiniones], he expected them to be
the same toward him now that he was emperor. So powerful is the mere conscious-
ness of a low-born spirit [conscientia degeneris animi].

8.8–11

The biographer continues the assault on the emperor’s origins and his
lack of social grace. Maximinus could not understand Greek and was
gullible, in the latter case because he was both Thracian and a
barbarian (ut erat Thrax et barbarus) (9.3–5); he hated the senate and
the nobility because of his ignobilitas (9.1); his cruel nature (crudelis)
earned him several nicknames, including Cyclops,

the gigantic,

savage, man-eating bogeyman of the Odyssey, as well as Busiris,
Sciron, Phalaris, Typhon, and Gyges (8.5); and, finally, he lived
according the ways of wild animals (ferarum more) (10.1). The author

MAXIMINUS THRAX AND THE POLITICS OF RACE IN LATE ANTIQUITY

It was never good to be called ‘Cyclops’. Cf. Ach. Tat. 2.23, where an annoying slave has

the same nickname. On emperors and their nicknames, but not including the Historia Augusta,
see C. Bruun, ‘Roman Emperors in Popular Jargon: Searching for Contemporary Nicknames
(I)’, in L. de Blois et al. (eds.), The Representation and Perception of Roman Imperial Power,
Proceedings of the Third Workshop of the International Network Impact of Empire (Roman
Empire, c. 200 B.C.–A.D. 476), Netherlands Institute in Rome, March 20–23, 2002
(Amsterdam, 2003), 69–98.

thus implies that Maximinus could not become fully acculturated, but
could slip only further into the animal world: ‘[He] became fiercer
day by day, as wild animals grow more savage with their wounds’
(11.6).

The pursuit of the author’s theme to its logical conclusion –

half-barbarian leadership inevitably devolves into tyranny – led,
perhaps ironically, to a rather interesting view of culture along the
margins of the empire. In an early anecdote, the biography reveals
that, as a young man, Maximinus saw the emperor Septimius Severus.
His first words to the emperor sounded muddled because, according
to both Herodian and the Historia Augusta, his first language was
Thracian and his Latin was at best infantile. Unable to speak properly,
the giant performed feats of strength for the emperor and his entou-
rage. However suspect all of this is as actually descriptive of
conditions in Thrace in the early third century, such details point to
the moral and racial fears of the author’s fourth-century audience. In
the author’s imagination, he finds chaos along the margins of the
empire, a view informed, in all likelihood, by stereotypes of mixed
populations, themselves rooted in a long tradition stretching back at
least to Periclean Athens.

The biographer’s profile of Maximinus as

a semibarbarus reminds us that the author was both held by literary
traditions (Herodian) and cultural stereotypes (mixed populations)
and liberated from them, freely able to conjure specific information
on the emperor’s racial origins and cultural defects.

The invention of a son

This freedom to invent also allowed the biographer to introduce a
secondary actor for the elaboration of his themes: the half-barbarian’s
son and designated successor. Born from a Roman mother known
only by inscriptions as Caecilia Paulina, the son was noteworthy to
historians solely as his father’s successor.

Indeed, not even his name

was remembered properly. In the historiographical sources he is called

MAXIMINUS THRAX AND THE POLITICS OF RACE IN LATE ANTIQUITY

For a discussion of comparisons between humans and animals, see Isaac (n. 1), 194–207.

Ibid., 118–21, 126, citing Thucydides, Plato, Aristotle, and others.

For clarity I will refer to the son (correctly) as Maximus rather than his designation in the

literary sources as Maximinus. We know his mother’s name only from an inscription and coins:
see Syme (n. 15), 192 n. 7. Ammianus (14.1.8), without naming her in the surviving Res Gestae,
characterizes her as having undue influence on Maximinus, fueling rather than dampening his
ferocity. On Caecilia Paulina, see Syme (n. 15), 192 n. 7. Hohl refers to her as ‘eine edle Frau’,
RE 10 (1917), s.v. C. Iulius Verus Maximus Caesar (no. 527), col. 870. See also Lippold
(n. 14), 373–4.

by his father’s name, Maximinus, rather than his epigraphically
attested name Maximus. Herodian (8.4.9, 8.5.9) mentions him twice
in passing, saying nothing of his appearance or character. Aurelius
Victor (Caes. 25) states: ‘His son, who had the same name, Gaius
Julius Maximinus, was made Caesar.’

Eutropius fails to mention

him at all. But the author of the Historia Augusta departs from the
silent tradition. The offspring of a mixed marriage, this Maximus still
had barbarian blood, although he was admittedly more cultured than
his father. According to the Historia Augusta, the son of the
semibarbarus studied both Latin and Greek literature under the
famous men of letters in his day (27.1–5). But assimilation was not
enough.

Aside from his insolence and unrestrained appetites, Maximus was

unlucky in love, mostly, the biographer makes clear, because of his
barbarian blood. He was first engaged to Junia Fadilla, the
great-granddaughter of Marcus Aurelius. But Toxotius, a senator and
poet, thus a man of better blood and culture, stole her away. Adding
insult to Maximus’ broken pride, she also kept the dowry, including
necklaces, hats, and dresses studded with precious jewels (27.6–8). A
second attempt to marry into the nobility likewise ended in disap-
pointment. While emperor, Severus Alexander intended to offer his
sister Theoclia to Maximus for a spouse. For this union the emperor
sought his mother’s advice in a letter:

Mother, were there not an element of the barbarian in the […] elder Maximinus
[si…non aliquid in se barbarum] – he who is our general, and a very good one, too – I
had already married your Theoclia to (Maximus). But I am afraid that such a product
of Greek culture as my sister could not endure a barbarian father-in-law, however
much the young man himself seems handsome and learned and polished in Greek
elegance.

29.2–4

Just as becoming emperor failed to erase that ‘barbarian element’
in his father, education failed to erase the racial stain on the son.
Culturally, Maximus was beyond suspicion. In racial terms, however,
he was the son of a semibarbarus; he, too, had that ‘barbarian element
in him’ (aliquid in se barbarum). The son was therefore a repulsive
pastiche of Roman and barbarian, all the more degenerate for his
attempt at integration. Like his father he was tall, but not quite so
(27.1); he was beautiful, but desirable mostly by profligate women (a
procacioribus feminis) (27.1); and, though educated, he was imperious

MAXIMINUS THRAX AND THE POLITICS OF RACE IN LATE ANTIQUITY

Aurelius Victor. De Caesaribus, tr. with introduction and commentary by H. W. Bird, TTH

17 (Liverpool, 1994), 28.

(superbissimus) (28.7–8). At the end of the letter, Severus asked his
mother if a better fit for Theoclia would be Messalla ‘who is a scion of
a noble house [ex familia nobili], a very powerful speaker, very learned,
and, if I mistake not, a man who would prove himself gallant on the
field if occasion should arise’ (29.4).

Although all of this is pure fancy, including the names Junia

Fadilla, Toxotius, and Messalla, the author invented these episodes to
mark an important difference.

Blood and the antiquity of origins

mattered; Messalla was the cognomen of one of the original patrician
families in Rome. Severus’ question to his mother about choosing
Maximus or Messalla was therefore laughable, but perhaps also repre-
sents ‘a delicate tribute to birth and rank’, a marshalling of fictitious
ancestors for aristocratic families in the fourth century.

But the biographer’s purpose went beyond amusement as he

created a story for the half-breed’s son. His sources did not require
such a story. Hermann Dessau and Theodore Mommsen first spotted
the biography of Maximus as a fraud. The author of the Historia
Augusta, they suggested, had a tendency to create biographies for
emperor’s sons, even insignificant ones such as Diadumenianus, the
adolescent son of the usurper Macrinus. The rationale was that the
emperor’s position was passed from father to son and therefore the
son’s life had to be shaded in, no matter how obscure the figure.

Nevertheless, this observation only accounts for the impulse to create
a biography, and not for the fact that the specific details in these biog-
raphies were individually crafted. Diadumenianus, though the son of a
Moor, is never called a ‘barbarian’, nor for that matter was his father
Macrinus. In fact, we have to turn to Dio (79.11.1) for the racial
origins of Macrinus, where the usurper is described in this way:

Macrinus was a Moor by birth [to genos Mauros], from Caesarea, and the son of most
obscure parents [goneôn adoxotatôn]…. [O]ne of his ears had been bored in accor-
dance with the custom followed by most of the Moors. But his integrity threw even
this into the shade.

Tribal disfigurement was apparently a sign of racial difference.

But,

in this case, it was not necessarily a brand of inferiority. In the Historia

MAXIMINUS THRAX AND THE POLITICS OF RACE IN LATE ANTIQUITY

Syme (n. 15), 183–4.

R. Syme, ‘The Bogus Names in the Historia Augusta’, in A. Alföldy (ed.), Bonner

Historia-Augusta-Colloquium 1964/65, Antiquitas 4.3 (Bonn, 1966), 268–9, where Toxotius is
discussed.

Lippold (n. 14), 248–51.

For additional references to piercing as a mark of foreigners, see Isaac (n. 1), 289, 472

n. 157.

Augusta (Mac. 2.1), Macrinus is only vaguely described as ‘humbly
born’ (humili natus loco). For whatever reason, it was not the biogra-
pher’s purpose to base his character study on the origins of Macrinus
and his son, as it was for the lives of Maximinus and his son. In selec-
tively narrating the lives of these doomed figures, the author would
have agreed with Karl Julius Beloch’s 1893 assertion: ‘A negro who
speaks English is not for that reason an Englishman, and equally a Jew
who spoke Greek did not pass in antiquity for a Greek any more than
today a Jew who speaks German passes for a German.’

Ironically,

Maximus’ cultural mastery, his Romanness, only underscored that by
blood he could never be Roman.

Semibarbarism and the critique of policy

So far an attempt has been made to demonstrate that the biographer
depended on his main source, Herodian, for not only the historical
details but also the historiographical themes of his account of
Maximinus and his son, namely Maximinus’ origins and their causal
effect on his principate. But the biographer clearly recrafted Herodian
and his other sources to develop the theme more fully; for example, by
fashioning a bogus parentage for Maximinus and a bogus biography
for the half-barbarian’s son. It remains to show how the biographer’s
themes intersect with the fears of his contemporaries in the late fourth
and early fifth centuries.

For, in showing that the Historia Augusta

was reflecting fears of barbarian blood in the same way as a range of
other sources, we can read the biography of Maximinus as a historical
commentary rooted in the fourth century, rather than focusing on the
rather comedic elements that portray him as a third-century barbarian
– an illiterate, gigantic, peasant-emperor.

The Historia Augusta appears to enjoy revealing inappropriately

entitled élites.

Alexander Severus, we are told again and again, was

MAXIMINUS THRAX AND THE POLITICS OF RACE IN LATE ANTIQUITY

Quoted and contextualized by A. D. Momigliano, ‘Julius Beloch’, tr. T. J. Cornell, in

G. W. Bowersock and T. J. Cornell (eds.), A. D. Momigliano. Studies on Modern Scholarship
(Berkeley, CA, 1994), 115.

See A. Chauvot, Opinions romaines face aux barbares au IVe siècle ap. J.-C. (Paris, 1998).

W. Goffart, The Narrators of Barbarian History (A.D. 550–800). Jordanes, Gregory of Tours,

Bede, and Paul the Deacon (Princeton, NJ, 1988), 81 and n. 295, calls the biography ‘amusing’.
When these amusing details were used by Jordanes, Goffart claims: ‘This passage [Maximinus’
barbarian parentage] is so interesting for reasons alien to the Getica that one tends not to notice
that it relates to nothing else in the narrative and is therefore puzzling. But Maximinus’ irrele-
vance to the plot is consistent with his role as a bringer of comic relief.’

For a similar reading, see Lippold (n. 14), 300: ‘Man könnte von daher in 1,7 einen

Reflex der Zeit des späten 4. oder frühen 5. Jhdts. sehen, als von ausserhalb des Imperiums bzw.

ashamed of his Syrian origins, even going so far as to produce a fictive
family tree (stemma generis) to prove otherwise (Alex. Sev. 19.7, 44.3,
64.3, 65.1). The author ends this biography by showing how a ‘Syrian
man and a foreigner’ (homo Syrus et alienigena) could be a good
emperor while so many ‘of Roman birth’ (Romani generis) were so
reprehensible (65.1). Apology was necessary. His answer is that the
‘Syrian’ was surrounded by talented Roman advisors with family
names such as Sabinus, Ulpianus, Gordianus, Paulus, Venacus,
Severus, Serenianus, and Marcellus: ‘These are the men who made
the Syrian a good emperor’ (68.4).

The Historia Augusta appears to be less generous to racial mixtures.

In the passages discussed above, racial terms directly contrast noble
blood (genus nobile, nobilitas, or eugeneia) and ignoble, barbarian, or
mixed blood (ignobilis, semibarbarus). On the one hand, it was outra-
geous for the biographer and his audience to imagine that Maximus,
the son of the semibarbarus, could marry into the Roman aristocracy.
On the other hand, a Roman could not fruitfully marry a barbarian
for fear of drastic consequences. For example, Gallienus, born from a
senatorial family, ‘declined through the love of barbarian woman’
(amore barbarae mulieris consenesceret) (Tyr. Trig. 3.4), who is described
further elsewhere as the ‘barbarian daughter of a king’ (barbara regis
filia). The decline is evident from the fact that this affair caused
Gallienus and his intimates to dye their hair yellow (Gall. 21.3–4).

is as if the author is ironically comparing Gallienus’ fall into prema-
ture senility (consenescere) and barbarous imitation to the state’s
similar fate as it absorbed barbarians from across the frontier.
However, the range of opinions on racial mixing in the fourth and
fifth centuries was hardly consistent, sometimes condemning the prac-
tice, less often celebrating it, partly depending on the shifting political
usefulness of allied barbarian peoples. But the sources always reveal
unease.

Contemporary law allows us to see how racial mixing was theoreti-

cally framed as a problem. A constitution dating from the joint reign

MAXIMINUS THRAX AND THE POLITICS OF RACE IN LATE ANTIQUITY

von barbarischen Eltern stammende Persönlichkeiten zur höchsten Macht drängten (z.B.
Arbogast, Stilicho…)….’ (One could see from here in 1.7 a reflection of the period of the late
fourth or early fifth century, when individuals from outside the empire, that is those from
barbarian descent, rose to the highest power [e.g. Arbogast, Stilicho, etc.]….)

This passage is discussed by Isaac (n. 1), 349. Note the difference: Alexander Severus,

though ‘ashamed to be called Syrian’, nevertheless ruled as a ‘good emperor’. Maximinus tried
to hide his ignobilitas (Max. 1.7, 9.1), but his natural cruelty nevertheless broke through.

See also the author’s characterization of the ‘Thirty Tyrants’ in the preface. He states that

they ‘flocked’ together from ‘diverse parts of the world’ (Trig. Tyr. 1.2).

of Valentinian I and Valens, probably in the 370s, prohibited marriage
(coniugium) between Romans (provinciales) and barbarians (gentiles)
(CTh 3.14.1: De nubitiis gentilium). Neither could a Roman
(provincialis) of any standing take a ‘barbarian wife’ (barbara uxor), nor
could a Roman woman (provincialis femina) marry any barbarian.
When the compilers of the Theodosian Code redacted the law, it was
stripped of the specific circumstances that led to the decision.

Nonetheless, its remains make clear that the primary concern was that
such marriages created ‘alliances between Romans and barbarians’
(inter provinciales atque gentiles adfinitates), and that ‘suspect or crimi-
nal’ (suspectum vel noxium) information would spread through such
mixing. Although not specifically concerned with maintaining the
bloodlines of the Roman elite and the imperial household, the law
appears to me to deal implicitly with the problem of racial mixture by
drawing attention to the reproductive capacity of the woman and its
political consequences. From her would be born half-breed offspring
that would inevitably cause the Roman or barbarian parents to
consider their flesh first and the state second. The punishment was
death.

This decision is a rigidly bureaucratic framing of provincial reali-

ties. From the perspective of the capitals of the empire, the messiness
of life, its treasonous mixing, had to submit to the rule of law. There
were also literary visions of such troubles. In 398, gazing from Milan
to the shore of North Africa, Claudian, court poet to Honorius, imag-
ined the sordid consequences of an empire in shambles. His poem
celebrating Stilicho’s suppression of the revolt of Gildo, comes Africae
and of indigenous birth, begins with the goddess Roma bemoaning
her senility, her tattered appearance symbolizing the empire’s inability
to police the provinces, resulting not only in the interruption of the
grain supply from Africa but also in other disturbing problems.

After this pathetic image, the goddess Africa reports the condition of
her land under the rebellious leadership of Gildo. The insurgent
leader debauches the wives of the local notables and, when he is

MAXIMINUS THRAX AND THE POLITICS OF RACE IN LATE ANTIQUITY

Sivan has convincingly located the historical circumstances of the original law in the revolt

of Firmus, an indigenous rebel in north Africa: H. S. Sivan, ‘Why Not Marry a Barbarian?
Marital Frontiers in Late Antiquity (The Example of CTh 3.14.1)’, in R. W. Mathisen and H. S.
Sivan (eds.), Shifting Frontiers in Late Antiquity (Aldershot, 1996), 135–45. For a thorough
summary of the interpretation of the law, including new conclusions, see Chauvot (n. 27),
131–44.

M. Roberts, ‘Rome Personified, Rome Epitomized: Representations of Rome in the

Poetry of the Early Fifth Century,’ AJPh 122 (2001), 533–65. For Claudian and others, the
physical condition of Roma, as a personification, is a ‘metonymic index of Rome’s status’ (535).

finished with them, hands them over to his Moorish comrades for
repeated abuse. Through violence and violation the Roman women
are forced to generate half-barbarians, causing Africa to cry out, ‘The
discolored baby [discolor infans] frightens (even its own) cradle.’

The concern to police noble bloodlines and the treason that

half-barbarians threatened converges in the fate of Stilicho.

His

father was Vandal and his mother Roman.

That he was a hybrid was

apparently not initially of consequence, for the emperor Theodosius
recognized his talent as a military commander and, in 384, offered his
niece Serena in marriage after Stilicho’s return from a diplomatic
mission in Persia. The marriage produced three children, Maria,
Eucherius, and Thermantia. The union and the offspring were cele-
brated in the arts, including panegyrics for himself and his wife, as
well as by the famous ivory diptych that portrays the family.

Stilicho

was sent to the west as protector of Theodosius’ son Honorius, an
arrangement sealed by the marriage of Honorius to Stilicho’s daugh-
ters, first to Maria in 395 and, after her death, to Thermantia in 408.

Even among his most fervent supporters, however, there was a

palpable degree of reservation. In the first of a series of panegyrics on
the consulate of Stilicho, Claudian (Cons. Stil. 1.36–41) clouds
Stilicho’s origins just in the place where the subject’s origins are
traditionally to be praised. Similarly, in the poetry of Claudian’s
contemporary, Prudentius (C. Symm. 2.709–11), while Stilicho was
praised as the ‘companion and father’ (comes atque parens) of
Honorius, some qualification was deemed necessary. Perhaps in an
attempt to justify the close relationship between the emperor and his
half-barbarian general, Prudentius, just a few lines before the intro-
duction of Stilicho, makes the remarkable statement that Rome under
God’s guidance has brought together ‘distant peoples’ (distantes) into
harmonious legal, commercial, and conjugal relations, allowing in the
latter case ‘the right to marry a foreigner’. Prudentius continues, ‘for
one offspring is stitched together from two races [gentes] as a result of

MAXIMINUS THRAX AND THE POLITICS OF RACE IN LATE ANTIQUITY

Claudian, In Gildonem 193. On Gildo, see PLRE I, s.v. Gildo; A. Cameron, Claudian.

Poetry and Propaganda at the Court of Honorius (Oxford, 1970), 93–123.

For a discussion of Stilicho’s origins and their political consequences, see J. Matthews,

Western Aristocracies and the Imperial Court, AD 364–425, orig. pub. 1975 (Oxford, 1990),
257–83; PLRE I, s.v. Stilicho.

One must stitch together three sources to arrive at Stilicho’s half-Vandal origins. Jerome

refers to him as a semibarbarus, ‘half-barbarian’, and from Claudian we can infer that the
barbarian element was on his father’s side (see below). Finally, from Orosius we learn that his
family was Vandal: 7.38.1.

For Stilicho’s family, see PLRE I, s.v. Serena; PLRE II, s.v. Eucherius 1, s.v. Aemilia

Materna Thermantia.

the mixing of blood [sanguine mixto]. This was the achievement of so
many successes and triumphs of Roman rule’ (2.613–20).

Yet the

reader is hardly convinced of his enthusiasm for the collapsing of ‘dis-
tance’. Later Prudentius boldly states that Romans and barbarians are
as ‘distant’ (distant) from one another as beasts from humans and the
mute from the speaking (2.816–17).

The brief period during which Stilicho’s dominance was accommo-

dated by the literary elite came to an abrupt end. In 408, on orders
from Honorius, Stilicho and Serena were murdered for collusion with
the barbarians; his son was hunted down and killed in Rome even
after taking refuge in a church; and his supporters were rounded up.
Perhaps drawing on the propaganda that followed, Jerome (Ep.
123.16.2) calls Stilicho a ‘half-barbarian traitor’ (semibarbarus
proditor) in a long letter that advises his correspondent not to marry a
second time. If Scripture is not enough to convince the lonely widow,
then Jerome urges her to consider the chaotic times in which she lives.
He groans that barbarians had burst the barriers, causing Rome ‘to
fight within her own borders not for glory but for bare life’. Most
important of all, the cause that Jerome saw as the root of these
barbarian incursions was half-barbarian leadership: ‘This humiliation
has been brought upon [Rome] not by the fault of her emperors who
are both religious men, but by the crime of the half-barbarian traitor
who with our money has armed our foes against us.’

Jerome suggests

that Stilicho could hardly have avoided betrayal: his barbarian blood
was dominant and determined his course of action; in a political
crisis, the stain of origins could not be erased by office or marriage
into the imperial household.

Scapegoating was no less effective at the local level. It could

become uncomfortable, quite quickly, for those of obviously ambig-
uous descent. In his first sermon, just days after the Riot of the

MAXIMINUS THRAX AND THE POLITICS OF RACE IN LATE ANTIQUITY

Distantes regione plagae diuisaque ponto litora conueniunt nunc per uadimonia ad unum et

commune forum, nunc per commercia et artes ad coetum celebrem, nunc per genialia fulcra externi ad
ius conubii; nam sanguine mixto texitur alternis ex gentibus una propago. Hoc actum est tantis
successibus atque triumphis Romani imperii. This passage is placed into the long tradition of such
statements by Roman authors by C. Ando, Imperial Ideology and Provincial Loyalty in the Roman
Empire (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 63.

Sed tantum distant Romana et barbara, quantum quadrupes abiuncta est bipedi vel muta

loquenti. In the treatment of Roma, Prudentius’ inconsistency is noted by Roberts, ‘Rome
Personified’ (n. 33), 539.

Translated by W. H. Fremantle, NPNF second series, volume 6 (Grand Rapids, MI,

1979), 237.

For discussion, see A. Chauvot, ‘Remarques sur l’emploi de semibarbarus’, in A. Rousselle

(ed.), Frontières terrestres, frontières célestes dans l’antiquité (Paris, 1995), 262.

Statues had broken out in Antioch in March 387 and been violently
suppressed, John Chrysostom chided his congregation for their lack of
vigilance. It was as if the first city of the east had been captured by
barbarians. There was an eerie silence. Hundreds had fled the city.
Those who remained were afraid of leaving their houses, so many of
their neighbours having been arrested by the authorities. The real
criminals, the priest says, were ‘certain strangers and men of mixed
race’ (xenoi tines kai migades anthrôpoi), blasphemers of whom he had
repeatedly warned in the past. In a chilling cry, unfortunately so
persuasive in times of crisis, Chrysostom tells the frightened
church-goers: ‘Let us punish the madness of those blasphemers!’ Only
by rooting out this dangerous element would the Christians save their
city.

The threat of barbarian blood in the imperial household and the

threat of treasonous half-breed offspring were rooted in the fear of
inappropriate passing between largely imaginary geographical, ethnic,
moral, and, for Christians, religious frontiers.

The church historian

Socrates (HE 5.23.8–9), writing in Constantinople in 439, territorial-
ized heresy and charted its movements from the margins to the
heartland. In one arresting case, he notes the danger of barbarian
hybridity when he introduces the reader to Selenas, the successor of
Ufilas, the first bishop of the Goths:

Selenas the bishop of the Goths, a man of mixed race [epimikton genos]: he was a Goth
on his father’s side, a Phrygian on his mother’s, and because of this he taught in the
church equally well in both languages.

Two cultures, joined in the blood of Selenas, were twice as effective in
spreading heresy along the frontiers. Though Roman–barbarian and
barbarian–barbarian intermarriage was common enough at all levels
in the fourth century and thereafter, any degree of barbarian blood

MAXIMINUS THRAX AND THE POLITICS OF RACE IN LATE ANTIQUITY

John Chrysostom, De Statuis ad Populum Antiochenum 2.4–5; 2.10, tr. in NPNF, first

series, volume 9 (New York, NY, 1889), 345, 347. For migades anthrôpoi as ‘mixed-race men’,
cf. Isoc., Panath. 124.7. It is also possible that Chrysostom here means ‘mixed rabble’, e.g.,
Isoc., Arch. 124.7; Philo, Leg. 200.3; Strabo 8.7.5. Another ambiguous use of the phrase occurs
in his De inani gloria 28. Here, immoral words are compared to foreigners, pious words to proper
citizens, and Christian bodies to cities. Therefore, we should, according to Chrysostom, bring
about a large expulsion of foreigners (xenêlasia): mê migadas tinas kai phthorous anthrôpous
epeisienai tois politais toutois.

Cf. A. Chaniotis, ‘Foreign Soldiers – Native Girls? Constructing and Crossing Boundaries

in Hellenistic Cities with Foreign Garrisons’, in A. Chaniotis and P. Ducrey (eds.), Army and
Power in the Ancient World (Stuttgart, 2002), 99–113, esp. 110–12 on ‘legal boundaries and
mixed marriages’.

was potentially dangerous, especially when combined with treason or
heresy.

Such barbarian crossings led historians to frame the hostility to

barbarian blood as a simple equation. The decline of the state was
charted in relation to the racial deterioration of the elite. According to
this logic, the acceptance of racially defective soldiers as emperors was
a sign of imminent doom and a symbol of the empire’s senescence.
This sentiment is stated most clearly by Aurelius Victor (Caes.
24.9–11), just before introducing the reign of Maximinus Thrax:

Henceforth, as long as the emperors were more intent upon dominating their subjects
than upon subjugating foreign peoples and preferred to fight among themselves, they
threw the Roman state into a steep decline, as it were, and men were put in power
indiscriminately, good and bad, noble and base-born, even many of barbarian extrac-
tion [immissique in imperium promiscue boni malique, nobiles atque ignobiles, ac barbariae
multi].

This was not a cheerful introduction; nor was it a peculiar idea. The
coupling of the decline of the elite and the enfeeblement of the empire
is an old trope in Latin literature, most familiar perhaps from Tacitus
and his criticism of the Julio-Claudian emperors in the Annals. But
Tacitus was not concerned with barbarian blood in the palace, even if,
in his opinion, imperial rule was dumping repellent races and their
beliefs into the streets of the capital (for example, Ann. 15.44, Juv.
3.58 ff). For Aurelius Victor, writing c. 360, the inordinate (promiscue)
mixing of high and low, of the Roman nobility and barbarians,
marked a difference from the past. Decline was linked both to neglect
of foreign policy and neglect of policing the influx of barbarians. Such
transgressions, Victor suggests, were unnatural, leading first to the
reign of Maximinus Thrax, practically an illiterate (25.1: litterarum fere
rudis), and finally to civil war and barbarian invasions. Barbarian
crossings were not just a literary construction. In the lower Danube
and Asia Minor, a few inscriptions from the third century attest
similar fears of barbarians. They report at first hand that individuals
had actually been abducted and held by ‘barbarians’, Goths probably,

MAXIMINUS THRAX AND THE POLITICS OF RACE IN LATE ANTIQUITY

For lists of such unions, see R. C. Blockley, ‘Roman-Barbarian Marriages in the Late

Empire’, Florilegium 4 (1982), 63–79, revising earlier work by Rosario Soraci; more recently,
Chauvot (n. 27), 131–6.

Translated by Bird, Aurelius Victor, 27. The same sentiment—improper ‘mixing’ that led

to political chaos—is repeated for the reign of Gallienus: ‘Thus throughout the whole world the
mightiest things were mixed with the small, the lowest with the highest, as if by winds violently
gusting from all directions (Caes. 33, tr. Bird, Aurelius Victor, 33). Not surprisingly, just below
this Victor mentions Gallienus’ ‘shameful love-affair with the daughter of Attalus, a king of the
Germans, whose name was Pipa.’ The affair is analyzed by Chauvot (n. 27), 415–16.

for months in one case, and then escaped to report their salvation in
stone.

The author of the Historia Augusta and his contemporaries were

probably even more self-consciously aware of barbarians, barbarism,
and the passage of barbarians into the empire than Victor. In flight
from the Huns and allowed to settle in Thrace, the Goths revolted
against the empire, killed Valens on the field in 378, and in short
order marched against both Constantinople and Rome.

The

concern, particularly in a post–378 world, was not the passage of
effeminate non-Roman or barbarian culture into Roman territory, but
the passage of flesh-and-blood barbarians into Roman society. Like
the Gothic settlers in Thrace who shamed the empire and continued
to pose a threat, Maximinus, the semibarbarus from Thrace, had set
upon Rome and unleashed his terror. He was, in this sense, symptom-
atic of a disease that nearly put the empire in mortal danger a century
and a half later. Although this thought cannot be attributed to the
author of the Historia Augusta with certainty, it is difficult to imagine
the peculiarities of the biography without the recent transgressions of
the Gothic nation in mind. If correct, Rome’s flaw, according to some
at the end of the fourth century, was not so much Gibbon’s ‘immod-
erate greatness’ as an immoderate heterogeneity. This logic can
partially account for the elaborations, themes, and linkage of defective
origins and defective principates in the Historia Augusta, an attitude
shared across religious and geographic distances.

All of this is not to suggest that such attitudes hindered intermar-

riage: the legal, literary, and epigraphic sources demonstrate that
intermarriage and the semibarbarism that naturally resulted were
(increasingly?) common. In addition, there was a healthy flow of
immigrants into the major cities, despite official hostility that erupted,
particularly during times of famine.

But if this toleration is the

reality on the ground, as it were, so too is the range of views
concerning racial mixing. While Claudian praises Stilicho, he could at
the same time denigrate Gildo’s regime as producing ‘discolored
babies’, seemingly without irony or a sense of contradiction. The lives
of Maximinus and his son in the Historia Augusta appear, therefore, as

MAXIMINUS THRAX AND THE POLITICS OF RACE IN LATE ANTIQUITY

L. Robert, Hellenica vi.117–22, no. 48 (Lydia, 263); CIL 3, 12455 (Moesia Inferior, 238);

IGBulg I

, 1 (Thrace, third century). See also the curious report of Apollo’s miraculous salvation

of Didyma from Scythians (i.e. Goths) in 262/263: IDidy 159.

For a survey of Roman attitudes after Adrianople, see Chauvot (n. 27), 383–428.

Blockley (n. 45) and Chauvot (n. 27), 132–4, list the epigraphic evidence. For immi-

grants, see David Noy, ‘Immigrants in Late Imperial Rome’, in S. Mitchell and G. Greatrex
(eds.), Ethnicity and Culture in Late Antiquity (London, 2000), 15–30.

a specifically late Roman commentary on the problem of promiscuous
mixing, and a more general commentary on changes in society just
before the fall of the west.

Jordanes and the transformation of Maximinus Thrax

The staging of Maximinus and his son as racially defective in the
Historia Augusta had profound consequences for the emperor’s histor-
ical memory, both in antiquity and in modern scholarship. The first
step in this process was the representation of Maximinus as a
half-breed (mixobarbaros/semibarbarus) tyrant by Herodian and more
elaborately by the Historia Augusta. While it is tempting to dismiss
much of the Historia Augusta as full of falsifications, its reliability was
not so tenuous in late antiquity. The biographer’s report of
Maximinus’ half-barbarian origins found its way perhaps through the
lost Roman History of Symmachus (cos. 485, d. 525) to Jordanes’
Getica, a history of the Gothic ‘race’ (gens), written probably in
Constantinople around 551.

Such a history was not a novel under-

taking. By the time of Jordanes’ writing, Gothic rule in Italy and
southern Gaul was nearly a century old. Under Theodoric (493–526),
Cassiodorus was charged to narrate the origins of the Gothic nation.

Though now lost, Jordanes (Getica, praef. 1–3) had a copy for a few
days and quickly read through it before writing his own version,
composing it partly from memory and partly by supplementing
Cassiodorus with his own research.

For Jordanes (we can say almost nothing certain about the role

played by Maximinus in Cassiodorus’ lost history

), Maximinus,

MAXIMINUS THRAX AND THE POLITICS OF RACE IN LATE ANTIQUITY

For Jordanes and his sources, see T. Mommsen’s preface to the edition of Jordanes:

MGH, AA 5.1 (Berlin, 1882; Munich, 1982), xxiii–xliv; J. J. O’Donnell, ‘The Aims of Jordanes’,
Historia 31 (1982), 223–40; B. Croke, ‘Cassiodorus and the Getica of Jordanes’, CP 82 (1987),
117–34, esp. 122–5. Jordanes himself (Getica 15.83) claimed that the information on Maximinus
was derived from Symmachus (c. 485), whose history was indebted to the Historia Augusta,
though with obvious additions from Christian authors (Mommsen, Getica, xxxix). Lippold (n.
14), 164–77, summarizes the extensive scholarship on the so-called ‘Symmachusfragment’, and
also cautiously suggests that Jordanes may well have had a copy of the Historia Augusta on hand
in Constantinople. For Jordanes’ degree of dependence on Cassiodorus, see the following diver-
gent views: sceptical of dependence: J. J. O’Donnell, Cassiodorus (Berkeley, CA, 1979), 47–54;
Croke, ‘Cassiodorus’; Goffart (n. 28); more accepting of dependence: P. Heather, ‘Cassiodorus
and the Rise of the Amals: Genealogy and the Goths under Hun Domination’, JRS 79 (1989),
103–28, esp. 104–5 and n. 3.

For Cassiodorus and the political nature of his literary work, see O’Donnell (n. 49); for

what little can be said on the nature of the Gothic History, see ibid., 43–54.

Comparison of Cassiodorus’ Chronicle and Jordanes’ Romana and Getica does not allow

us to conclude that Maximinus played any significant role in Cassiodorus’ lost history of the

the half-breed tyrant in the Historia Augusta and presumably in
Symmachus’ history, was reborn a national hero.

The sparse details

in the laconic tradition of the chroniclers, none of whom, including
Cassiodorus, recorded the elaborate information on the emperor’s
origins, did not suffice. Jordanes uniquely saw Maximinus as a praise-
worthy figure.

Therefore, it seems that one place where Jordanes

supplemented Cassiodorus was in his handling of Maximinus. To
make his case, he repeated, nearly verbatim, the hostile account in the
Historia Augusta. The details are familiar by now: Maximinus was a
semibarbarus born in Thrace from the union of a Gothic father and
Alan mother (Getica 15.83–88).

In Jordanes’ version, Maximinus’

origins, his physically imposing size, and his military valour show ‘how
this race (gens) had come all the way to the pinnacle of Roman rule’
(15.88). But, as glorious as the Goths had been, Jordanes was critical
of Gothic rule in his own time and urged Constantinople to correct
the past neglect that emboldened barbarians on the northern frontier,
in this case the Bulgars and Slavs.

Maximinus fitted into the overall purpose of the Getica. The Goths,

according to Jordanes (here certainly following Cassiodorus), had a
noble lineage of kings, stretching for generations into the distant past,
aligning the Gothic and Roman people as aristocratic equals. The

MAXIMINUS THRAX AND THE POLITICS OF RACE IN LATE ANTIQUITY

Goths. In the Chronicle, Cassiodorus only mentions two factors, political usurpation and
persecution (Cassiodorus, Chron. 931). For the opposing view that Maximinus had already
become a Gothic hero in Cassiodorus’ Gothic History, see H. Usener, Anecdoton Holderi. Ein
Beitrag zur Geschichte Roms in Ostgothischer Zeit (Bonn, 1877), 29, arguing that Cassiodorus
had already included the Symmachus fragment in his lost Gothic History; W. Enßlin, Des
Symmachus Historia Romana als Quelle für Jordanes, Sitzungsberichte der Bayerischen Akademie
der Wissenschaften, Philosophisch-historische Klasse, Jahrgang 1948, Heft 3 (Munich, 1949),
11–13.

This reading of Maximinus as a ‘national hero’ fundamental to the purpose of the Getica

is traditional: e.g., see F. Giunta, Jordanes e la cultura dell’alto medio evo (Palermo, 1952),
168–9. But note that there are opposing views: Goffart sees the excursus on Maximinus and the
information on his barbarian parentage as ‘comic relief’. On this and the debate it has sparked,
see Goffart (n. 28), 81–82, and his new preface to the paperback edition published in 2005,
xviii.

Jordanes’ creative use of Maximinus is made all the more surprising given that his source,

Symmachus, probably adopted the venomous judgment of the emperor in the Historia Augusta;
for a profile of Symmachus’ conservative senatorial cultural preconceptions, see M. A. Wes, Das
Ende des Kaisertums im Westen des Römischen Reichs, Archeologische Studiën van het Nederlands
Historisch Instituut te Rome, deel II (’s-Gravenhage, 1967), 110–12. Wes concludes that
‘Symmachus, da seine Quelle wenig günstig über Maximinus urteilt, diese negative Bewertung,
die aus der ganzen Vita Maximini spricht, sicherlich übernommen hat’. (Symmachus, because
his source judged Maximinus with little favour, certainly adopted this negative assessment,
which resonates throughout the Vita Maximini.)

Jordanes’ insistence on revealing Maximinus’ half-barbarian origins is confirmed by his

Romana, an earlier historical epitome: Romana 281.

Croke (n. 49), 126–7.

Goths were not barbarians, but errant partners in empire. He
concludes that the preservation of the harmony of Gotho-Roman rule,
an alliance deeply rooted in the history of both races, had been inau-
gurated by the marriage (549/550) of Matasuentha, Theoderic’s
granddaughter, and Germanus, Justinian’s cousin and an influential
general, a match that mixed two noble bloodlines, the Amals and the
Anicii (Getica 60.314–15).

Nearly two centuries after the Goths had

killed an emperor in battle, a Gotho-Roman mixed marriage at the
highest level of politics was now celebrated as a commingling of one
noble ‘race’ (genus) with another. Their son, another Germanus, could
no longer be defined as a degenerative semibarbarus.

It is significant that the staging of Maximinus as a semibarbarus was

only the preoccupation of the Historia Augusta at the end of the fourth
century and the Getica in the middle of the sixth century, for opposite
reasons. For the fourth-century audience, fear of barbarian blood
mixed into the military elite was topical for a number of authors. For
Jordanes’ audience, probably the Latin-speaking hangers-on in
Constantinople in the middle of the sixth century, a semibarbarus as
emperor could supply historical support for the hopes placed on
Germanus, a potential saviour of Gothic and Roman blood, through
whom Gothic Italy apparently had a chance to remain under Roman
rule. By contrast, for the epitomators – Eutropius, Aurelius Victor,
and the anonymous author of the Epitome de Caesaribus – and the
historians who relied on them in the fifth, sixth, and seventh centuries
– Jerome, Rufinus, Orosius, Cassiodorus, and a number of Latin
chronicles – the emperor’s racial origins were ignored. What was
important for the later tradition was Maximinus’ supposedly unprece-
dented subversion of the constitution: Maximinus was the first man
elected by the troops to be emperor.

In addition, he was an alleged

MAXIMINUS THRAX AND THE POLITICS OF RACE IN LATE ANTIQUITY

O’Donnell (n. 49), 47; Goffart (n. 28), 22, 68–84; PLRE II, s.v. Germanus 4; PLRE IIIB,

s.v. Matasuentha; PLRE IIIA, s.v. Germanus 3 (their son).

Syme asserts that this detail was made authoritative by inclusion in the so-called

Kaisergeschichte: Syme (n. 15), 189. The epitomators and chroniclers all repeat that Maximinus
was the first soldier-emperor, ruling not by the will or authority of the senate: Eutr., Brev. 9.1:
Maximinus ex corpore militari primus ad imperium accessit sola militum voluntate (‘Maximinus was
the first from the military to rise to power by the will of the soldiers alone’); Aur. Vic., Caes.
25.1: primus e militaribus (‘first from the soldiers’); Epit. Caes. 25.1: ex militaribus (‘from the
soldiers’); SHA, Max. 8.1: primum e corpore militari et nondum senator sine decreto senatus Augustus
ab exercitu appellatus est (‘first from the military and not even a senator to be called Augustus by
the army without a decree of the senate’); Jerome, Chron. 2250: primus ex corpore militari, sine
senatus auctoritate, ab exercitu imperator electus est (‘the first from the military, without the
authority of the senate, elected emperor by the army’); Orosius 7.19.1–2: nulla senatus voluntate
imperator ab exercitu (‘emperor by the army, not by the will of the senate’); Cassiodorus, Chron.
931: primus omnium ex corpore militari imperator electus (‘first of all elected emperor by the mili-
tary’).

persecutor of Christians, the sixth since Nero.

The same political

and religious factors characterize the image of Maximinus in Byzan-
tium.

Most late antique and early medieval authors therefore either

ignored, failed to the see the significance of, or simply did not know
the emperor’s racial origins.

Maximinus and the moderns

It was not until recently that Maximinus’ racial hybridity was again
remembered as a significant factor in this emperor’s short principate.
In Nazi Germany, the origins of Maximinus became relevant to a
handful of prominent scholars, sparking a debate that intersected in
curious ways with national politics, racial ideology, and a fair amount
of solid philology, which in the end helped elucidate the production of
both the Historia Augusta and Jordanes’ Romana and Getica.

In 1939, Franz Altheim published Die Soldatenkaiser, partly a study

of the peoples on Rome’s borders, complete with photographs taken
by his travelling companion, E. Trautmann, partly an analysis of
the origins and national character of the emperors of the third
century.

By this time, Altheim had joined Himmler’s Lehr- und

Forschungsgemeinschaft ‘Das Ahnenerbe’ (Teaching and Research Insti-
tute on Ancestral Heritage). The institute’s charge, in paraphrase,
was to provide proof that the Aryan people had primordial roots in
central Europe and that German national culture was superior to all

MAXIMINUS THRAX AND THE POLITICS OF RACE IN LATE ANTIQUITY

Jordanes, Getica 15.88, a tradition that appears, without much merit, in Eusebius, HE

6.28. Eusebius’ authority established the persecution as a fact to be copied by Jerome and there-
after frequently repeated, e.g., Jerome, Chron. 2250; Rufinus, HE 6.28; Orosius 7.19.2, 7.27.9;
Prosper of Aquitaine, Chron. 820; Isidore, Chron. 297–9; Bede, Chron. 361. For a study of the
possible but unlikely victims of this alleged persecution, see G. W. Clarke, ‘Some Victims of the
Persecution of Maximinus Thrax’, Historia 15 (1966), 445–53; for a clever and attractive argu-
ment for the historicity of the persecution, see A. Lippold, ‘Maximinus Thrax und die Christen’,
Historia 24 (1975), 479–92.

Historians in the middle Byzantine period relied on Dio and Herodian for chronicling

the third century. See B. Bleckmann, Die Reichskrise des III. Jahrhunderts in der spätantiken und
byzantinischen Geschichtsschreibung. Untersuchungen zu den nachdionischen Quellen der Chronik
des Johannes Zonoras (Munich, 1992), 406–7, with specific reference to Maximinus, where he
shows that the constitutional subversion was likewise of importance in the eastern chronological
traditions. To cite one example, George Syncellus (Chron. ann. 5728), writing at the beginning
of the ninth century, notes that Maximinus was a persecutor and a ‘tyrant’ prone to violent
extremes.

F. Altheim, Die Soldatenkaiser (Frankfurt, 1939). On Soldatenkaiser, see Matthäus Heil,

‘“Soldatenkaiser” als Epochenbegriff’, in K.-P. Johne, T. Gerdhardt, and U. Hartmann (eds.),
Deleto Paene Imperio Romano. Transformationsprozesse des Römischen Reiches im 3. Jahrhundert und
ihre Rezeption in der Neuzeit (Stuttgart, 2006), 416–17 (I thank Christian Witschel for alerting
me to this recent publication).

others.

Altheim clearly wrote Soldatenkaiser with these goals in

mind. It was published under the auspices of the Ahnenerbe, and in the
forward Altheim thanked both Göring and Himmler for the ‘generous
support’ (großzügige Unterstützung) that made possible travel, research,
and the resulting publication.

Maximinus appears here as a man of

‘half or complete barbarian origin’ who ‘embodied the manly prin-
ciple in his roughest and most natural form’.

Following both

Herodian and the Historia Augusta, Altheim argues that Maximinus
did indeed have Gothic blood in his veins, concluding: ‘We must
recognize him as an emperor of Germanic blood’.

But Altheim had his critics. In a 1941 article, Wilhelm Enßlin

urged caution when dealing with the sources on Maximinus, to avoid
creating farcical links in the present to imaginary barbarian heroes of
the past. In his conclusion, Enßlin poses a biting rhetorical question:
‘In the end, is the figure of Maximinus such that it could delight
us, and that its designation as Germanic could be profitable in a posi-
tive way for its appreciation and for the view of our history
[Geschichtsbild]?’ No, Enßlin writes. ‘I think we have enough
Germanic [germanische] figures. We do not need a Maximinus Thrax
for its completion. According to Altheim himself, he “embodied the
manly principle in its roughest and most natural form.”’

In direct

response to Enßlin, Altheim attempted to set out his case systemati-
cally in an article published later in the same volume of the journal.
He asserts, first of all, that Herodian’s term mixobarbaros, used to
describe Maximinus’ origins, should be taken as an racial label:
‘Mixobarbaros in all cases describes…a half-breed [Mischling]’.

Altheim cites this use of the term by a number of authors and

MAXIMINUS THRAX AND THE POLITICS OF RACE IN LATE ANTIQUITY

V. Lesemann, Nationalsozialismus und Antike. Studien zur Entwicklung des Faches Alte

Geschichte 1933–1945 (Hamburg, 1977), 118–23.

Altheim (n. 60), 5.

Ibid., 245: ‘Selbst von der Donau stammend, halb oder ganz barbarischer Abkunft,

verkörperte er das männliche Prinzip in seiner rohesten and naturhaftesten Form’.

Ibid., 246–8, for a review of the evidence; 249: ‘Es besteht kein Grund, die gotische

Abkunft Maximins zu leugnen. Man wird ihn as Kaiser germanischen Blutes anerkennen’; cf.
similar statements, 185, 189: ‘Der Kaiser, dem selbst germanisches Blut in seinen Adern
floss…’.

W. Enßlin, ‘War Maximinus Thrax ein Germane?’, RhM 90 (1941), 17: ‘Und ist

schließlich diese Gestalt des Maximinus so, daß wir an ihr unsere Freude haben könnten und
ihre Einreihung unter die Germanen irgend einen positiven Gewinn für ihre Beurteilung und für
unser Geschichtsbild abwerfen könnte? Ich denke, wir haben germanische Gestalten genug, daß
wir zu ihrer Ergänzung nicht einen Maximinus Thrax brauchen, der nach Altheim selbst, “das
männliche Prinzip in seiner rohesten und naturhaftesten Form verkörperte.”’ In CAH XII
(1939), Enßlin had already characterized Maximinus as the ‘son of a Thracian peasant – only a
falsification of history has made him a Goth’ (72).

F. Altheim, ‘Die Abstammung des Maximinus Thrax’, RhM 90 (1941), 198:

‘Mixobarbaros bezeichnet überall…den Mischling’.

concludes that Maximinus ‘came from innermost Thrace, specifically
from a village settled by a mixed population’.

So far, Altheim was

following Herodian accurately. But Altheim had an active imagina-
tion. He suggests that this village had ethnic quarters, similar perhaps
to religious-ethnic quarters he had seen throughout his travels in the
Near East. In this imaginary village, the barbarians lived side-by-side
with the Romans, but the two segments of the population refused
intermarriage and remained, as a result, distinct. ‘Thus,’ according to
Altheim, ‘Maximinus himself and his parents were pure-blooded
barbarians.’

Then adding the information from the Historia Augusta

that Maximinus’ father was Gothic and his mother Alan (interpreted
as ‘Iranian’ in origin), Altheim celebrated the emperor’s racial
hybridity. One can conclude from his treatment that Altheim intended
to suggest that the emperor was ‘Aryan’ on both sides of the family,
though he did not use the term in this instance.

Ernst Hohl, the editor of the Teubner edition of the Historia

Augusta, finally settled the debate.

In a 1942 article, Hohl ridicules

Altheim’s use of the text, questioning how the author could have
specific knowledge of the names of the emperor’s parents and their
origins when the biography was so full of glaring inaccuracies. For
Hohl, Maximinus ‘is no half-Goth, but rather a “half-barbarian”
Thracian provincial’. Moreover, he concludes, the fact that the
emperor cannot be labeled ‘half-Germanic’ [Halbgermane] entails no
‘loss’ for ‘us Germans’ [Deutsche].

Maximinus was, after all, a tyrant.

Hohl’s article caused Altheim to harden his views. In 1942, he wrote a
response, titled ‘Zum letzen Mal: Maximinus Thrax’, in which Hohl’s
arguments,

specifically

the

historicity

the

emperor’s

Gothic–Alan parentage, were dismissed. The last sentence of this brief
rebuttal is telling: ‘I see no reason at all to change my statements.’

And the article (whose title translates as ‘For the Last Time’) was
indeed his final statement. Parts of the Soldatenkaiser were folded
first into the 1943 Die Krise der alten Welt and then into the 1952 Der

MAXIMINUS THRAX AND THE POLITICS OF RACE IN LATE ANTIQUITY

Ibid., 198: ‘Maximin kam aus dem innersten Thrakien und zwar aus einem Dorf, das von

gemischter Bevölkerung bewohnt war.’

Ibid.: ‘Denn Maximin selbst war reinblütiger Barbar und seine Eltern dementsprechend

auch.’

E. Hohl, ‘Die “gotische Abkunft” des Kaisers Maximinus Thrax’, Klio 34 (1942),

264–89.

Ibid., 286: ‘Dieser Kaiser Roms ist kein Halbgote, sondern ein “halbbarbarischer”

thrakischer Provinziale…. Bedeutet die Erkenntnis, daß Maximin kein Halbgermane gewesen
sein kann, einen Verlust für uns Deutsche? Im Gegenteil.’

F. Altheim, ‘Zum letzen Mal: Maximinus Thrax’, RhM 91 (1942), 353: ‘Ich sehe keinen

Anlaß, an meinen Aufstellungen etwas zu ändern.’

Niedergang der alten Welt. In all three, Altheim’s assertion of
Maximinus’ German origins remained unchanged.

Unlike other

scholars, such as Tenny Frank and Martin Nilsson, who insisted on
racial causes for Rome’s decline long before Altheim, his ideas and his
affiliation with Himmler’s Ahnenerbe have forever tarnished his schol-
arly reputation.

In one sense, Altheim was correct, despite his racist obsessions. By

highlighting the origins of Maximinus, he correctly demonstrated that
race matters in the sources, though not precisely in the way he imag-
ined.

This is an important point to remember. In recent years, race

has been substituted by ethnicity as the preferable focus of analysis,
primarily, in the words of Jonathan Hall, because of the ‘troubled
past’ and resonating ‘ideological discomfort’ of the term.

Ethnicity,

by contrast, is supposed to be a fluid category that disarms the bogus
fixity of racial thinking as just one of many historically contingent
elements that constitute identity. In application, Hall finds that
ethnicity as a component of identity dramatically diminished in
importance in Greek society, replaced after the fifth century by
cultural factors, such as language, custom, and religion. Briefly
considering the afterlife of this process, Hall speculates that Roman
society operated on the same principle: Rome defined itself as a
composite society, plagued by a pathological sense of cultural

MAXIMINUS THRAX AND THE POLITICS OF RACE IN LATE ANTIQUITY

Noted by Lesemann (n. 61), 127; Enßlin continued to discuss the argument, recapitu-

lating his criticisms in Enßlin (n. 51), 6–9.

T. Frank, ‘Race Mixture in the Roman Empire’, AHR 21 (1916), 689–708. M. P.

Nilsson, ‘The Race Problem of the Roman Empire’, orig. pub. 1921, reprinted without changes
in his Opuscula Selecta, volume 2 (Lund, 1952), 940–64: the ‘race problem’ was that the empire
allowed ‘the mixing up of the different races’, leading to ‘unlimited bastardizing’ (941, 957,
960). Curiously, Nilsson notes that Maximinus Thrax and his successors ‘in all proba-
bility…belonged to the refractory people that we know in our times as Albanians’ (947). Such
ideas are repeated in his Imperial Rome, tr. Rev. G. C. Richards (London, 1926), e.g., 318, 338
ff. Not all scholars were in thrall to the topic of ‘mongrelization’: see the critical N. H. Baynes,
‘The Decline of the Roman Power in Western Europe: Some Modern Explanations’, JRS 33
(1943), 33. For the legacy of Altheim’s work, see G. W. Bowersock, review of K. Christ,
Romische Geschichte und deutsche Geschichtswissenschaft (Munich, 1982), History and Theory 23
(1984), 376: ‘Altheim’s work was accomplished with such breathtakingly poor judgment and
inaccuracy that most scholars have, in recent times, not even bothered to take account of his
work in any serious or detailed way.’ Others differ: see, e.g., R. Frank, review of Alexander
Demandt, Der Fall Roms. Die Auflösung des römischen Reiches im Urteil der Nachwelt (Munich,
1984), AHR 90 (1985), 115. Note also the publication of a Festschrift with contributions by
reputable international scholars: R. Stiehl and H. E. Stier (eds.), Beiträge zur alten Geschichte und
deren Nachleben. Festschrift für Franz Altheim zum 6.10.1968 (Berlin, 1969).

For example, Altheim’s correct notice of racial prejudice in the sources is used paradoxi-

cally to argue that Maximinus and the later Illyrian emperors relieved the empire from the
degenerate orientals Elagabalus and Alexander Severus.

J. H. Hall, Hellenicity. Between Ethnicity and Culture (Chicago, IL, 2002), 13–15. D. K.

Buell rightly confronts this passage; see her Why This New Race. Ethnic Reasoning in Early Chris-
tianity (New York, NY, 2005), 20.

inferiority, and therefore embraced difference, aside from the
grumblings of a few outraged poets.

The focus on ethnicity as a preferable (decontaminated) term has

led to a distinctly postwar interpretation of hybrid labels. What did
Herodian mean to suggest when he described the emperor’s origins as
mixobarbaros, ‘mixed-barbarian’? Hall, and the scholarship he draws
on, interprets earlier attestations of mixobarbaros in opposition to the
term mixellen, ‘mixed-Greek’. As a category, mixellen referred to a
barbarian in the salutary process of acculturation. In contrast, a
mixobarbaros was a half-breed, partly Greek and partly barbarian,
who, because he was suffering under the influence of savagery, was
slipping into barbarous decline.

Like mixobarbaros, the term

semibarbarus has undergone a similar erasure of racial coloring. A
decade ago, Alain Chauvot catalogued all instances of semibarbarus
and suggested particular shades of meaning in each case.

The

earliest of eleven instances appears in Suetonius, but the real flour-
ishing of the term occurred mostly in the fourth century and less so
thereafter. In this later period, semibarbarus was used by Lactantius,
Symmachus, Jerome, the Historia Augusta, Salvian, and Jordanes. In
five cases, the term refers to individuals, in three to collectivities, and
in three to places, either cities or rivers.

In reference to individuals,

Chauvot concludes that, like the Greek terms for hybridity,
semibarbarus was a sign of fluid cultural possibilities, not fixed origins.
Hybrids lived, according to this view, on a cultural spectrum. Regard-
less of race, the semibarbarus had agency, able, more or less, to choose
assimilation or the decline into complete barbarism.

According to Chauvot, the reference in the Historia Augusta to

Maximinus as a semibarbarus referred to his barbarous culture, not to
his barbarian origins. Only in two cases, Lactantius on Maximinus
Daia and Jerome on Stilicho, did the term refer to racial mixture.
Such hairsplitting is questionable for two related reasons. The first is
based on Chauvot’s own reflections. He suggested that it would be a
mistake to be too analytically precise. Hybrid terms deliberately

MAXIMINUS THRAX AND THE POLITICS OF RACE IN LATE ANTIQUITY

M. Dubuisson, ‘Remarques sur le vocabulaire grec de l’acculturation’, RBPh 60 (1982),

31–2.

Hall bases much of his understanding of these hybrid terms on Dubuisson (n. 77).

A. Chauvot (n. 42), 255–71.

Individuals: Lactantius, De mortibus persecutorum 18.13 (Maximinus Daia); Jerome, Ep.

50.2 (Jerome himself); Jerome, Ep. 123.16 (Stilicho); SHA, Max. 2.5 (Maximinus); Jordanes,
Getica 15.84 (Maximinus). Collectivities: Suetonius, Jul. 76.5 (Gauls); Eutropius 1.3 (Romans);
Salvian, Ep. 4.20 (Romans and Sabines). Cities: Jerome, Adv. Jov. 1.48 (Lepcis). Rivers:
Symmachus, Laud. in Val. 14 (Rhine); Jerome, Ep. 3.5 (Rhine).

muddy the waters, because reference to defective culture was implic-
itly a reference to defective origins.

The logical conclusion is that

the severing of culture from race (or ethnicity) is virtually an analyt-
ical fiction, especially in texts, such as ours, that readily embrace
contradictions: somehow Maximinus was Thracian, Gothic, Alan, and
a Roman citizen. Hybrid terms such as mixobarbaros and semibarbarus
therefore constituted a vocabulary of racial differentiation, even if not
exclusively so. It was not just a matter of culture: race and culture
were consubstantial.

Another reason for unease with the deracialization of hybrid terms

has to do with a larger historiographical conundrum. If the accultura-
tion model applied to Maximinus and his empire, it would mean that
he was barbarian by birth and therefore by culture, but not forever.
The emperor had agency, but ultimately failed, perhaps by a flaw of
his own character, to negotiate the limits of Roman tolerance. By
embracing Roman culture, the son of mixobarbaroi could become fully
Roman. The term ‘Roman’, following this model of acculturation,
constituted an inclusive ‘legal-juridical’ identity that both embraced
the city’s heterogeneous origins in Italy and afforded the possibility of
an erasure of racial difference.

Rome was therefore the precursor to

the modern democratic, racially inclusive state. This view is not only
misleading, but it also comes dangerously close to being the flipside of
now discredited theories of Rome’s decline. The same sense of racial
inclusiveness has been used to suggest that Rome’s lack of interest in
policing racial boundaries led to the ‘mongrelization’ of society and
the inevitable destruction of the Roman spirit.

Like so many other figures from antiquity, Maximinus remains

unconvincing as a historical agent; he lies outside his own time and
place, instead inhabiting empires that he would probably have found
quite strange. This article has not been corrective in this regard. No
attempt has been made to reconstruct Maximinus’ own life, much less
sort out his actual origins. It has shown, however, the reasons for
Maximinus’ persisting iconic representation as a racially circum-
scribed subject long after his head was paraded around on a spike. In
Peter Heather’s words, ‘identity is generally created and hardened in

MAXIMINUS THRAX AND THE POLITICS OF RACE IN LATE ANTIQUITY

Chauvot (n. 41), 269.

Hall (n. 75), 23, 224–6, agreeing with Dubuisson that ‘the Hellenistic culturally-based

definition of Hellenic identity endured well into the period of Roman rule’.

For the history of scholarship on the question of ‘racial mixture’ and its disastrous conse-

quences for the empire, see Demandt (n. 73), 352–65, 368–93.

conflict’.

In this case, the identity of Maximinus was paradoxically

coherent for and contingent on the preoccupations of conflicting
communities. In the late fourth century, Maximinus was staged as an
actor, to play a role in a historical tragedy that satisfied the fears of an
audience that increasingly heard reports of barbarians passing into the
empire, both through incursions and intermarriages.

Ultimately the

barbarians had their day as the western Roman empire was carved
into successor states. In this process, Maximinus was staged once
again by Jordanes, to play another role, this time as a hero for the
Gothic nation. In this guise, he has continued to serve as a symbol,
but for cross-purposes. For the Nazi historian Altheim, Maximinus
was an Aryan forefather; for postwar and some current scholars in the
west, Maximinus might well become the symbol of the new order: a
hybrid, culturally and racially, who enriched a pluralistic body politic
as he moved from the margins to full integration in the metropolitan
culture; and for the modern ‘Thracians’ in Bulgaria, a winery in
Brestovitza has cultivated the essence of Maximinus Thrax into a
national icon: his name now labels affordable bottles of Cabernet and
Merlot.

MAXIMINUS THRAX AND THE POLITICS OF RACE IN LATE ANTIQUITY

P. Heather, ‘State, Lordship and Community in the West (c. A.D. 400–600)’, in

A. Cameron, B. Ward-Perkins, and M. Whitby (eds.), CAH XIV (Cambridge, 2000), 454. See
also Hall (n. 75), 9–10; and, for a general theory of peoplehood, applicable in this case, R. M.
Smith, Stories of Peoplehood. The Politics of Political Membership (Cambridge, 2003), esp. 102–25.

I use the term ‘staging’ purely metaphorically as a way of discussing how late antique

authors used Maximinus as a malleable figure in the plots of their literary productions. I do not
use the term to signal that I am reading the sources through the lens of ‘performativity’. Such an
approach would probably yield conclusions different from my own. For the use of performative
analysis in reading late antique and early medieval sources, see J. Martschukat and S. Patzold
(eds.), Geschichtswissenschaft und ‘Performative Turn’. Ritual, Inszenierung und Performanz vom
Mittelalter bis zur Neuzeit (Cologne, 2003).

Nov Jivot Winery, Brestovitza, Bulgaria.

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