It would appear that the first reliably documented
assertion that the "new" Goths are the "old" Getae
stems from the pen and imagination of St Jerome,
writing in 390 AD and residing in Bethlehem. Unless
somebody kindly beats me to it, I shall check the text
of his "Quaestiones Hebraicae in Genesim" within the
next week to see if there is anything there warranting
further investigation.== What about Aelius Spartianus
and the Historia Augusta? I must say that I had not
practised this source very much, and took Steve Long's
initial contention at face value. Substantively the
source hardly mattered, since it was ambiguous, and
proved rather the reverse of what it had been adduced
to confirm. But after further research, its timeline's
authenticity turned out to be rather shaky. Scholars
today are not certain at all about either the
existence of "Aelius Spartianus" or about the time of
composition of the Historia Augusta. The leading
perspective is that it was either authored or edited
in the late 4th or early 5th century. [A quick
research check of the first 50 or 60 on-line hits of
"Historia Augusta" will demonstrate this
satisfactorily to anyone interested]. Which means that
it cannot be used as a solid argument that the
Gothi=Getae equation was being discussed "in the early
4th century". We are therefore left, at the moment,
with the sequence Jerome---Claudianus----Gibbon's
inscription----Orosius: all pointing to the same time
frame for the emergence of the "theory". *******
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