George wrote:
*****GK: This would mean accepting the view that Berig
> brought his Goths over from Scandza ca. 1500 BC, and
> that Filimer led them into Scythian Oium some 150
> years or so later...
Torsten replied:
<<Maybe some of us know that these claims are totally inappropriate and
anachronistic and based on an arbitrary misperception, but some of us don't.
Would you share with us the reasons why we think this is so?>>
In support of George's statement:
"The Getica places material from two millenium of Classical Greek history and
pseudo-history between its account of Filmer's migration and the point at
which it returns to genuinely Gothic activities in the Black Sea region. It
was a standard conceit of late antique ethography that there were no new
people, only old ones under new names. For Cassiodorus this offered the
opportunity - grasped with both hands - of giving the Goths a grandiose
pre-history....
According to this view of the past, the kingdom of the Goths was founded well
before the city of Rome, and Goths had even fought in the Trojan war. An
incidental effect was to date Berig's crossing from Scandinavia to 1490 BC...
Writing in the early 520s, Cassiodorus, in his lost Gothic History, linked
the takeover of Spain [by Theodoric] to a notational 2000th anniversary of
the creation of the Gothic kingdom..."
- Peter Heather, The Goths 12-13, 233