Arve, and welcome to Emperors of Rome, a Roman history podcast from Latrib University.

I'm your host, Matt Smith, and with me today is Associate Professor Kaelin Davenport,

Senior Lecturer in Roman history at Macquarie University, and Humboldt Research Fellow

at GERTHY University in Frankfurt, Germany.

This is episode CLXVI, the Gothic invasion.

This is the era of Roman history where the Goths from the North begin to pose a serious threat

to the stability of the faltering Roman Empire.

When they begin to lay siege to Roman cities, DCS rides to confront them, not realizing

the challenging battles that await him, here's Kaelin Davenport.

The Goths in the mid-3rd century are a Germanic people, at the moment they're living in quite

a large area which covers modern day Romania and the Ukraine.

They probably migrated from modern day Poland towards the end of the second century AD.

It's thought, or it is said, and for this we depend on a sixth century writer named

Jordanes, that they may have originally come from Scandinavia, but this is partly disputed

whether that's accurate.

They occupy a wide range of territory north of the Danube, so north of most of Rome's

Empire, it's only Dacia, which was conquered by Trajan, but actually extends to the northern

bank of the Danube.

The name Goths probably just means the people in the Gothic language, and you may have heard

of the Austro-Goths and the Visigoths when people talk about the barbarian migrations

of the later Roman Empire, they just mean the Eastern Goths and the Western Goths.

It's not thought that the Goths were divided into those two groups at this period in the

...