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Old Names, New Peoples: Listing Ethnonyms in Late Antiquity
Series: - Brill's Series on the Early Middle Ages, Volume: 30
Author:
No people is nameless, and lists of words are as old as writing systems. And yet, both subjects can appear unpromising to historians. This volume shows the contrary by examining the various meanings and functions of ethnonyms in Late Antiquity: added to catalogues of provinces, they reflect the political messages and the regulating power of the imperial bureaucracy; included in schoolbooks, they mirror educational practices and reveal the geographical and ethnic landscapes taught at school; placed on a map, they help make sense of the world in times of transition.
Salvatore Liccardo, Ph.D. (2019), University of Vienna, is a postdoctoral researcher and team member of the ERC Synergy Grant HistoGenes. His research covers processes of identity formation, ethnic terminology, and geographical knowledge in late antique and early medieval sources.
“Old Names, New Peoples is a methodologically innovative and intellectually ambitious contribution to the burgeoning field of late antique studies. Liccardo’s approach – focusing not on the historical content of ethnonyms but rather on their textual uses and epistemological implications – is both refreshing and rigorous.” – Marco Cristini, Università degli Studi di Firenze, in: I Quaderni Del m.æ.S. - Journal of Mediæ Ætatis Sodalicium 23/1 (2025), p. 327 [DOI: https://doi.org/10.60923/issn.2533-2325/22836]
Preface
List of Figures
Abbreviations
General Introduction
1 Ethnonyms and Ethnicity: Some Methodological Reflections
2 Ethnonyms: Identifying the Sources
3 Listing Ethnonyms alongside Other Cognitive Processes and Literary Strategies
Part 1: Listing and Declaiming Ethnonyms
Introduction
1 Listing in Late Antiquity
2 Aesthetics of Listing – the Example of Decimus Magnus Ausonius
1 The Laterculus Veronensis
1 The Forgotten Attachment: The Ethnic Catalogues
2 The Gentes of the Far North and West
3 The Gentes of the Rhine
4 The Gentes of the Danube
5 The Non-European Gentes
6 Conclusions: Lexical Adaptations and Ethnic Transformations in Late Antique Gaul
Part 2: Listing and Memorizing Ethnonyms
Introduction
1 Lists for Learning
2 Listing Ethnonyms in Schoolbooks – Vibius Sequester and Lucius Ampelius
2 The Cosmographia of Julius Honorius
1 From a Student, for Future Students
2 Gentes of the Eastern Quarter
3 Gentes of the Western Quarter
4 Gentes of the Northern Quarter
5 Gentes of the Southern Quarter
6 Conclusions: The Educational Value and Political Overtones of Lists of Place Names and Ethnonyms
Part 3: Listing and Locating Ethnonyms
Introduction
1 Conceptualizing and Listing Space
2 And yet it moves. Beyond Lists in Late Antique Geography
3 The Expositio totius mundi et gentium
1 A Curious Author and a Peculiar Guidebook of the Roman World
2 A (Partially) Utopian and (Very Much) Ethnic East
3 A (Mostly) Civic terra Romanorum and the gentes barbarorum at Its Borders
4 Ethnic and Spatial Identities in the Expositio
4 The Tabula Peutingeriana and Its Ethnonyms
1 Introduction
2 The Ethnonyms on the Tabula Peutingeriana: General Aspects
3 Beyond the Rhine: Really a Medieval Addition?
4 Ethnic Double Names
5 A (Relatively) Unimaginative Ethnic Landscape
6 Persae: Explicit and Implicit Traces of a Special Ethnonym
7 Conclusions: Ethnonyms and a Geography of Otherness
General Conclusions
Bibliography
Index
This book will be of particular interest to post-graduate students and researchers that study ethnicity, geography and culture in Late Antiquity.