[darkagebritain] Re: Riothamus
- From: "Daniel Hunt" <Cerwyd@xxxxxxx>
- To: <darkagebritain@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Thu, 3 Apr 2008 10:03:23 -0700
Hi, Dennis
Yes, that's fine - especially as I'm on the losing end of the name argument,
anyway!
But I do have a problem with the notion that Riothamus came from Brittany.
This is only possible if the account is wrong which has him coming by way of
the ocean It has been pointed out before that this could indicate a Breton
chieftain setting sail from Brittany and landing or entering an estuary and
going up a river further north in Gaul. But he supposedly had 12,000 troops
which, even if exaggerated, would suggest to me that had he been in Brittany,
he would have marched this army rather than shipped it.
Of course, the account could be mistaken. If Riothamus were wrongly thought to
be Briton rather than Breton (an easy mistake for a Gaulish chronicler to
make), the comment about him coming across the Channel could be mere
supposition on the part of the chronicler
I don't know if there is any way to resolve this problem, either!
Dan
----- Original Message -----
From: C C<mailto:vaeringjar@xxxxxxxxx>
To: darkagebritain@xxxxxxxxxxxxx<mailto:darkagebritain@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Thursday, April 03, 2008 9:53 AM
Subject: [darkagebritain] Re: Riothamus
--- Daniel Hunt <Cerwyd@xxxxxxx<mailto:Cerwyd@xxxxxxx>> wrote:
> Robert,
>
> You said:
>
> <It's not so much a literal Latin description that I
> mean here, but a
> description of their person and power. Riothamus is
> never described as king
> of Britain, he jjust leads a British army. Vortimer
> on the other hand is
> described (albeit in later sources) as King of the
> Britons.>
>
>
> I'm afraid I must disagree with this. I don't have
> the Latin text at hand (can someone please find this
> for us?), but if memory serves, Jordanes refers to
> Riothamus as 'rex brittonum'. This means,
> unambiguously, 'King of the Britons'. Just as rex
> pictorum (in various annals, etc.) means 'King of
> the Picts'. Such titles were not understood at the
> time as meaning merely a 'British king' or a
> 'Pictish king'. The writers did not mean to convey
> the limited sense of 'King of Britons', i.e. a king
> of some of the Britons, as opposed to a king of all
> of the Britons.
>
> Once again, if Vortimer was King of the Britons at
> the same time Riothamus was King of the Britons, and
> given the shared double-components of their names, I
> maintain there is sufficient grounds for viewing
> these two rulers as the same personage.
>
> Dan
>
Yes, he is referred to by Jordanes, summarizing
Cassiodorus, as the king of the Britons, but that is
the question, exactly what does Jordanes mean here?
Specifically Jordanes wrote, slightly paraphrased,
that Anthemius was seeking the aid of the Britons,
whose king was Riothamus.
We have hashed this about a lot recently, including on
Arthurnet, and I won't rehearse all my postings there
and here, but we have to allow for the possibility
that Brittones in Jordanes refers to Britons settled
in Armorica, though personally I prefer to interpret
Jordanes as meaning that Riothamus had indeed just
arrived from Britain, and even if the other
interpretation is correct, that he was rather king of
Britons in Armorica, they might not have been there
all that long anyway, so in many ways we may even in
that case be dealing with a distinction without much
of a difference. But regardless we have no hard
information about him before his recruitment by
Anthemius and arrival in Berry. I too have floated
this idea he could be the same as Vortimer, but that's
a SWAG and cannot be proved.
And can we stop torturing these names?!? There just is
nothing there ultimately, though since there is so
little evidence it's natural to want to dig wherever
possible, but in this case, as they say in Texas, that
dog just won't hunt. The name Riothamus reappears, as
Chris as pointed out, in later Breton history, and
it's probably just a name. Even if it's not, if it was
chosen for its etymology, if he carried some other
Latin based Roman name and this was added as a Celtic
name, that doesn't even really tell us all that much,
since the one thing we do already know is that he was
a king, or that perhaps he wanted to appeal to his
British subjects by taking a Celtic name. Even that
speculation doesn't buy us much.
If we want to try to fill out his character, I think
the approach I was attempting, working from the bare
facts that he was engaged by the Emperor Anthemius and
was treated with respect by Sidonius to suggest what
you could reasonably attribute to a man of that class
and time who would be acting the part if not the
reality of a late Roman aristocrat. We don't even know
his age, but if we throw out another SWAG, that he was
45 at the time of his engagement in Gaul, then he
still would have been born, if he was in fact born in
Britain, some years after the end of Roman government
there. So one question arises, how "Roman" was he?
Since we know so little about British society in the
fifth century in general, it's hard of course to hope
to know much about an individual.
I am not against trying to speculate about these
figures of 5th century Britain, as long as it's
labeled as such, and I would prefer to call it
"modeling", but based always on what we know about
Roman history. The ultimate results are probably of
little worth, since there are so many variables with
unknown values even starting out, but I think it's not
totally useless to pursue.
Dennis Clark
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