The Vandal aristocracy of fifth-century Africa was quite unlike anything the inhabitants of the region had seen before, but it was still an aristocracy which had adopted more or less recognizable form. While the Vandals kept their distinctive naming patterns, may well have commonly spoken a strange language and perhaps cultivated a sense of shared heritage, they were also acutely aware of the social expectations thrust upon them as a new ruling caste within a Roman province. The most striking feature of our textual sources on Vandal identity is the extent to which it was shaped by existing notions of Romanitas, and particularly by ideals of Roman masculinity. As shall be discussed, this can frequently look like acculturation or the ‘Romanization’ of the Vandals, but this would be a simplification. We can state confidently that the Vandals did not become ‘Romanized’, simply because their own identity developed within a profoundly Roman milieu. ‘Vandal’ identity, as it was understood by Victor and Procopius (and probably by the individuals who professed it) had always assumed strong elements of Roman culture. This is best demonstrated with a series of specific illustrations, which relate either to individuals who are explicitly labelled as ‘Vandals’ by our sources, or who bear recognizably ‘Germanic’ names and might tentatively be regarded as members of the group.
Victor provides us with a first case study, an unnamed individual who is explicitly identified as a Vandal:
There were, at that time, some slaves who belonged to a certain Vandal, one of the Vandals called ‘millenarii’, Martinianus, Saturianus and their true brothers as well as a slave, a noteworthy handmaiden of Christ called Maxima, who was beautiful in both body and heart. And because Martinianus was the one who made his weapons, and was always held in high regard by his lord, while Maxima was mistress over the entire household, the Vandal thought that he would unite Martinianus and Maxima in marriage, in order to make these members of his household more faithful to himself.55
The Vandal’s matchmaking was not a success, and Victor goes on to describe the resistance of the two slaves, their torture at the hands of their master and the eventual death of the persecutor along with most of his family.56 Victor’s principal concern, of course, is to relate the story of the confessors, and consequently he provides relatively little information on the Vandal himself, but what he does provide is telling. First, the social status of the Vandal is evident and is a defining feature of Victor’s account: Victor specifies his rank, which must have been common knowledge. The fact that he was a millenarius probably implies that the Vandal was in the army, and his particular affection for his armourer may also suggest that weapons provided a further mark of social status for him.57 The unfolding story of the persecution reveals that the Vandal lived on his own estate, along with a houseful of family and slaves, above whom he held absolute authority. His only legal deference seems to have been to the king, who supported him in his right to pass authority over his slaves. Following the death of the Vandal and his children, his wife inherited the estate, presumably in keeping with the laws of ad 442.
A second illustration is provided by Fridamal, the recipient of a poem by the Latin writer Luxorius, probably in the 510s or 520s.58 To judge from his name, Fridamal was a Vandal nobleman, and he had recently commissioned a painting of a hunting trip for the decoration of his rural estate:
But, although things that give pleasure have been enclosed in such splendour, and although the beautiful rooms are resplendent with varied artistry, yet must be admired the picture of your brave deed, Fridamal, and the great and glorious feat of slaying a wild boar. Excited by love of your characteristic courage, you set your mind upon picturing your exploits in a worthy setting. Here, drawing back and aiming the spear from behind your back, you are striking the foaming boar straight on its forehead and two-nostrilled face.59
Here we see the Vandal aristocrat in the familiar cultural register of the later empire. His taste for hunting, and his desire to be commemorated in the act of the kill, reflects a pastime which had been common within North Africa long before the arrival of the Vandals. The fact that he chose to have his painting celebrated in Latin elegy simply underlines the classical context in which he was acting. Indeed, in many ways, Fridamal’s layered self-presentation recalls nothing so much as the preVandal hunting mosaics of the villa at Bord Djedid in Carthage. Here, strikingly, we see a Vandal assuming the guise of the Roman aristocracy.
A further illustration of the Vandal aristocratic ideal may be found in two letters, preserved in a sixteenth-century manuscript from Monte Cassino, one a letter from the comes Sigisteus to the presbyter Parthemius, the other Parthemius’ reply.60 Sigisteus’ ethnic identity can inferred from his Germanic name, and the fact that his rank of comes suggests employment in administration or the military, although neither of these assumptions can be made with complete confidence.61 Sigisteus revealed himself to be a generous, if somewhat over-enthusiastic, correspondent: at one point he declares Parthemius to be the equal of the pope in his spiritual stature. Parthemius returned the compliment in terms evidently intended to appeal to the Vandal:
Learned Greece has not produced such a man, nor has great Larissa given birth to such an Achilles, as you, whom Africa, warlike and productive of harvests, has exalted to the stars.62
Evidently this was a popular form of flattery in the North African kingdom: Procopius reports that the Hasding prince Hoamer was also known as the ‘Achilles of the Vandals’ on the strength of his military successes against the Moors.63 Here we see a conflation of ideals, at once classical and militaristic. Sigisteus is a military champion, but in the mould of Achilles, he was a noble warrior who is African, and not barbarian by birth.
These three different perspectives seem to provide contradictory impressions of Vandal identity. Victor’s unnamed Vandal is a violent, persecuting thug, Luxorius’ Fridamal is a slightly rough-edged nobleman with aspirations to the finer things, and Parthemius’ Sigisteus seems like an enthusiastic patron of the church. This apparent shift in Vandal behaviour over the course of the fifth and early sixth century has frequently been explained in terms of acculturation or ‘Romanization’.64 It is assumed that, as the Vandals spent more time rubbing shoulders with wealthy Romano-Africans in the flesh-pots of Carthage, and less time plundering along the Mediterranean coast, they lost their essentially ‘Vandal’ identity, and started to assume many of the trappings of the late Roman aristocracy. Ethnic affiliations were eroded, in other words, in the warm air of Carthage.
This is to misrepresent the way in which the Vandals viewed themselves and were viewed by others. Fridamal and Sigisteus would not have accepted that their behaviour was unbefitting for a Vandal, and may not have regarded themselves as being so very different from the unnamed barbarian of Victor’s account. Victor’s anonymous barbarian derived his status primarily from his military function; we may assume that the same was true of the comes Sigisteus, and Fridamal’s interest in hunting would seem to indicate something similar. Significantly, Fridamal, Sigisteus and the anonymous barbarian all behaved like Vandals, whether fighting, hunting or writing, it is just that Vandal behaviour was often very similar to ‘Roman’ behaviour. If we assume that ‘Vandal’ identity had been thoroughly imbued with the cultural and social associations of Romanitas from its very inception in North Africa, the apparent contradictions between these three noblemen disappear. Roman aristocrats had long marked themselves out by their authority over the household, their literary tastes and (more recently) their patronage of the church, and Vandals were evidently keen to follow this lead. Social standing was a central part of what made a Vandal; what we see here are individuals expressing just that.
This is not to suggest that notions of Vandal identity did not change over the course of the occupation of Carthage. Each generation born within the kingdom would have inherited traditions of ethnic affiliation in different ways; the changing behaviour of the Hasding kings may provide a rough index of this transformation.65 The crucial point is that the appropriation of new forms of cultural expression, or the more widespread appreciation of different manifestations of ‘Vandalic’ behaviour did not represent a compromise or a contradiction. Vandal and Roman aristocracies may well have looked very alike by the end of the reign of Gelimer, but this does not mean that the groups were identical, or that the signs by which they distinguished themselves were unimportant.
The extent to which Vandalic identity was dependent upon Roman norms for its definition is illustrated particularly well by one of the most famous passages relating to the group. Procopius’ explanation for the gradual decay of the Vandals has already appeared once within this book, but it deserves to be repeated in full:
For the Vandals, since the time when they gained possession of Libya, used to indulge in baths, all of them, every day and enjoyed a table abounding in all things, the sweetest and best that the earth and sea produce. And they wore gold very generally, and clothed themselves in the Medic garments, which now they call ‘seric’ and passed their time, thus dressed, in theatres and hippodromes and in other pleasurable pursuits, and in all else in hunting. . . . and they had a great number of banquets and all manner of sexual pleasures were in great vogue among them.66
Procopius includes this passage as an explanation for the rapid demise of the Vandal kingdom in the face of the Byzantine conquest, a point which he develops by stressing the proud resistance of the still-barbaric Moors. The passage itself has been widely cited as an illustration of the widespread ‘Romanization’ of the Vandals, indeed it is almost always interpreted in these terms.67 But Procopius’ intention was not to demonstrate that the Vandals had become more ‘Roman’ during their occupation of North Africa, but rather that they had become less ‘Vandal’. To Procopius, the Vandals had lost an essential part of their identity which had kept their kingdom intact. In order to understand this passage we need to appreciate that lamentations of this kind had been commonplace throughout classical antiquity. Inhabitants of the Mediterranean world had been upbraided for their sexual and sensual excesses, the triviality of their behaviour and their adoption of foreign ‘oriental’ traits since the classical Greek period. In the more recent past, Christian writers like Augustine, Salvian and Quodvultdeus had condemned Roman North African society in precisely these terms, for losing themselves in a sea of delights when moral and physical perils lurked around the corner.68 The luxuries listed by Procopius, in other words, were important not as symbols of Romanitas to which the Vandals aspired, but as markers of inappropriate behaviour which threatened any well-ordered society, whether Vandal or Roman.
A certain school of nineteenth-century scholarship regarded the history of the Vandals as essentially a narrative of decline and decay, of a gradual ‘Romanization’ of a pure Vandal identity.69 The idea that there was ever such a thing as a ‘pure’ Vandal identity has since been universally dismissed, but the concept of Vandal ‘Romanization’ should also be rejected. Roman cultural traits did not in themselves represent a significant challenge to the coherence of Vandal identity, simply because ‘Vandalness’ was not solely expressed in opposition to notions of Romanitas. Indeed, as we have seen, a substantial proportion of the means by which Vandals identified themselves would seem to have been shared with traditional notions of Roman ethnicity. If many prominent Vandals spent a large amount of their time hunting, dining or reciting Latin poetry, this need not have implied a deterioration of their Vandal identity, it simply shows that what it meant to be ‘Vandal’ was strongly imbued with classical ideals.
Procopius’ use of a familiar literary conceit to explain the demise of the Vandals and the survival of the Moors means that the passage cannot be used as evidence for the gradual acculturation of the barbarians. But it is striking that Procopius felt able to explain Vandal decadence in terms which had traditionally been reserved for the societies of the classical Mediterranean. Emasculation of the kind the historian describes would have been abhorrent according to Roman ideals of masculinity, just as much as the Vandal. In seeking to explain how the Vandals had lost their essential ‘Vandalness’ during the fifth and sixth centuries, Procopius vividly highlights the strongly ‘Roman’ ideals around which their identity had been built, and the essentially masculine identity which underpinned all of these social constructions.
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