Goths Through the Ages

The many faces of the Gothic (from the fall of Rome to the present), and some thoughts on the evolution of language.

Detail from the Ludovisi Battle sarcophagus, depicting a battle between Romans and Goths. Artist unknown, ca. 250-260 A.D. Via Wikimedia Commons.

The word “goth” conjures a variety of images in one’s head: dark, dramatic makeup, black clothing, perhaps a listless melancholy. I’m particularly fascinated by the manner in which words can transform over time, and “goth” is a quintessential example. The Gothic is a shape-shifter, at once the vanquisher of Rome and the ornate style of a towering cathedral, a 19th century poet and a 1980s musician. 

But long before The Cure gave us “Just Like Heaven” and “Boys Don’t Cry,” the Goths were a source of genuine terror, and they played an instrumental role in the fall of the Western Roman Empire in 410 A.D. (The Eastern half of the empire, what historians today call the Byzantine Empire, would soldier on for another thousand years before the Ottomans conquered it in the 1400s.) The Visigoths and Ostrogoths were Germanic tribes who terrorized the Ro…