Attempts at explaining Gothic foundations has often taken us a very long way from the ancient world, and into a discussion of contemporary intellectual history. Observing the way contemporary accounts of Gothic migration, whether they claim to be established by historical, archaeological or linguistic evidence, are all in one way or another echo of Jordanes’ sixth-century Getica. Consciously or not, contemporary narratives of Gothic migration are rooted in the very old quest for Germanic origins, a quest to give northern Europe a past independent from Roman history. Unfortunately, as we have seen, contemporary evidence supports neither migration stories nor any narrative derived from Jordanes. On the contrary, it suggests that — like the Franks and the Alamanni further west along the frontier — the Goths were a commodity of the Roman frontier itself. That outcome not only makes sense in the evidence of the late third century, it also fits in well with the much better-understood evidence of the fourth-century.