active 6th century Jordanes

Jordanes was a 6th-century Eastern Roman writer and historian, active around the middle of the 500s. He is best known for two surviving works: the Getica, a history of the Goths, and the Romana, a concise history of the Roman world.

What makes him especially important is that the Getica preserves material from the now-lost Gothic history of Cassiodorus. Because of that, Jordanes remains a key source for the history of the Goths, even though scholars also read him with care and understand that he was summarizing earlier work.

Very little is known for certain about his life. Sources describe him as connected to the Eastern Roman world and active as a writer later in life, and some accounts identify him as being of Gothic descent or closely tied to Gothic circles. Even with those uncertainties, his writings have had a long afterlife because they offer one of the clearest surviving windows into the meeting of Roman and Gothic history.