Setting the scene: Claudian's Phrygia

In the spring of ad 399, the highlands of Phrygia saw a sudden and violent uprising by Gothic settlers in the region, under the leadership of a certain Tribigild. These were the survivors of the great Gothic army brought across the Danube by Odotheus thirteen years earlier, whom the emperor Theodosius I, after a decisive victory at the Danube, had settled in Phrygia in dispersed units as laeti, barbarian settlers tied to the soil and liable for military service. With Tribigild's rebellion began the dramatic sequence of events which would lead to the fall of the eunuch Eutropius and the short-lived coup of Gainas at Constantinople in ad 400.

The poet Claudian dedicates the greater part of his second invective against Eutropius to a spectacular and overwrought narrative of the Gothic uprising. The Gothic settlement in Phrygia serves as the occasion for a long geographical excursus on the Phrygians, including a beautiful thumbnail sketch of the topography and mythology of Phrygia. Claudian begins by marking out the cultural boundaries of the Phrygians: to the north lies Bithynia, to the west Ionia, and to the east the Galatians. The Lydians, not fitting neatly into this schema, are located, vaguely, ‘on both sides’; to the south live the ferocious warriors of Pisidia. Claudian then turns to the mythological and natural riches of Phrygia.