IN THE DECADES THAT FOLLOWED THEODOSIUS' TREATY OF 382, there is a great deal of evidence for Goths in and around the empire, but remarkably little for those Goths who actually concluded their peace with Theodosius. Indeed, it is very possible that the larger number of these “treaty-Goths” settled down to a life on the land in the Balkan provinces and were never heard from again. Apart from them, however, we still find Ulfila's Goths, the so-called Gothi minores, in the Roman province of Scythia. Elsewhere, a Gothic population seems to have lived in Asia Minor, where a serious rebellion broke out in the year 399 under a commander named Tribigild, who probably made use of Goths who had survived the massacres and police actions of 378–379. Beyond the frontier, many Gothic residents remained, even though the upheavals that had led to the Danube crossing seem to have continued. We do not yet have any evidence for Huns in the immediate vicinity of the Roman frontier – indeed, we first meet a Danubian Hun in 400, when a chieftain named Uldin had some dealings with the government in Constantinople.

Instead of direct Hunnic involvement along the Danube, we see during the 380s and 390s a continuation of the political realignments that had started in 376. Although the details of these changes are almost totally invisible to us until the disintegration of the Hunnic empire in the 450s, several different Gothic groups emerge at that point from the shadow of Hunnic hegemony. This suggests that in the decades between 376 and the mid fifth century, many Gothic leaders – men like the megistanes whom we met in the Passion of St. Saba – retained the authority they had possessed before 376, while others arose to take the place of those who had departed for the empire.