Ethnographic discourse did not merely describe society: it attempted to order and reorder it. This reordering succeeded in creating something different from ethnicity: political opportunities that vanished as soon as they appeared. The many uses of ethnographic discourse in fifth- and sixth-century Italy evolved over periods of time, and conflicted with each other and with non-ethnographic ways of imagining community. The words “Goth” and “Roman,” redefinable as they were, could never fully describe or reorder a society far more complex than a division into two groups. Although some people attempted to fit themselves into the historically received categories of Goth and Roman in different ways at different times, in the end neither of these categories succeeded in constructing a meaningful or permanent community. Rather, they succeeded in changing individual behavior briefly, introducing new routes to political power for the ambitious, and destroying the lives of those who could not take advantage of them.

In Ostrogothic Italy, the words of the powerful weighed heavily on people's necks. Ideology did not float away, unnoticed, into the air. Everyone was surrounded by the marks and pressures of officialdom, the demands of the priest, the magistrate, the tax collector and the general. A lengthy ceremony surrounded even the request to enter the judge's office to present a petition. At the end of a case judged in his favor, a relieved curialis said “limitless thanks” and the court notary duly set down his words in the record.