Dagistheus
Ostrogothic chieftain

Dagistheus (fl. 479) was an Ostrogothic chieftain. The name is Germanic. Theodoric the Great (r. 474–526) sent Dagistheus and Soas as hostages to Adamantius in Epirus in 479. He was presumably a leading Ostrogothic chieftain under Theodoric. The Roman baths in Constantinople were possibly named after him. He may have been an ancestor of the later Byzantine general Dagisthaeus.
References
Sources
Jones, Arnold Hugh Martin; Martindale, John Robert; Morris, J. (1980). The Prosopography of the Later Roman Empire.
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This entry incorporates text from “Dagistheus” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.