Alaric - 'Roman Officer'?

[Nathan Ross]

here is Halsall's take ... the current drama between them and Halsall.

Thanks - I've read Halsall's blog with great interest in the past, but I hadn't seen that post.

There does seem to be a long-running and quite amazingly impassioned beef between certain historians in this field - although I wonder how much of it is powered by the personalities concerned, and their supposed prestige or influence (or lack of it) outside of their immediate academic circle!

I'm only just beginning to read some of the main players, so to speak, but I do suspect that many of their views are not as wildly opposed as some of them might pretend, and there's quite a bit of shouting at straw men going on. Interestingly, one of the best refutals of the 'barbarian invasions brought down the empire' thesis comes from Adrian Goldsworthy, who suggests that the empire collapsed from within, in a process going back to the third century, and small bodies of outside invaders took advantage of the chaos... But as Goldsworthy seems to be considered a 'popular historian' his work is seldom considered in these debates.

its not hard to find the fall of the Roman empire interpreted that way in the wider culture by people who read books?

Oh certainly. But I do wonder whether, even in the widest popular culture, there isn't a vague idea that the old notions of ravaging barbarian hordes are maybe a bit outdated - or perhaps that view is in turn only suggested by populist blowhards who want to 'overturn' such fashionable stuff etc etc?

one problem with the maps with scary arrows is that they often present a 50 year process, which began when the Romans recruited some barbarian soldiers, as a single military campaign

Yes, I agree. Certainly in terms of the Goths and their various movements 378-418: the usual big swooping arrows make them look like one united people, with a plan, perhaps directed by Goth-Command... Ultimately all these big movement maps resemble divisional battle plans from the Franco-Prussian war or something, which was probably around the time they first appeared in historical studies!

But as far as Alaric is concerned, the debate around 'immigration' is superfluous anyway - his army/nation/whatever had its genesis within the Roman empire. Interestingly, I notice that Jerome refers to the men who sacked Rome in 410 as 'a congress of deserters and slaves'.

But this is a long way, I think, from presenting Alaric as a 'normal' Roman general, like Stilicho or Arbogast, leading a normal-for-the-5th-century Roman army, and that the sack of Rome was 'the most genteel of sacks, with all sorts of niceties being observed... and has more the appearance of a troop of soldiers getting a bit out of hand' (as Ralph Mathison puts it, in 'Roma a Gothis Alarico duce capta est', 2013).