Alaric - 'Roman Officer'?

[Nathan Ross]

a barbarian invasion of fur-clad savages intent on plundering an ending an Empire

Ha! But does anyone seriously believe that sort of thing nowadays? Even popular historians are very keen to deny the old stereotypes - which doesn't stop the more academic ones having fun with it: Kulikowski, in the lecture above, has a few laughs pretending that he once believed all barbarians resembled Arnold Schwarzenegger...

I do wonder, though - if barbarians did not really have long hair and dress in furs, why do we have laws in the Theodosian code prohibiting people in Rome from wearing their hair long and dressing in 'garments made of skins'? Seems odd to make laws against a literary device...

Alaric did not want to sack Rome because it was his last piece to play on the board and he knew it.

Certainly Alaric himself was a skilled political operator (or just a good extortionist). His reticence in sacking Rome is sometimes presented, I think, as a sort of noble desire to preserve it - like he's more Roman than the Romans or something - which I dont think holds much water. He probably knew that sacking a famine-ridden metropolis of c.800K hungry and desperate people would cause more problems than it solved!

But whatever Alaric's qualms, they need not have been shared by his troops. Many of his men had until recently been slaves of the Romans; many more (30K of them, if we believe Zosimus) had their wives and families massacred by Roman regular troops in 408. His entire army had spent years fighting Romans, attacking Roman towns and fortresses and besieging Roman cities. They owed Rome nothing, had no reason to love it and plenty of reasons to hate it. Any residual ideas that the sack was 'civilised' or 'genteel' need to be thrown out of the window, I think.

his waxing and waning band of Goths (et al) of which he never was a true leader.

I'd agree with the waxing and waning, and the 'et al' - but why was he not their true leader, do you think?