Alaric - 'Roman Officer'?

[Sean Manning]

some distinguished Late Antique historians use "uncontrolled immigration" to market their books. 

This is often mentioned (by other historians complaining about it), but I haven't come across many actual claims of this sort recently; it seems to be a bit of a chimera, but perhaps I haven't read widely enough into the subject.

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Who are you thinking of?

I don't know! The main Late Antique specialists I follow are Steve Muhlberger and Guy Halsall who both seem concerned about the way this period is used (here is Halsall's take), I would like to read more auf Deutsch by Roland Steinacher. I would certainly want to read the books by Heather and Ward-Perkins before I took a side in the current drama between them and Halsall.

But given the way widely cited (and even more widely read) writers talk about the Achaemenid empire, I don't have trouble believing the claim: vague ideas about Mongols, Zulus, or Turks, and 19th century stereotypes about the orient, have a lot of influence on how researchers talk about Achaemenid armies.

I hope we can agree that its not hard to find the fall of the Roman empire interpreted that way in the wider culture by people who read books? I think I could find examples but I would have to read people who I really don't want to read.

Guy Halsall can still find quotes from recent scholarly books about the legions leaving Britain to "shore up a crumbling continental empire"

That's from Worlds of Arthur, isn't it? From what I can see (I've just had a look at the notes at the back of the book and checked!) it seems to be from a 2003 essay on vernacular Latin by A. Orchard - that Halsall had to dig that far to find something suitably unreconstructed suggests that these views might not be all that common nowadays after all!

Well, something 10 years old by a youngish University of Toronto professor does not seem that obscure to me ... in Achaemenid army studies a lot goes back to folks like Eduard Meyer before WW I. But I have found that when Halsall gets indignant about "this has been demonstrated again and again" its wise to check his footnotes, because sometimes they don't say what they say he says

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Also, I think that 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 like Timur raiding Anatolia and Syria in 1400-1402. And they imply that the 'nation' existed from the start and was a whole nation, and overlook the chance that the generals, at least early on, were trying as hard as possible to be Christians and Romans because that was where the respect and power were located.