Alaric - 'Roman Officer'?

[Sean Manning]

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!

Yes, I work in Achaemenid studies, the other end of classical antiquity (and in Austria not the UK) so if I wanted to get a handle on the situation, the first thing to do would be to read books by three or so other researchers. I am a little bit uncomfortable seeing scholars call their colleagues "not the sharpest knife in the drawer" in footnotes, it seems that that could do as much to interrupt someone's career as sinister back-room dealings and old boys' networks.

I will say this: a very large minority of the US military sees themselves as Spartans or legionaries standing up against the oriental or barbarian hordes And it does not take much digging to find people who present themselves as defending civilized, Christian Europe against barbarian, Moslem intruders and cite Charles Martel at Tours as a model. Nor people in the wider culture whose interpretations of archaeogenetics sound like something they should be working out in private with a lover rather that in public as a scholarly project. So to me, saying that the old racist and colonialist ideas are behind us is not just wrong but dangerous.

But I also agree that its wrong to excuse or minimize atrocities committed by a disadvantaged group (or blame them on anonymous lower-class 'soldiers'). I have a blog post sketched about how a BBC In Our Time interview talked about Ottoman atrocities in the 16th century without using phrases like "flayed alive" or "contrary to the terms of surrender, the prisoners were all killed."