Alaric - 'Roman Officer'?

[Sean Manning]

Would you not say that the grosser manifestations are coming more from the popularity of certain film and TV things ('300', 'Gladiator' etc) than from academia? I can see the link between them, I'm just wondering whether some academics are prone to see a closer relationship than exists in reality.

Nathan, for things to reach audiences in the tens of millions and up, there has to be decades of work by many people preparing the ideological ground. So on one hand blaming anything in the Zack Snyder film on an academic would be like the fox which peed in the Tigris and said it hoped it was not causing a flood downstream, but for that to be a hit there had to be mass market books reaching a hundred thousand to a million, inspired by midlist nonfiction reaching ten thousand, based on monographs reaching a thousand, derived from articles reaching a hundred.

I think academics often play a role in those middle and upper levels of the chain, influencing people with the audiences of a hundred thousand to a million like David Brin, Steven Pressfield, or Tom Holland who inspire the filmmakers and TV directors (or inspire children who will grow up to become filmmakers and TV directors). That does not mean that they control what their audiences do with it, but they do chose to pass on some things and erase others, and they do chose to keep saying things which get certain audiences very excited.

But like I said, I am not an expert on late antiquity, I have just seen the same ugly pattern play out with classicists, medievalists, and economists who all want the world in 1880 to reflect some timeless truth about the special virtues of Europe and Europeans and not the accident that its a shorter sail from Bristol to Halifax than from Shanghai to Los Angeles, and that western Europe happened to be in an aggressive, expansionist mood when the locals figured out how to sail around Africa.