Alaric - 'Roman Officer'?

[Nathan Ross]

some costs of Late Roman civilization... slaves in Egypt worked to death... soldiers who took out their frustration... uppity farmer murdered... talking tools from his weaving factory

Yes. But was this unique to 'late' Roman civilisation? Surely these things happened throughout Roman history? So the problem lies with Roman power and culture itself, rather than the late empire per se.

We would have to ask, I suppose, what alternative there was at the time. Was there a society of the 1st-5th centuries that offered something different? Or even  a contemporary culture that could have offered a reasoned critique of Roman mores?

If not, are we not just looking back from our present situation (full of injustice and abuses too) and decrying the immorality of the past?

people in Gaul in 500 CE had draftier houses than people in Gaul in 300 CE, but they are not so sure that they were hungrier or less free.

Perhaps not. I'm not sure how we would measure freedom though. The citizens of northern Gaul who sent envoys to Ravenna to complain of the depredations of their new Alanic overlords presumably didn't feel any freer. And Bagaudae revolts continued in Spain long after the end of Roman rule there - so the oppressed people of Spain didn't seem to rate their new masters any more than the old ones.

Unless we evoke some sort of image of the free barbarian, living at one with nature, paying no tax and obeying no master, which seems as much a product of 19th-century thinking as the idea of the ravaging horde destroying the empire, it seems very difficult to claim that things were necessarily better after Roman control faded and vanished.

[quote="Steve Muhlberger, 'Walther Goffart's Barbarian Tides', 26 October 2006"]Bryan Ward-Perkins and Peter Heather... argued that at the beginning of the fifth century, catastrophic military defeat led to cataclysmic civilizational collapse. ...

I'm only just reading Heather's book at the moment - it's nicely written, although at times very sloppy with small details ('Boniface' was not murdered in the Temple of Memory in Carthage, that was Heraclian! etc). I'm not sure if I can determine his overall thesis as yet - it seems more a straight narrative history (maybe that's the thesis? hmm).

Ward-Perkins, I would say, is not all that concerned with why the empire fell - just that it measurably did. And if identifiable groups or cultures turn up in one place when they apparently used to be in another place, presumably they have moved or 'migrated', and presumably this has both cause and effects. As far as I recall he doesn't build much more of an edifice than that.

I don't think any of this, however, is part of the romantic imagery of "barbarian migration" that Muhlberger mentions in the post you linked. Painting your opponents as 'romantic' is, of course, a way of suggesting they are out of date and terribly deluded!

I also have a hard time hearing an account of the later Roman empire which is just about public works and brave soldiers standing against the barbarians.

Certainly - as there wasn't much in the way of public works after the mid 4th century*, and most of the 'brave soldiers' were barbarians themselves!

[edit * - except walls. Plenty of walls going up in the 4th-5th century. Not all of which can be explained by the stresses of civil conflict...]

The argument that a ruler may be hard, but at least he makes the trains run on time is an old one and it can lead some very dark places.

No doubt. But similarly the romantic image of the 'degenerate' and immoral late empire being vanquished by freedom-loving barbarians is a tool of power as well.

It's interesting that Kulikowski (for one) draws heavily on post-colonial theory - alterity/subalterneity, and so on; interesting, but I had a surfeit of it while trying to read Spivak some years ago! There's recently been (on twitter again) some pushback against post-colonialism from Indian historians working in India itself. I noticed Guy Halsall giving them an approving nod too. It would be interesting to see how a post-post-colonial (!!) interpretation of late antiquity might play out...