Alaric - 'Roman Officer'?

[Sean Manning]

Interesting post - thanks! Muhlberger answers his own question in the two extracts you've quoted, and I think Ward-Perkins would agree entirely - 'civilisation' is not measured by whatever the rich elites are up to, but by the general standard and complexity of daily life available across a wide spectrum of society - clean drinking water, like solid roofs and access to diverse produce and good pottery and literacy and not-too-insane levels of infant mortality, is all a part of that.

Yes, but folks who look at cemeteries or papyri see some costs of Late Roman civilization which Ward-Perkins did not share with the good people of Jaipur. Their view is that when you look at those beautiful bathhouses, you have to imagine the slaves in Egypt worked to death to mine porphyry for the foyer, the soldiers who took out their frustration with the work by robbing and beating anyone they felt like, and the sponsor rocking home towards his villa in a sedan chair and thinking idly about whether he should have that uppity farmer murdered or just bankrupted, and which of the talking tools from his weaving factory he will summon to his bedchamber tonight. They agree that 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.

I referred to the latest round of debate in this post back in January, when I discussed recent books with easily confused titles by Bryan Ward-Perkins and Peter Heather. Both argued that at the beginning of the fifth century, catastrophic military defeat led to cataclysmic civilizational collapse. ... Without being notably pro-barbarian myself, I find this attitude to the fall of Rome, even the notion of a unique fall of Rome, not very productive of true historical understanding. I am much more sympathetic to two other books, Walter Goffart's Barbarian Tides and Chris Wickham's Framing the Early Middle Ages. Two quite different books have one thing in common. They take the attitude that just because a particular style of late Roman imperialism came to an end, the world did not. They are not nostalgic books.

I have a hard time seeing that domestic pottery factory in Gaul as a sinister agent of empire, but 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.

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. When a reviewer accused an economic history of classical Greece of neglecting slavery, one day later one "Morris Silver" demanded that the reviewer prove that people did not voluntarily sell themselves into slavery in Athens "to improve their living standard." In the 19th century American south, that was one of the standard excuses for slavery: "we brought them out of the jungle and let them take part in our fine Christian civilization with iron shackles and cash crops, they should be grateful." So if you are not careful with these arguments, you can accidentally give people a tool for justifying horrible acts.