Alaric - 'Roman Officer'?

[Nathan Ross]

Yes, I've wondered about their clothing laws as well... Maybe people would make political statements by dressing up?

Perhaps like those circus factions that Procopius (I think) mentions, getting 'Hunnic' hair-dos?

Then again, what do we know about what 5th-century 'barbarians' actually wore? Some kind of leather garment - maybe like the leather jacket-thing recently found at Vindonissa - might not have been too fantastical. And longer-than-usual hair, maybe. We have pictures of 'barbarian' guardsmen in Roman service, but they may not have been wearing the same stuff as a guy who'd just crossed the Danube from Gothia... Or what somebody in Rome thought he might be wearing...

But yes, we're probably missing some important context with the Theodosian Code laws!

But we know that the Goths were not ethnically unified and that many diverse groups were circulating inside and outside the Empire, willing to be employed or leaving after defeat... Stilicho & Arbogast had risen through the ranks and were fully-fledged Roman dignitaries, something Alaric, the rebel from the marshes, would never reach.

Have you read this paper by Guy Halsall? It was his contribution to the Sack of Rome conference in 2010 - I'd wondered why his paper didn't appear in the final published volume, alongside Kulikowsi, Ralph Mathison, Heather, Ward-Perkins etc.

"At no point can we deny that Alaric’s troops were Goths", Halsall writes, and also "there were good reasons why Alaric, Gaïnas and the rest – Stilicho even – could not be just ordinary Roman officers." But also "Alaric and his army were firmly ensconced within the established frameworks of Roman politics."

This seems right to me - Alaric was not a 'Roman soldier', but neither was he a 'barbarian invader' - his troops and his power base were both inside the empire from the start, pretty much. It's a sign of the weakness of the Roman state, and of the Roman army in the west at this point, that Alaric was able to use his (perhaps not too huge) independent army/warrior group to such devastating effect. Clearly he knew what he was doing.

If the sack of Rome only spared those inside chuches, it would have been a bloodbath.

It quite possibly was a bit of a bloodbath, at the beginning at least. The 'sanctuary churches' appear to have been the three major basilicas outside the walls, plus the Lateran - which might suggest that it was just a clever way of clearing the city quickly - but several Christian writers describe Gothic troops beating and raping women, for example, before 'miraculously' realising the error of their ways...

I suspect that the rather cosy gentleman's-club narrative of the 'civilised' Sack of Rome is about due for some major revision; I've seen a couple of papers by younger female historians that take quite a different view!