Alaric - 'Roman Officer'?

[Robert Vermaat]

But making Alaric into a kind of 'Roman officer' effectively turns the crisis of 408-10 leading up to the Sack of Rome into a Roman civil war. This neatly disposes of the 'problem of the barbarians', which I suspect is kind of Kulikowski's aim here!

Well it was more of a civil war that a barbarian invasion of fur-clad savages intent on plundering an ending an Empire, as we would read in schoolbooks of days long past (I hope). 
Alaric did not want to sack Rome because it was his last piece to play on the board and he knew it. But the civil war of Stilicho vs. the East was how it got him where he ended up in 410. Had Stilicho not wanted to take Illyricum and probably the whole East, Alaric would never have been put in a position where he could exploit the weakness of two Empires with his waxing and waning band of Goths (et al) of which he never was a true leader.

The same would happen 60 years later when the Ostrogoths were sent to Italy - although Alarics Visigoths and Theodoric's Ostrogoths were totally incomparable. One had a warband, the other a tribe.