Alaric - 'Roman Officer'?

[Nathan Ross]

saying that the old racist and colonialist ideas are behind us is not just wrong but dangerous.

Yes, that's unfortunately true. Although I would suggest that those sustaining and promoting ideas like that are not drawing their inspiration from the likes of Bryan Ward-Perkins or Peter Heather - they care little about the disputes of contemporary liberal academia, or any sort of considered study.

To an extent, of course, the popular view is shaped by the academic one, but I suspect that anyone who thinks that the Roman empire fell because of 'uncontrolled immigration' is more likely to have their view challenged by reading Heather's work (for example) than confirmed by it!

But I also agree that its wrong to excuse or minimize atrocities committed by a disadvantaged group (or blame them on anonymous lower-class 'soldiers').

Quite so. It's this minimisation of atrocity (which often fades into excusing or exonerating the perpetrators, or even blaming the victims) that I find least palatable.

There's an intriguing comment from Isidore of Seville about the AD410 sack of Rome, claiming that Alaric ordered "none of the Romans who would be found in Christ's places would be treated according to the laws of war". We might ask what the 'laws of war' were in the early 5th century... We might also ask what the maximum capacity of the churches of Rome might have been at the time - twenty thousand, perhaps, in total? That leaves a lot of defenceless citizens fully exposed to Gothic 'treatment'...