Alaric - 'Roman Officer'?

[Sean Manning]

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.

But the novelists and political commentators get their ideas from TV personalities and pop books, and the TV personalities and pop books get their ideas from academic books aimed at a broad audience, and the broad academic books draw on carefully written research for specialists. So ideas still ripple outwards from academe to the broader public.

Many of the strange ideas about Achaemenid armies in books and videos by people without a lot of training in ancient history are pretty faithful extrapolations of ideas from academics like W.W. How, Robin Lane Fox, Peter Green, Paul Rahe, VDH, or John Keegan, who in turn got their ideas from stereotypes about the east in pop culture. As academics, we can't say "we had nothing to do with the guys with lambadas on their riot shields" (especially when we specifically boost our friends' books aimed at a large audience and overlook aspects which would cause us to dismiss someone else's book as not scholarly).