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erikajay's review
3.0
Boin gives us a well written account of the Goths living under Roman law. The book does a good job of keeping the narrative told from the Goths’ perspective, depicting them as refugees searching for a place they can truly call home. Boin also does a good job of discussing the bias and shortcomings of the sources that he uses - usually these sources are written by Romans much later.
This book is somewhat anticlimactic though. This book is leading up to a significant event - the 410 sack of Rome - but we actually get very little information about that. Just a couple pages. We also get very little detail about the attacks on the Roman countryside leading up to 410, even though Boin admits that there is plenty of evidence about those attacks. This book is very short, but I think it would benefit from a couple more chapters.
As another reviewer mentioned, this should’ve been called something like “The Goths - an outside perspective of the Roman Empire”. A lot of the information about Alaric, especially his early life, is speculative and based on generalized accounts of the time. Due to the lack of sources, this makes sense, but then the focus of this book isn’t really Alaric. It is all Goths living in the Roman Empire at this time.
This book is somewhat anticlimactic though. This book is leading up to a significant event - the 410 sack of Rome - but we actually get very little information about that. Just a couple pages. We also get very little detail about the attacks on the Roman countryside leading up to 410, even though Boin admits that there is plenty of evidence about those attacks. This book is very short, but I think it would benefit from a couple more chapters.
As another reviewer mentioned, this should’ve been called something like “The Goths - an outside perspective of the Roman Empire”. A lot of the information about Alaric, especially his early life, is speculative and based on generalized accounts of the time. Due to the lack of sources, this makes sense, but then the focus of this book isn’t really Alaric. It is all Goths living in the Roman Empire at this time.
jdintr's review
4.0
Pro: this book is packed with facts and fascinating insights about the waning century of the Roman Empire. Boin had a lot to share about the culture of the Goths on the northern side of the Danube and their struggle for safety and recognition within the Roman Empire.
Con: there just isn't a lot about Alaric in the book--just a lot about outsiders. Granted, Alaric employed no chroniclers, and most sources on his life and infamous sack of Rome in 410 comes from aggrieved Roman sources. Alaric also died soon after the sack, before it probably occurred to him that he needed to leave a legacy.
What we are left with is a birds-eye view of Alaric's life (about a chapter's worth) but a clear view of an out-of-sync empire that veered from the extremes of Christian hegemony to tolerance, from fear and prejudice toward immigrants to embraced and enfranchisement, from West to East and back again.
I really enjoyed this book. I listened to it the first time, but I kept missing key facts, so I read the book. It will be a valuable addition to my library.
Con: there just isn't a lot about Alaric in the book--just a lot about outsiders. Granted, Alaric employed no chroniclers, and most sources on his life and infamous sack of Rome in 410 comes from aggrieved Roman sources. Alaric also died soon after the sack, before it probably occurred to him that he needed to leave a legacy.
What we are left with is a birds-eye view of Alaric's life (about a chapter's worth) but a clear view of an out-of-sync empire that veered from the extremes of Christian hegemony to tolerance, from fear and prejudice toward immigrants to embraced and enfranchisement, from West to East and back again.
I really enjoyed this book. I listened to it the first time, but I kept missing key facts, so I read the book. It will be a valuable addition to my library.
mkw's review against another edition
informative
medium-paced
1.0
So many this could've happened, but wait not that couldn't have happened. Just like the thinnest of histories. I do, however, know more about Rome than I did before.
htreat's review
3.0
This was a good book, but with so much unknown about Alaric's life, there is a lot of conjecture. Also, nothing was revolutionary. But it's well written and interesting.
hettym's review against another edition
informative
reflective
slow-paced
2.5
not a well organized or cohesive book, even if i agreed with the point the author was trying to make about the mainstream historical narrative surrounding the goths. somehow all over the place and boring at the same time.
siria's review
3.0
This is very loosely a biographic sketch of Alaric, the leader of the Goths who led the Sack of Rome in 410, the first breach of the Eternal City's walls in roughly 800 years. There simply aren't the sources about Alaric to produce the kind of biography we've come to expect from more modern figures—even by the standards of the ancient world—so Douglas Boin mines textual, artistic, and archaeological evidence to produce a portrait of the world in which Alaric lived and thus outline the kind of person he might have been. Boin squeezes as much evidence as he can from the source base, and in the kind of accessible prose that would make this a good microhistory to hand to someone new to the history of the later Roman Empire.
However, I kept finding myself tripping over some of Boin's framing choices which show his analysis is (unthinkingly?) rooted in a modern U.S. American perspective. Whether you see it as coming from an intense desire to claim a relevance for the deep past, personal convictions, or an impish desire to needle, Boin's refers to Christian "culture warriors" who lack the "religious tolerance" of the "immigrant" Goths, while discussions of the Roman border along the Rhine and Danube prompt Boin to write about the "border patrol", "border separation", and wealthy Romans pulling back to live in "gated communities." Boin never makes any comparison to the present-day U.S. overtly but at times I wished he had. If you're going to be provocative, you might as well provoke—and if you're going to use the problems of an ancient imperial hegemon to throw light on those of a modern one, you might as well be up front about that.
However, I kept finding myself tripping over some of Boin's framing choices which show his analysis is (unthinkingly?) rooted in a modern U.S. American perspective. Whether you see it as coming from an intense desire to claim a relevance for the deep past, personal convictions, or an impish desire to needle, Boin's refers to Christian "culture warriors" who lack the "religious tolerance" of the "immigrant" Goths, while discussions of the Roman border along the Rhine and Danube prompt Boin to write about the "border patrol", "border separation", and wealthy Romans pulling back to live in "gated communities." Boin never makes any comparison to the present-day U.S. overtly but at times I wished he had. If you're going to be provocative, you might as well provoke—and if you're going to use the problems of an ancient imperial hegemon to throw light on those of a modern one, you might as well be up front about that.