Get Started On Alaric The Goth: An Outsiders History Of The Fall Of Rome Constructed By Douglas Boin Presented As Paper Edition

story of Alaric the Goth is more than the traditional view of a barbarian who sacked the glorious city of Rome inthat history has given him.
In his exploration of Alaric's world and story, Boin draws the picture of a child of the borderlands, a Christian who is held separately from the Christians of Rome, a man who takes an opportunity to fight for the Roman Empire, but who is denied any opportunity at citizenship, and one whose charisma and strength ultimately makes him the leader who finds a home for a people without a land of their own.


As seen in his earlier book, Coming out Christian in the Roman World, Boin has a talent for drawing parallels between the ancient and modern worlds, both in his exploration of the themes of history and in his description of everyday life.
It sound cliche to say that Boin's work makes the ancient world come alive, but it kind of does instead of just a world of emperors, wars, and monuments, we enter a world of families, writers, tourists, restaurants, politicians, the powerful, and the powerless.


As a historian, Boin had his work cut out for him in finding sources on Alaric and his life, which aren't well represented in existing primary sources.
Instead he gives us a picture of Alaric informed by poetry, archaeology, early Christian writings, partisan histories, and sometimes conjecture, The reader benefits from Boin's thoughtful reading of these sources, and he walks us through the biases, context, traditional readings, and new interpretations of the texts,

Boin is a very readable storyteller and this book should appeal both to historians and to general readers of ancient history, the Roman Empire, and early Christianity.
Highly recommended. I thoroughly enjoyed this book, There is not much information around about Alaric, The author has taken each nugget that there is, let's switch metaphors and say picked up a twig and built a nest around that twig, Each twig becomes a discussion/context of what was happening in Rome, who was doing what, and so building a story of Alaric, I liked the details, the various historical figures, the religious machinations, Several descriptions of fanatical Christians resonated with what we're dealing with today, When fanatics rule, chaos is not far off, I guess its really a look at Rome at aboutAD, Theres not much good historical info about Alaric himself, so the author tries to fill in without actually making stuff up, I learned many things about Roman life at that time, but I think a good historian, had they worked on a history of Rome from, could have come up with something a little more solid.
By trying to focus on Alaric, about whom so little can be known, something was lost, But still the book was very educational, Is this an unserious book, or a very serious book with very serious problems I strongly suspect the latter, since Boin is talented, I wanted to like this book and could not, though it isnt without merit,

Note that this isnt much of a biography, If youre under the impression that youre going to

learn about Alaric spent his youth, for example, youre mistaken, Thats not a flaw, because we know precious little about Alaric and no one could write that book, I wasnt bothered by this, since Boin makes clear that his goal is to examine the lives of “marginalized people too often invisible in our history books,” and he used Alaric as the lens to sharpen his focus.
So Alaric is the frame around which the book hangs, and not the subject per se,

What didnt I like, then Well, if you set out to write a book that takes the least favorable view to the Romans of evidence in every possible instance, itd look something like this.


In the modern world, we have a good deal of trouble dealing with large waves of refugees and migrants see Syria/Europe, US southern border, etc.
. It seems odd to expect more from the Romans who, despite their sophistication, lived in a world of razorthin, preindustrial margins of value and calorie extraction, miserable means of communication, and glacial transport systems.
What's more, their world saw warfare as a zerosum game, with victors likely to reap huge windfalls, Conquered cities and towns provided the victors with ready wealth and slaves fuel that powered the engines of imperialism to be sure, but Its not as though the peoples on the other side of the frontier obeyed different laws of war.
They did not. The decision to let large groups of armed and justthissideofdesperate foreigners cross into your lands was fraught with danger, and the possibility of things going sideways for whatever reason was high.


The Romans were deeply flawed, but I'm unaware of an ancient society that lived up to Boins standards, I suppose the subtext here is a commentary on modern geopolitics, but if so, it feels amateurish and heavyhanded,

I havent spent this much time thinking about a book in ages and Im sure I could find more to say, Instead, Ill say that if you like thinking about how history is written, this book will give you lots to think about, I dont generally recommend it,
A wonderful work of science, If you don't believe me, just ask Boin for his hundreds of hours of filmed interviews with the participants of those misreported events, Only the most subtle readers will pick up on this Alaric the Goth's allusions to current events,.rounded up You don't have to convince me to not be racist or cruel today by bizarrely calling migrating tribes "immigrants," or wistfully imagining an eternal, multiethnic Rome that might have been.
Was looking for a genuinely new understanding of Late Antiquity, a sort of anthropology of perspective amp the Gothic consciousness, Instead, basically an uninteresting political tract grounded in anachronism and factually untrue nonsense, This was a very good introduction to the fall of Rome and The outsiders, specifically Alaric, that just wanted acceptance and inclusion into the Roman empire and the consequences when that didn't happen.
There were parallels that appeared deliberate between then and now, This was highly readable and entertaining but lacked some depth, I hope to read more about the subject matter in the future,
Thank you to the publisher for providing me with this arc available through edelweiss, Excellent look at a controversial figure in Roman history with a lot of parallels to today's increasingly partisan and polarized society,

Boin uses the few scraps of historical accounts that exist to paint a picture of Alaric the Goth, a Gothic foreigner desperate for citizenship after years of service to the empire, against the backdrop of wild xenophobia within the Roman Empire under Emperor Theodosius and his sons.


After multiple attempts at citizenship via negotiations with multiple Roman decision makers, Alaric sacks the city of Rome with a group of his Gothic compatriots, bucking against the nativist, antiforeigner sentiment pervading the Roman Empire at the time.


A quick read, it would be five if Boin was able to paint more of a picture of the fatefulhours of the sack of Rome in.
It felt a little anticlimactic to get towards the end of the book leading up to the actual attack only to walk away without a good picture of what exactly happened.


It's not really Boin's fault the archaeological record is hazy and has been somewhat politicized, making a precise retelling difficult, if not impossible, Boin does the best he can with the source material, and is transparent about this, This is very loosely a biographic sketch of Alaric, the leader of the Goths who led the Sack of Rome in, the first breach of the Eternal City's walls in roughlyyears.
There simply aren't the sources about Alaric to produce the kind of biography we've come to expect from more modern figureseven by the standards of the ancient worldso 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 presentday U, S. overtly but at times I wished he had, If you're going to be provocative, you might as well provokeand 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.
A good example of what happens when an author's agenda gets in front of his historical acumen,
There is a staggering amount of anachronism, clumsily transplanting identity politics into the ancient Mediterranean world which has been so famously documented time and again to have been one of the most open and accessible societies in history.
So, in my opinion much of what Boin achieves is tainted by politically correct secular moralism in order to sell books and I won't even go into the shameless pandering to a modern audience complete with thinly drawn analogies to present day America.

The book is also extensively antiChristian to the point of being a screed at times, Sobering only in the fact that it got published, full of the author's speculations and at points utterly devoid of historical discipline, it remains like the broken clock accurate in rare moments that give evidence of a better book that might have been if only the author could have put aside his manifest prejudices.

Boin rarely misses a chance to play the "worst possible assessment of a person's character" card in his never ending psychological and moral analysis of his subjects, particularly if they were Christian, Roman, or both.
The result is a book that could have been wonderfully insightful, written by a talented author who was unafraid to be unconventional, that at the end of the day caved to every current leftist trope.

It is the height of irony that Boin, in his flawed heavy handed interpretation of history becomes twice the zealot he finds in the much maligned Theodosius.
Such is the blindness of the bigot and the fool, This is the worst kind of history in my opinion, I understand Boin wants to make the work accessible to a more popular audience but he is dumbing the topic down and painting in the broadest of strokes.
What disturbs me most is his lack of references, which makes it unclear where he is using his source material and where he is embellishing, This is especially important because this work has a great deal of fiction in it as the author prioritized telling an interesting story over dry fact based history.
He frequently inserts a level of detail that is clearly meant to add a bit of color to a scene, but you would think Boin was an eyewitness based on some passages.


The fact is there isn't enough surviving material for a book on Alaric, Boin thus accepts thin and frankly untrustworthy evidence at face value that other historians have rightfully questioned and in some cases rejected, This is largely a writing around the topic project to make up for the fact that he doesn't have enough evidence for a biography, Stigmatized and relegated to the margins of Roman society, the Goths were violent “barbarians” who destroyed “civilization,” at least in the conventional story of Romes collapse, But a slight shift of perspective brings their history, and ours, shockingly alive,


Alaric grew up near the river border that separated Gothic territory from Roman, He survived a border policy that separated migrant children from their parents, and he was denied benefits he likely expected from military service, Romans were deeply conflicted over who should enjoy the privileges of citizenship, They wanted to buttress their global power, but were insecure about Roman identity they depended on foreign goods, but scoffed at and denied foreigners their own voices and humanity.
In stark contrast to the rising bigotry, intolerance, and zealotry among Romans during Alarics lifetime, the Goths, as practicing Christians, valued religious pluralism and tolerance, The marginalized Goths, marked by history as frightening harbingers of destruction and of the Dark Ages, preserved virtues of the ancient world that we take for granted,


The three nights of riots Alaric and the Goths brought to the capital struck fear into the hearts of the powerful, but the riots were not without cause.
Combining vivid storytelling and historical analysis, Douglas Boin reveals the Goths complex and fascinating legacy in shaping our world, .