ROME S GOTHIC WARS

From the Third Century to Alaric

 

by

 

Michael Kulikowski

 

Cambridge University Press

 

Hardback, 225 pages, $25

ISBN 0-521-84633-2

 

 

Michael Kulikowski does not write history dry as papyrus. Like a good storyteller, he begins with a hook, engages us with a story, and marshals facts, opinion, and theory as if in command of chapters like troops. In Rome s Gothic Wars, he sets the stage with the Gothic general Alaric in August 410 CE, poised with his army to sack Rome while the Emperor dithers far to the north in Ravenna. From there Kulikowski goes back in time to the mid-third century and explores the tumultuous beginning of the end of the Roman Empire by which rivals for the throne tore the empire apart by endless civil wars which, in turn, encouraged incursions on the borders by barbarians, including the Goths. In other words, internal political instability fostered instability on the frontiers. This obvious lesson should not be lost on us, although those currently in power in Washington are so myopic they can t even see the short distance back in time to Vietnam, despite the fact they lived through it.

But back to the Goths Kulikowski explains that the power of barbarians on the frontier was also a direct result of the power of Rome on the frontier. In other words, Roman incursions and abuses across the frontier into barbarian lands worked to make some tribes stronger because by necessity they had to be to defend themselves. And the extension of Roman citizenship to all within the Empire extended power into the provinces where anyone in a position of significant authority could actively imagine seizing the imperial throne if they happened to be in an opportune position to do so. All of this contributed to the constant struggle for power within the empire as well as along is borders, leading to the need to accept, within the empire, barbarians and their leaders as part of Rome s military in order to have sufficient manpower to fight constant wars, which led to further demands for power by barbarian leaders.

Further complicating an already complex situation was Rome s foreign policy of playing off one barbarian leader against another in short, subsidizing one foreign leader to give him an advantage over another. Roman dogma held that all barbarians were dangerous and that it was therefore best to keep them at odds with one another as much as possible. Some things, of course, never change like arming Saddam Hussein to pit Iraq against Iran after the Ayatollah Khomeini overthrew the Shah, then invading Iraq to overthrow Saddam Hussein. The CIA refers to the unintended consequences of this meddling as blowback. For Rome, Goths were blowback.

Kulikowski places the Goths on the Roman frontier to the north of the lower Danube and the Black Sea, and east of the Carpathian Mountains. He rejects the theory of Germanic historians who trace the history of the Goths as migrating out of Scandianavia. This theory, he asserts, arises from the unreliable text Getica, written by Jordanes in the sixth century. Kulikowski argues that Jordanes should be entirely discredited because, as did many ancient historians, he attempted to link the Goths to Biblical, Greek, Roman, and Near Eastern history in a bizarre m lange of material from different sources. This, Kulikowski contends, is nonsense. Therefore, he argues, the one nugget from Jordanes which scholars have clung to must also be dismissed that the Goths crossed from Scandza in three boats over the Baltic Sea and migrated to the lower Danube. Maybe so, maybe not though he scores points with his contention that Jordane s thread of a Germanic trace was sewn into a larger historical context by more modern scholars in German-speaking countries looking for a history they did not have.

In the same way that the myth of the noble savage seemed to be validated by the imagined purity of New World primitives, unbesmirched by European decadence, so too were the ancient Germans fitted into a myth of primitive nobility and moral virtue.

 

In other words, the adoption of Jordanes story was a form of German nationalism which, in its most virulent form, became the Third Reich. Unfortunately, Kulikowski offers no alternative theory of Gothic origins other than to say rather blithely that they were a product of what was happening on the Roman frontier. Of course they were a product of those circumstances but where did they originally come from? This question is left unanswered by Kulikowski, who only says where they did not come from Scandinavia.

This aside, Kulikowski offers a fascinating look at how the internecine warfare among the Romans, and their frequent punitive incursions and treacherous dealings beyond their borders, led to the growing power of the Goths as the internal power of Rome declined eventually leading to one of the worst defeats in Rome s history at Adrianople in 378 CE in which a Gothic force annihilated the Roman army and killed its Emperor, followed by the subsequent attempt to incorporate Goths into the empire, and the rise to power of one of its generals, Alaric, who, when Rome failed to meet his demands, sacked Rome in August 410. As Kulikowski writes about Alaric s assault on Rome:

for three days the violence continued. The great houses of the city were looted and the treasures seized were on a scale that remains staggering: five years later, when Alaric s successor Athaulf married his new bride, he gave her fifty handsome young men dressed in silk, each bearing aloft two very large dishes, one full of gold, the other full of precious nay, priceless gems, which the Goths had seized in the sack of Rome.

 

The trauma was both physical and psychological. For the ancients, the unthinkable had occurred, and the mother of the world had been murdered. A lesson for us? It s so obvious it need not be said.

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