ALARIC THE GOTH
AN OUTSIDER’S HISTORY OF THE FALL OF ROME
DOUGLAS BOIN
Wiley, 254pp, £19.99
Was Christianity, with what Gibbon called its ‘preaching of patience and pusillanimity’, responsible for the fall of Rome? No, says Douglas Boin, the author of a new book about Alaric, the Gothic chieftain who in 410 AD sacked the city. Rome’s duplicitous rulers, he says, had only themselves to blame. Enfeebled by luxury and dissipation, yet still fancying themselves a superior race, the arrogant heirs of Macaulay’s ‘brave Horatius’ looked down on virile mercenaries like Alaric who manned their armies. Even worse, they tried to short-change them – and got their just desserts.
Unfortunately for Boin, details of Alaric’s life are, Boin admits, ‘frustratingly thin: whole decades of his existence have simply vanished’. And although, said Patrick Kidd in the Times, ‘he knits the strands together with a vibrant writing style’, his narrative lacks balance. ‘Alaric’s side is entirely noble and reasonable, the Romans are “rabid xenophobes”.’ The result is ‘a parable for our intolerant age’, in which “Goth Lives Matter” and “Rome Must Fall”.’
The Literary Review’s Peter Parker agreed that at the core of
Boin’s book is the ‘ambivalent relationship’ Rome had with the ‘outsiders’ on whom it had come to rely. These outsiders felt they deserved Roman citizenship. The Roman establishment ‘feared that
romanitas, the essential core of what it meant to be Roman’, would be contaminated if the outsiders’ wish was granted. So although most of Alaric’s life is irrecoverable, Boin successfully explains how he ‘became the embodiment of Rome’s selfdefeating fear of the world outside its frontiers’.