23 of 24 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
You'll learn a lot from it if it doesn't put you to sleep..., May 2, 2008
`Romans and Barbarians' is, to sum it up in a sentence, a summary of Western Europe's history from the 5th to the 8th Centuries AD. Mr. Thompson present an incredible amount of information in this clearly very well-researched book. My only reason for giving it four stars instead of five is that this is very possibly the most boring book on the barbarians I have ever read, yet this is one of the most exciting moments in Western history. I actually fell asleep reading this one a couple times, which I never do.
This is a new paperback edition of this book, which was originally published in hardcover in the UK. The author is E. A. Thompson (1914-1994), who was a professor of classics at the University of Nottingham in England 1948-1979. He wrote a number of other books on the Romans and barbarians in his life, but this one was the most popular. He was summed up by R. A. Markus in the Journal of Roman Studies as `one of the pioneers of the revival in the study of Late Antiquity'.
The introduction to this book is a combination of a condensed history of the earlier Roman-barbarian relations and a summary of the book's scope and content. Several pages of the intro are devoted to the three major forms of contact between Roman and barbarian-warfare, economics, and barbarian movements and migrations.
The first chapter, `The Settlement of Barbarians in Southern Gaul' begins in the year AD 418 and a look at the Germanic and Sarmatian groups traveling (or rampaging) through Gaul and Spain at the time. The second chapter is a summarized history of the earlier Visigoths up to their permanent settlement in Spain, and the third is already looking at the nominal date of the fall of the Western Empire, 476.
From the fourth chapter on to the twelfth and final one, most of this book concerns either the wars between the Eastern Roman Empire and the Goths, or events in Spain in the 5th and 6th Centuries. Three whole chapters are about the barbarian conquest of Spain, and one is exclusively about the Suevic Kingdom of Galicia. Another chapter is devoted to the fall of Noricum, one of Rome's final holdings in the West at the close of the 5th Century, and from which our last epigraphic evidence of Western Roman soldiers comes. On a personal level these chapters were some of the most enlightening for me; the barbarians in Spain, especially the Suevi, fail to receive as much attention as the Vandals and Ostrogoths of the 6th Century.
The barbarian settlement in Britain is dwelt with, but in little detail in comparison to other books. Two other chapters of note concern, respectively, the Italian outlook on the `Byzantine' conquest of Italy under Belisarius in the 6th Century, and the barbarians of the entire period who collaborated with Rome, and often accepted Christianity. Numerous examples of both barbarians who took up Roman ways and also bizarre cases of that going the opposite direction are mentioned in this final chapter. Useful also is the small essay on the Bacaudae at the close of the book, and the comprehensive list of ancient sources.
In short, if you are looking for a scholarly examination of the Western Roman and Early Byzantine Empires' associations, both friendly and not so friendly, with the Goths, Sueves, and Vandals 418-c. 700, this will be a good book for you-just don't buy it expecting to be entertained.
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3.0 out of 5 stars
Sheds light on a Dark Age, May 3, 2011
We don't know a lot for sure about what really happened in the darkest parts of the Dark Ages. Thompson tries to figure out just what's going on politically in the 5th and 6th centuries, as clearly Roman government transitions to clearly barbarian successor states, but how and why exactly? Concentrates on the settlement of Visigoths and Burgundians in Gaul, formal relations between Constantinople and various Germans in Italy, disappearance of Roman authority in Noricum (Lower Austria, more or less), and the Sueves in Galicia (NW Spain). The different sections feel very much as if they were written separately, and then shoved together between one pair of covers with only a little bit of cross-referencing. Not an explicitly Marxist interpretation, but Thompson does tend to frame his questions in terms of political struggle and class conflict over economic interests and ownership of land.
In places (Noricum and Galicia especially), Thompson has only the skimpiest of documentary sources to work from, and sometimes I think he works those skimpy sources a little too hard. For example, he bases a major step in his model of dwindling imperial authority in Hispania on the fact that Hydatius calls such-and-such a Roman "dux militum" ('leader of soldiers') instead of "magister militum" ('master of soldiers', the official title). But Hydatius was a backcountry bishop in the remotest, most isolated province in the west, as Thompson emphasizes several times (and mocks him for spelling "Theoderic" six different ways to boot); I wouldn't want to depend too much on his precise use of military titles.
This kind of over-reaching and a little too much intrusion of the first-person pronoun, especially in constructions like "I really can't understand where $another_historian gets his idea from," weaken what's otherwise an excellent work on a very interesting, very difficult period. Don't read this book alone. (Meaning, compare and contrast it with other books, not that it's so dangerous you need a friend with you.)
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0 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Decent Survey of Barbarians in Western Europe, August 19, 2008
This book is a collection of essays on the relationship between the Romans and barbarians at the end of the Western empire. In the first chapter, he discusses the economic relationship between the Romans and the barbarians. In the subsequent chapters he investigates these two groups' relationship with each other in various parts of the empire, focusing on the end of Roman rule. He comments on Gaul, Italy, and Spain, and briefly looks at Britain.
Though Thompson's survey of the Western empire was informative and impressive, I could not help but wonder what the state of North Africa was. It is not entirely fair to criticize an author for matters neglected in a book. After all, no book is comprehensive. It seems, however, that a chapter on the decline of Roman influence in Latin Africa would enhance the work.
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