I guess it’s really a look at Rome at about 350 - 450AD. There’s 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 350-450, 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. ( )

In 410 AD, an army of Goths led by Alaric sacked Rome, an event that shocked the entire Roman world. For centuries, the Goths were painted as the evil villains of history for this. Douglas Boin writes the history of the 410 sacking from the perspective of the Goths and paints a sympathetic portrait of them. He also has lots of critical things to say about the Romans who ridiculed immigrants to the empire and imposed an extremely intolerant form of Christianity on the Empire.

This book is a valuable contribution to the history of the period. Other books describing the mass migrations of people during this period provide little understanding of the people doing the migration. Boin manages to bring the world of the goths to life.

The book is very readable albeit confusing in spots. It also strains to make parallels to our modern world. ( )

Because Roman history really doesn't need modern day sensibilities transposed onto it. ( )

A fairly light read for a book that straddles the line between academic and popular history. The author does the best he can with the very limited number of primary sources about the historic Alaric. It does provide an interesting perspective on the late Roman empire. ( )

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 references to Christian "culture warriors" who lack the "religious tolerance" of the "immigrant" Goths. 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. ( )