The barbarians were literally at the gates.
Alaric the Visigoth, at the head of an army of more than 20,000 men, had been rampaging through Roman territory for almost a decade by the time he resolved to take the city of Rome in the year 410. The emperor of the West, Honorius, safely ensconced in his fortress in Ravenna, had kept the Visigoth hordes at bay by paying them off — thousands of pounds of gold to stay in the outer provinces and leave Italy alone. But now Alaric was outside the city, threatening to starve the people of the Eternal City until they surrendered.
The Roman Senate made feeble threats, telling Alaric that the Romans would fight. According to the Roman historian Zosimus, this was the Visigoth’s reply:
When Alaric heard that the people were trained and ready to fight, he said that thicker grass was easier to mow than thinner and laughed broadly at the ambassadors, but when they turned to discuss peace he used expressions excessive even for an arrogant barbarian: he declared that he would not give up the siege unless he got all the gold and silver in the city, as well as all movable property and the barbarian slaves. When one of the ambassadors asked what he would leave for the citizens if he took these, he replied: 'Their lives.'
The Romans paid up, parting with an exorbitant sum: 5,000 pounds of gold, 30,000 pounds of silver, thousands of silk garments, and 3,000 pounds of pepper. But this only delayed the inevitable. The barbarians returned on August 24, 410, and sacked the city of Rome; Alaric’s troops looted and pillaged for three days, stripping the city of whatever wealth they hadn’t already extracted.
St. Jerome lamented: "My voice sticks in my throat, and, as I dictate, sobs choke me. The city which had taken the whole world was itself taken."
This, the traditional story of Alaric’s sack of Rome, is almost always presented from the Roman point of view. The civilized but weakened Romans faced off against the savage, alien barbarians. An empire that had represented culture, refinement, and power for centuries fell before a bunch of illiterate tribesmen.
But the reality was more complicated than that. Alaric had fought bravely in the Roman army as a younger man, as many barbarians had. Indeed, much of the defense of Rome against barbarian invasions was carried out by other barbarians. As a commander of Gothic forces, Alaric helped the emperor Theodosius crush his rivals for the throne. He no doubt noted that Theodosius’ strategy in the most brutal battles was to put the Goths on the front lines and use them as cannon fodder.
After Theodosius died, Alaric split with the Romans, fighting for much of the next decade against the top Roman general, Stilicho — who often wielded more power than the emperors he served. Stilicho, the defender of Rome against the barbarians, was himself half-Vandal.
What did Alaric want? Why was he driven to attack Rome? He seemed to most desire an honorable settlement for his Visigoths within the Roman Empire. Alaric didn’t want to destroy Rome; he wanted to be a power player within it.
The sack of Rome wasn’t a triumph for him — according to historian Michael Kulikowski:
[F]or Alaric the sack of Rome was an admission of defeat, a catastrophic failure. Everything he had hoped for, had fought for over the course of a decade and a half, went up in flames with the capital of the ancient world. Imperial office, a legitimate place for himself and his followers inside the empire, these were now forever out of reach. He might seize what he wanted, as he had seized Rome, but he would never be given it by right. The sack of Rome solved nothing and when the looting was over Alaric's men still had nowhere to live and fewer future prospects than ever before.
Alaric’s story shows us that the category of “barbarian” — often used by the Greeks and Romans to describe (and demean) foreigners — is more complicated than it might seem on the surface.
We have the word “barbarian” thanks to the Greeks, who sometimes called non-Greeks “barbaroi.” The word may come from the way the Greeks thought these people’s languages sounded — a stream of gibberish, “bar-bar-bar-bar,” in contrast to the elegant Greek tongue.
The concept of the barbarian comes from Greek arrogance — they thought their culture was more elevated and honorable than others— and a desire for identity. For much of the ancient period, Greece wasn’t politically united, so Greeks focused on their cultural unity. And what better way to find points of agreement than to identify an other?
During the classical age, the barbarians that Greeks most wanted to distance themselves from lived to the east, especially in the Persian Empire. The Persians were worthy of admiration at times — their empire was quite powerful — but fundamentally different from the Greeks. I wrote a whole post a while back about Greek and Persian depictions of each other, so I won’t repeat myself too much here, but I do think it’s worth taking a look at a couple of Greek depictions of barbarians.
First, here’s a pretty typical Greek representation of a barbarian:
There are a couple of little details here that would immediately mark this man as a barbarian, including his appointed cap and his trousers — manly Greek men never wore pants.
But often Greek artists used mythological beings to represent barbarians’ otherness. Sometimes, they used the Amazons as a stand-in for barbarians. Sometimes, they used half-human creatures like centaurs, as on this Parthenon relief, created after the Greek victories over the Persians:
Sometimes, the Greeks would put the barbarians and the Amazons in the same scene, as in this sculpture of an Amazon trampling a barbarian and a Greek (this is a Roman copy of a Greek work):
One of the later Greek depictions of a barbarian — the “Dying Gaul,” carved during the Hellenistic period in the 200s BCE, is the most evocative.
This wounded soldier can be identified as a Gaul because of his metal neck ring and facial hair.
By the way, this man isn’t just naked because the Greeks often sculpted people in the buff. Gauls were famous for fighting naked — a sign of “barbarian boastfulness,” according to Dionysius of Halicarnassus.
We have many more representations of barbarians from the Romans than we do from the Greeks. The Roman relationship with barbarians was even more complicated than the Greek one — after all, the Romans were not just often at war with foreigners, they conquered them and incorporated them into the empire. Many groups of people who had been barbarians became Roman.
Nevertheless, Romans did distinguish between barbarian and Roman in their art. Sometimes they showed this with simple distinctions in clothing, as the Greeks did. This statue is clearly a barbarian, despite missing its head, because of its pants-and-tunic combination:
Here’s another example; note the Phrygian cap, which also marks him as foreign, probably eastern:
You could often tell barbarian men by their facial hair, which contrasted with more clean-shaven or trimmed Romans.
Romans associated Germans, especially, with wilder hair.
Images of barbarian women were rare, but can similarly be identified by their hairstyles, which are less-kempt than the Romans’:
One of the most interesting ways in which the Romans distinguished between barbarian and Roman subjects was with the type of marble they used. Multicolored marbles — which usually came from outside of Italy — were generally reserved for non-Italian subjects. I think these polychrome sculptures are quite striking.
Here’s a defeated captive from the east:
Here’s another barbarian prisoner:
And a kneeling captive:
You may have noticed a couple of things about the statues above. First, they’ve got an air of nobility to them. The Romans seemed to want to view barbarians as impressive warriors — brave, strong, and honorable. This made the Romans’ conquest of them even more impressive. Second, they’re all captives. The Romans loved to depict barbarians in positions of subservience to Romans.
This sarcophagus shows female prisoners seated in the center:
We often see Roman soldiers imposing their will on barbarians:
Or once-wild barbarians in desperate straits:
Or even in the throes of death:
We don’t have many historical sources from the barbarians’ perspective — they often weren’t literate or had their records destroyed by the Romans when they were conquered. So we have to rely on Roman and Greek sources to tell us about these people. We do have some interesting accounts — for example, the Roman historian Tacitus described the various Germanic tribes in some detail. He seems especially impressed with their hospitality, honor in battle, and the “virtue of their women.”
But is Tacitus talking about the barbarians or the Romans themselves? Modern interpreters have seen some of his observations as a “mirror” — a way to criticize his own culture for what it had lost. The same goes for the artistic depictions of barbarians, as well. It seems that the artists’ goal was less often accuracy than to express something about the Romans or Greeks themselves.
As is so often the case in history, the Romans’ and Greeks’ perception of others was really a way of reflecting on their own identities.
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Thank you for another interesting nuanced post. The inclusion of images really bring it to life. The observations on the statuary is very useful. (The commentary about hair happens to tie in with something obscurely and only remotely related, I have been researching for a while.) A great simple commentary on a complex subject. Every day is a learning day :-)