Alaric the Goth by Douglas Boin

Alaric the Goth: An Outsider’s History of the Fall of Rome
By Douglas Boin
WW Norton, 2020

The sack of Rome in AD 410  by Alaric, the king of the Visigoths, features prominently in every history of the City and the Empire, naturally and easily held up as a turning point. In well over six centuries, Rome had only ever been violated by her own intransigent traitors; even Hannibal had turned back from the city walls. Alaric, a capable and disgruntled alien, marching into the Forum has always been a convenient shorthand for the hubris of empire coming home to roost. 

This kind of shorthand might contain some truth, but it contains precious little humanity and virtually nothing of the man himself, for whom Rome’s greatest historian couldn’t quite suppress a note of admiration. “Whether fame or conquest or riches were the object of Alaric,” Edward Gibbon wrote, “he pursued that object with an indefatigable ardour which could neither be quelled by adversity nor satiated by success.” 

Alaric the man is right at the heart of the new book by Saint Louis University history professor Douglas Boin’s new book. Alaric the Goth assembles everything modern scholarship can know or reasonably guess about this figure, although the sheer amount of doubt and patchwork that remains accounts for both the relative brevity of the book and for the fact that Boin is often prompted to issue factual disclaimers like this:

The fast-paced narratives and impressionistic histories that were written at the time by Oly, Philostorgius, and Orosius place Alaric all over the map of northern Italy, without narrating the events in chronological order. Later writers, among them, Socrates of Constantinople, Sozomen, Jordanes, and Zosimus, never corrected their predecessors’ errors or found their structure perfectly satisfying. As a result, precision is lacking and dates differ. In Jordanes’s Gothic account, Alaric wins the Battle of Pollentia. In Claudian, he loses it. One modern scholar has called it “a draw.”

Alaric’s career is reconstructed with an intense, almost conversational readability (Christian “culture warriors” are mentioned, as well as a handful of other 21st-century-sounding terms), and one of the most consistently pleasing elements of the job Boin does in these pages is the element of surprise, a certain lack of complacency that sees the author questioning things that might stand as givens in a less inquisitive book. Even the most predictable backdrop of the Alaric story - the alleged systemic debauchery and corruption of 5th century Rome - is here given a refreshing re-appraisal:

The ancient Romans were smarter than is sometimes recognized. They may not have articulated clear strategies for improving racial and ethnic tensions across their society, but they found creative ways to build a multicultural society across three continents. They did not have the words to describe what it meant to identify as a religious moderate, but many pagans, Christians, and Jews demonstrated a noble commitment to moderation in their beliefs and everyday actions. 

Alaric the Goth, far more of a biographical sketch than a biography given the skimpy and often conflicting nature of so many of the sources for such a study, is even so the first such study Alaric has received in many years - perhaps his first ever in English. This alone would make it important, but through a pleasing combination of scholarship and storytelling, Douglas Boin has also made it enjoyable. 

—Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Boston Globe, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and The American Conservative. He writes regularly for The National, The Vineyard Gazette, and The Christian Science Monitor. His website is http://www.stevedonoghue.com.