A funny thing happened to the later Roman Empire on its way to the twenty-first century: it ran into a wave of “ethnicity” and “ethnogenesis,”¹ A leading historian informs us, for example, that “from the late fourth century onwards, ethnicity began to return to the power struggles within the Roman world.”² This was not something one used to be told. The dominant handbook of late antiquity in the 1960s was a massive work by A. H. M. Jones; it is doubtful that the term “ethnicity” ever darkens its pages and certain that “ethnogenesis” does not.³ The standbys that accompanied college...

Not long ago my mail brought news of four DVDs called “The Wandering Tribes of Europe.” The individual disk titles are a little history in themselves: (1) “From the Mists of the North, the Germanic Tribes”; (2) “Furor Teutonicus, Pax Romana”; (3) “Storm over Europe: The Huns Are Corning”; (4) “The End of Rome, the Birth of Europe.” The “wandering tribes” package is obtainable from Films for the Humanities, in Princeton, for $640.¹ This effort at lucrative popular education is probably no worse than others, but one feature struck me as being specially mischievous, namely, the collective reference to “wandering...

In the continuing debate over the fall of the Roman Empire, the view that the Empire was destroyed by external forces has always had eloquent and influential supporters. Even before the imperial period of Rome began, the Greek historian Polybius raised the specter that its downfall might come from an unforeseeable force outside itself. The Latin poets—at the height of Roman expansionism—probed imaginatively beyond the edges of Roman power, especially to the north, and envisaged multiple threats from the poor, unconquered, wild peoples in that quarter, coursing between the outer Ocean and the civilized world. As the first...

Ernst Stein was a major twentieth-century historian of late antiquity. Austrian by birth and education, he obtained a personal chair of ancient history at the University of Berlin in 1927 and was visiting Belgium in 1933 when Hitler became chancellor of Germany. Stein, a Jew, responded decisively to the advent of Hitler. Immediately resigning his German ties, he stayed in Belgium and after various hardships died in Switzerland in 1945.¹

This historian totally without illusions about the Germany of his day needs to be kept in mind when considering the received wisdom about Germans before Germany. Stein had been reared...

The noted Prussian historian Heinrich von Sybel said, “A nation that does not keep a living connection with its origins is close to withering, as certainly so as a branch that has been cut from its roots. We are still today what we were yesterday.”¹ This is a harmless remark—one historian’s statement among many others affirming the civic relevance of his subject. It might be paraphrased as “History is important. A country that does not cultivate its history is like a branch torn from its trunk.” What has importance when such a saying is invoked is the content poured...

The invasion of Gaul in 406 by the Alans, Vandals, and Sueves is a famous event of late Roman history, a critical step in the penetration of aliens into the Roman Empire and the passage of the Western provinces from imperial to non-Roman control. When the fall of Rome was a widely respectable concept, the invasion of 406 was considered decisive in bringing it about. The focus has since tended to shift to the entry of the Goths in 376, but the special importance of the Alans, Vandals, and Sueves to the West is unquestioned.² The event of 406 involves...

Twenty-five years ago, I published a book called Barbarians and Romans: The Techniques of Accommodation. It took up an old subject—the legal technicalities involved in settling Goths and Burgundians in the Roman provinces of Gaul, Italy, and Spain in the fifth and sixth centuries. I argued, contrary to earlier opinion, that the Roman tax machinery was central to these settlements and that tax proceeds rather than landed property were awarded to individual barbarians. Time has passed. The book has had a few adherents and many detractors.¹ I have had the opportunity to think over the subject, with and without...

The title of this chapter draws attention to the absence of “Germans,” “the Germanic,” and “Germany” from the Migration Age. None of the participants called themselves by such a name, and even late Roman observers, whose ancestors had placed the term into circulation, used it rarely. When they did, they almost invariably meant it in the narrow sense of western barbarian peoples, such as the Franks, who lived more or less near the one incontrovertibly Germanic thing, namely, the two Roman provinces of “Germania,” on the middle and lower course of the Rhine river.¹ Whether or not, as Goetz suggests...

In 734, a year before his death, the monk Bede wrote a letter of admonition and advice to Egbert, bishop of York, a cousin of Ceolwulf, the reigning king of Northumbria. Bede paid special attention to an abuse that he regarded as a clear threat to Northumbrian society:

There are innumerable places, as we all know, allowed the name of monasteries by a most foolish manner of speaking, but having nothing at all of a monastic way of life....

And because there are many and large places of this kind, which, as is commonly said, are useful neither to God...