The barbarians of antiquity, so long a fixture of the public imagination
as the savages who sacked and destroyed Rome, emerge in this colorful,
richly textured history as a much more complex--and far more
interesting--factor in the expansion, and eventual unmaking, of the
Roman Empire. Thomas S. Burns marshals an abundance of archeological and
literary evidence, as well as three decades of study and experience, to
bring forth an unusually far-sighted and wide-ranging account of the
relations between Romans and non-Romans along the frontiers of western
Europe from the last years of the Republic into late antiquity.
Looking at a 500-year time span beginning with early encounters between
barbarians and Romans around 100 B.C. and ending with the spread of
barbarian settlement in the western Empire around A.D. 400, Burns
removes the barbarians from their narrow niche as invaders and
conquerors and places them in the broader context of neighbors,
(sometimes bitter) friends, and settlers. His nuanced history subtly
shows how Rome's relations with the barbarians--and vice versa--slowly
but inexorably evolved from general ignorance, hostility, and suspicion
toward tolerance, synergy, and integration. What he describes is, in
fact, a drawn-out period of acculturation, characterized more by
continuity than by change and conflict and leading to the creation of a
new Romano-barbarian hybrid society and culture that anticipated the
values and traditions of medieval civilization.
