October 2025 – Book and Sword

I’m Not on Bluesky, but the Blog Is

a screenshot of the Blueksky interface in light mode, a one-column layout with an icon, follow button, handles, and short bio against a white background

I’m told that Ancient World Twitter was a thing and many of the same people have moved to Bluesky. I am an open web person not a corporate social media person, but if you prefer following this site on Bluesky to following it on RSS or by email or by checking the URL every few days, there is a way. For a few months, it has been possible to follow bookandswordblog at https://bsky.app/profile/bookandswordblog.scholar.social.ap.brid.gy

Romans and Barbarians

a photo of a tall round stone building with a low domed roof silhouetted against the sky — The tomb of Theodoric, King of the Ostrogoths in Italy (died 526 CE). That roof is a single piece of stone, and he seems to have been buried in a porphyry bathtub. I once visited Ravenna for a few hours. Source: Wikimedia Commons

If you can bear not just Romans but Christian Romans, late antiquity is a fascinating time. The period from when the Roman empire fell into civil wars in the third century CE, and the remainder of the empire drew inwards under pressure from Arabs and Slavs and angry theologians was a time of rapid changes that we know just enough about to argue about. Some of the biggest questions are about how to think about interactions between Romans and barbarians. This has been discussed so intensively by very clever people with very similar backgrounds that debates sometimes get dogmatic and people have a hard time listening to new perspectives.

In his brief period of experimenting on posting on other people’s sites, Canadian historian and essayist Phil Paine had a discussion with medievalist Jonathan Jarett. For my post in October I would like to share his words, and the comparative evidence that he uses.