Romans and Barbarians
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.
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