Book Alert / The Day of the Barbarians

The Day of the Barbarians -- The Battle That Led to the Fall of the Roman Empire by Alessandro Barbero, Walker '07, $24.95, 180 pages, ISBN #0-8027-1571-0. Index, suggestions for further reading, no source notes, one map is the only illustration.

Conventional wisdom has it that by the fourth century A.D., the Roman Empire was well into its unraveling. But Italian novelist and scholar Alessandro Barbero argues that its problems had stabilized by 378, when a battle between the Goths and the Romans at Adrianople resulted in an upset victory for the Goths and the fall of the Western Roman Empire. Barbero's thesis is likely to ignite many debates within the academy.

The Goths had been largely subsistence farmers, dependent on Roman subsidies. But when Emperor Valens ended those subsidies and drew them across the Danube into prison camps, then led them on a humiliating march, the Goths formed a de facto army and managed to defeat battle-hardened Roman soldiers, killing two-thirds of the Romans and the Emperor himself.