on airport books

Most of the time airport books are a horrible selection. But on the Amsterdam-London flight I lucked into Alessandro Barbero’s delightful little history The Day of the Barbarians, about the Battle of Adrianopole between the Eastern Empire forces under Valens and the rebellious immigrant Goths on August 9, 378 A.D. It’s a remarkable work of popular military history. I’m just sort of the climax, but you can already tell what’s going to happen, because Rome obviously started to have some problems.

Barbero and many others think the end for Rome was inevitable after this particular battle. But that’s not as obvious a claim as it sounds, and entails a few theses that run counter to, say, Gibbon. Barbero doesn’t think that Rome was already in full decline in 378. In fact, he thinks quite highly of the flowering of Christian intellectual culture in the Empire in the late 300’s, and seems to find it equal to the earlier pagan cultural strands. He also opposes the “decline and fall” image and the general motif of Rome’s increasing decadence.

What that means is that Barbero opposes the “some damn fool thing in the Balkans” notion that individual causes aren’t as important as wider contributing social conditions. (And there’s a bit of a conceptual pun on Bismarck’s words here, since the Balkans are precisely where the Goths were causing all the problems.) In other words, Barbero is the sort who thinks that history can change drastically based on the result of individual battles. If Valens had simply waited two more days for Gratian’s reinforcements from the West, there could have been a flourishing Christian Western Empire that lasted quite a bit longer than the one we know. (Or at least this is what I’ve inferred from a number of his remarks. Perhaps he says something different in the conclusion.)

Otherwise… I deliberately chose a basement hotel room for the sake of silence, but am getting full Tube vibrations from the Piccadilly Line, which must not be that deep beneath me. You sort of have to focus on it to hear it, though, so I won’t lose any sleep.

The major downside to London so far is that someone left me a bum mobile# at the hotel. Not much to do in a case like thart but hope they won’t assume you’re blowing them off just for the fun of it; hope they call back, etc.