Barbarian Raiders and Barbarian Peasants: Models of Ideological and Economic integration

Hartmut ziche

The concept of the barbarian in Greco-Roman civilization, for its contemporaries, was first and foremost a cultural construct. In its earliest manifestation in the Greek world the concept was even primarily linguistic (and to a lesser degree ethnic): barbarians were those who did not speak, and therefore were not, Greek. For the Greeks and Romans, it was the perceived cultural difference with the barbarians that determined their perception and formulation of other, to us, more fundamental, more tangible, and hence more objective differences. In practice, differences beyond culture were real and shaped political, military, and other relations between Romans and barbarians, but actual events involving barbarians normally were interpreted by Roman observers through the prism of perceived cultural difference. To the late Romans, barbarians were recognizable because of the sweeping cultural generalizations that had been elaborated in the late Republican and early imperial periods: barbarians were ferocious but cowards, dominated by their passions but docile, and so on.1 it was not necessary for late Roman authors to analyze specific traits in detail in order to know and demonstrate that they were barbarian.653 654

Barbarians also were a cause for concern. Synesius, for example, identified cultural differences between Romans and barbarians as a fundamental problem.655 in a rather strange panegyric delivered to Arcadius in 399, synesius presented very distinct and seemingly objective—even if somewhat paranoid—arguments.656 synesius was worried about Goths in the senate and in the magistracies, Gothic slaves in every family, Gothic craftsmen in every city, and, most importantly, Goths in the army. It was not necessary for synesius to show that in the past barbarian troops had been disloyal to the empire (which they rarely were), or that Gothic slaves in the cities had conspired with Gothic raiders (which is not attested), because for him it was self-evident that young barbarians in the army, who had been brought up in a different cultural system of moral values, could not be loyal to the empire and to Roman culture.