Barbarians are well-known figures in the late antique landscape, familiar for centuries before Late Antiquity began, either as a time period or as a field of study. Understanding the earlier history of barbarians, in modern scholarship as much as in ancient society, is essential for evaluating the late antique barbarian. Barbarians play key roles in several disciplines that have been tributary to what is now labeled Late Antiquity. In the old grand narratives of ancient and European history, barbarians are leading characters in the stories of the fall of Rome (as destructive outsiders) and in the origins of Europe (as forebears) - Janus-like figures who both usher out the old world of antiquity and ring in the new world of the Middle Ages. In church history, Alaric’s sack of the city of Rome in ad 410 prompted Augustine to begin writing The City of God, and Clovis’ acceptance of Nicene baptism insured religious uniformity in postimperial western Europe - barbarians here acting as devices by which the Christian church was liberated from the weight of the Roman imperial past. More recently, research into late antique barbarian groups has been recast into the late twentieth-century terms of ethnicity, identity, and community. Much (though not all) of this recent work remains concerned with the barbarians who affected western Europe, traditionally the barbarians in classical and medieval studies, the actors of the ‘‘barbarian invasions’’ and the Vijlkerwanderung. A certain exceptionalism runs through both recent studies and their antecedents: among all the barbarian groups that interacted with the Late Roman Empire, the barbarians of the west are a particular case for study, because they generated future European states or cultures.
Neither the west nor Late Antiquity, however, has a monopoly on barbarians. Troublesome border peoples are shared with many other fields of ancient (and indeed modern) historical study, wherever major civilizations have abutted economically less complex societies: relations between Middle Kingdom Egypt and the Hyksos, and Han China and the Xiongnu, are prominent ancient examples. But, as a field of study, Late Antiquity shares most with its cognate discipline, Classics; not because the classical and postclassical worlds were partially coterminous, but because of their
A Companion to Late Antiquity. Edited by Philip Rousseau © 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. ISBN: 978-1-405-11980-1
Cultural continuity, seen best in the term ‘‘barbarian’’ itself. Greek in origin, used both by our late antique sources and by us, it bears within itself a potent set of concepts. This freighted term has been crucial to recent research on the classical world, which has placed ethnography and the concept of the barbarian at the center of our understanding of key aspects of ancient thought, literature, and politics. Its implications for the late antique world, however, are far from fully worked out.
Research on ethnicity and ethnography in classical studies has run parallel with work on Late Antiquity for some decades, with little contact or cross-pollination. Given the cultural indebtedness of the late antique world to its Hellenistic precursor, however, intersections between these fields of research are not only possible, but also profitable. This chapter aims to bring together some of the different approaches to the concept of the barbarian ‘‘now,’’ and suggest some possible avenues for future research in this field. But it may be useful, in looking at the concept of the barbarian ‘‘then,’’ in Late Antiquity and before, to begin with some examples of the varieties of this idea.
World History
