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Ancient Romans depicted Huns as barbarians – their bones tell a different story

116 points by benbreen 10y ago

ourmandave 10y ago
Is it ironic that the Romans were great wall builders too?
- kelvin0 10y ago
  Yup every great Empire has it's 'Terrorists'.
- hugh4life 10y ago
  About as ironic as the Romans taking Visigoth refugees kicked out of the Black Sea area by the Huns... and that the Visigoths ended up sacking Rome within a few generations. http://www.ancient.eu/visigoth/ http://www.ancient.eu/visigoth/
  - cmrdporcupine 10y ago
    If by "taking refugees" you mean "using as troops and mercenaries in their wars against other border groups" sure. They played a chess game with the people around them, and the right to settle or not within their rather arbitrarily defined borders was part of the game. Remember that the borders that they gave rights to enter were borders they established through imperial conquest anyways... The Franks and the Goths both Romanized and created successor states that mimiced the Romans. To many of the people who lived in these areas the transition from Rome to these new states was so gradual they never fully clued into it. The successor states of Francia, Visigothic Spain, Lombardic Italy, etc. all inherited most of the legal and cultural framework of Rome. Additionally the Western part of the empire fell for reasons probably not much related to barbarian invaders but more to economic and political decline. Taxation models shifted, landholding models shifted, raising large successful armies became harder, and the empire became harder to defend. And the eastern half of the Empire continued with significant vibrancy for quite some time. I really like this book on this topic: "The Inheritance of Rome: Illuminating the Dark Ages, 400-1000" https://www.amazon.ca/Inheritance-Rome-Illuminating-Dark-400-1000/dp/0143117424 https://www.amazon.ca/Inheritance-Rome-Illuminating-Dark-400...
    - Amezarak 10y ago
      > If by "taking refugees" you mean "using as troops and mercenaries in their wars against other border groups" sure. He was informed that the North was agitated by a furious tempest; that the irruption of the Huns, an unknown and monstrous race of savages, had subverted the power of the Goths; and that the suppliant multitudes of that warlike nation, whose pride was now humbled in the dust, covered a space many miles along the banks of the river. With outstretched arms and pathetic lamentations they loudly deplored their past misfortunes and their present danger; acknowledged that their only hope of safety was in the clemency of the Roman government; and most solemnly protested that, if the gracious liberality of the emperor would permit them to cultivate the waste lands of Thrace, they should ever hold themselves bound, by the strongest obligations of duty and gratitude, to obey the laws and to guard the limits of the republic. I think it is more than fair to describe this as "taking refugees", though the Romans didn't really have the option of saying "no", because the consequence would have been more immediately ruinous. It was thought expedient that an accurate account should be taken of their numbers; but the persons who were employed soon desisted, with amazement and dismay, from the prosecution of the endless and impracticable task;(67) and the principal historian of the age most seriously affirms that the prodigious armies of Darius and Xerxes, which had so long been considered as the fables of vain and credulous antiquity, were now justified, in the eyes of mankind, by the evidence of fact and experience. A probable testimony has fixed the number of the Gothic warriors at two hundred thousand men; and if we can venture to add the just proportion of women, of children, and of slaves, the whole mass of people which composed this formidable emigration must have amounted to near a million of persons, of both sexes and of all ages. http://www.ccel.org/g/gibbon/decline/volume1/chap26.htm http://www.ccel.org/g/gibbon/decline/volume1/chap26.htm Yes, the Romans did use Goths in their military, but this particular situation was quite a bit different.
      - Spooky23 10y ago
        It's an apples and oranges discussion. The ancient empires weren't modern nation states. People, particularly the Roman designated barbarians were more mobile. The Romans used these peoples as buffer states to keep other tribes migrating from the East away from their borders. Even the "Roman" lands weren't necessarily Roman. There were petty kingdoms and tribes in there too, with scattered Roman settlements. As the empire declined economically, they started depending more and more on the non-Roman kingdoms to fight as mercenaries, etc.
  - redsummer 10y ago
    On the same day London is attacked, Turkey says that Europe 'will not walk safely on the streets': http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/turkey-erdogan-germany-netherlands-warning-europeans-not-walk-safely-a7642941.html http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/turkey-erdoga...
    - jacquesm 10y ago
      Let's just say that we're not impressed. And plenty of people of Turkish origin living in European countries aren't impressed either. Erdogan is working hard to undo approximately 80 years of Turkish progress. He may succeed in Turkey, but I highly doubt he will succeed to destabilize the rest of Europe or to make good on his threats of using Turkish citizens that have moved abroad as some kind of fifth column. He's mostly playing to a local audience with statements like that and likes to depict himself as the strong man in a struggle that is mostly initiated by Erdogan himself. I feel pretty safe on the streets here. Much safer than I would feel in Ankara or Istanbul, and much safer than plenty of Turks feel in their own country.
    - tunocina 10y ago
      Thank our spineless European leaders. I can't believe we are letting Muslim nations pull the strings here--how did we let this happen? It was usually the opposite.
      - notsofastmister 10y ago
        Thank our spineless Western leaders for committing war crimes in Yemen... From american white phosphorus weapons [0] to british cluster bombs [1]. [0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/checkpoint/wp/2016/09/19/saudi-arabia-appears-to-be-using-u-s-supplied-white-phosphorus-in-its-war-in-yemen/?utm_term=.086d22acf631 https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/checkpoint/wp/2016/09/19... [1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/dec/19/saudis-dropped-british-cluster-bombs-in-yemen-fallon-tells-commons https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/dec/19/saudis-dropped...
        tunocina 10y ago
  - jacquesm 10y ago
    From the linked article: > Mistreatment by provincial Roman governors soon led to widespread discontent among the Visigoths and, by 376 CE, open rebellion had broken out. In other words: treat your refugees as if they're people.
    - amyjess 10y ago
      So, this is also how Rome fell in 476. My source for this is a documentary I watched about a decade ago (back when the History Channel actually aired history stuff). By the mid-470s, the Eastern Empire was rich, but the Western Empire was poor and struggling in every capacity. The Western Empire's army was so dependent on Germanic soldiers that the Emperor was a puppet of the commander of the Germanic forces, Ricimer. Ricimer would even kill emperors who stopped acting as loyal puppets! After Ricimer died, the emperor of the Eastern Empire decided enough was enough, and he took the opportunity to restore Roman rule to the Western Empire by sending Julius Nepos to lead an army to depose both Ricimer's successor Gundobad and his puppet Glycerius. Julius Nepos was successful, establishing himself as the new emperor of the Western Empire. He appointed two key generals who he believed were loyal to him: Orestes leading the Roman forces, and Odoacer leading the Germanic forces. Shortly after this, there was an uprising in Gaul by a group of Germanic tribes who were upset over not having enough land. Julius Nepos sent Orestes to put down the rebellion, which wound up being a fatal mistake. Orestes had a dream his entire life of restoring the Western Empire to its former glory, and he believed Julius Nepos wasn't strong enough to do so. In fact, he believed that the only person who could make Rome great again was himself. So when he arrived in Gaul, he made a deal with the rebels. He told them that if they followed him home to the capital in Ravenna and helped him overthrow Julius Nepos, he'd grant them all the Italian land they want. And so Orestes and an army of Germanic rebels entered Ravenna and sent both Julius Nepos and his remaining general Odoacer into exile. Orestes knew that it would be a mistake to take the throne himself -- nobody would tolerate an emperor who had the last guy kicked out -- so he instead appointed a puppet he could control, his nephew Romulus Augustulus ("Augustulus" being a nickname for "little emperor", not his actual name). But then Orestes made his own fatal mistake. He turned his back on the Germanic forces who helped him defeat Julius Nepos and said "I lied". He gave them no land and told them to beat it back to Gaul. They weren't happy at all. They were so pissed in fact that they tracked down Odoacer in his exile and begged him to lead them to overthrow Orestes and his puppet. Odoacer agreed. In the civil war that resulted, Orestes and his brother were both captured and executed, Ravenna was sacked, and Romulus Augustulus sent into exile. Odoacer was nice enough to actually give the kid a generous stipend and sent him to live with the rest of his family, since it wasn't really his fault Orestes put him on the throne. Tired of the cycle of conflicts over the emperorship, Odoacer declared himself King of Italy and sent all the imperial regalia to Constantinople along with a note saying that an emperor in the west is no longer needed. And the Germanic refugees got all the land they could ever want. And that is how the Western Roman Empire ceased to exist. Breaking your promises to your refugees is a good way to get overthrown. (edited to fix a typo; thank you jacquesm for pointing it out)
- arethuza 10y ago
  Multiple walls in some cases - although around here it was to keep the people from the North out of the South - but I'm in the bit that was described as the "uttermost confines of the earth and of freedom" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calgacus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calgacus There is supposed to be the remains of one of Agricola's camps on the hill behind our house.
- mjfl 10y ago
  But their primary defense was offense. The Roman response to true enemy was always "kill them all, man woman and child". That's why they genocided Carthage, the Gauls, destroyed Israel, massacred rebelling slaves in Sicily and lined the roads from Campania to Rome with crucified rebels. To bring in a modern political analogy is stupid. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appian_Way#The_crucifixion_of_Spartacus.27_army https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appian_Way#The_crucifixion_of_...
  - arethuza 10y ago
    "To robbery, slaughter, plunder, they give the lying name of empire; they make a solitude and call it peace." Probably invented by Tacitus.
    - mjfl 10y ago
      And believe it or not, the Huns/Gauls/Carthaginians were worse.
  - Spooky23 10y ago
    That's the human condition. If you think that we're any better, you're wrong. If any nation today had the ability to slaughter their enemies, they would. When the United States had that ability in the 1940s, we planned on doing so and reengineered the entire military complex to do so. When the Germans had the ability to do so in Angola in the early 1900s, they did.
    - dpark 10y ago
      > If any nation today had the ability to slaughter their enemies, they would. This is untrue. Most citizens don't have the stomach for total war or civilian massacre. It's not considered acceptable or moral by most people. There was no lack of ability constraining the US from carpet bombing everything habitable in Afghanistan after 9/11, but relatively few people were advocating for that.
      - Spooky23 10y ago
- mason240 10y ago
  At certain times they were, and their borders were very effective during the time they were powerful enough to defend them. There're not much to be gained by such a generic statement about an entity that lasted 1000 years.
- dang 10y ago
  You started a flamewar from hell with this unsubstantive comment. Please don't throw lit matches around here again.
vacri 10y ago
So, they weren't barbarians because some of them farmed? Seems to be a rather low bar.
- mythrwy 10y ago
  Washington Post has become a rather low bar in general the last few years. I've stopped reading it all together and am disappointed to see the number of articles from it cropping up on HN lately. Also (off topic) they have begin a policy of shadowbanning commenters in their comment sections who disagree with their "official" policy on things. It's really barely one step above Brietbart now days in my opinion.
  - dpark 10y ago
    > Also (off topic) they have begin a policy of shadowbanning commenters in their comment sections who disagree with their "official" policy on things. This policy is known to exist or you believe it does? Serious question.
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
    - mythrwy 10y ago
      You mean is it a published policy? Not that I know of. Does it happen? At least once (personally observed) and I assume more. They really ought to get rid of comments if they are going to shadowban. An echo chamber of Clinton support is kind of sad at this point and I doubt it fools anyone. It is their paper and they have a right to publish whatever propaganda they want. And they certainly have been doing that. It's kind of sad to see the major paper of our nations capital sunk to this level but I guess it's the trajectory of big media right now.
- namenotrequired 10y ago
  My interpretation of what the article says is they weren't all barbarians because some of them seem to have coexisted with the locals peacefully.
deleted 10y ago
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yawz 10y ago
History is written by the... victors. It's not surprising to get a single-sided story when the other side didn't care much about leaving written detailed records.
- tonmoy 10y ago
  The Huns were victors though, so the age old adage may need some updating
  - wu-ikkyu 10y ago
    "History is written by the victors, unless the victors can't write."
  - marcosdumay 10y ago
    Yep. History is written by... the people that cared to write it down. And Romans wrote a lot.
    - vetinari 10y ago
      That and the random chance of having your writings preserved through centuries. Burning down the libraries in not something unheard of.
      - clw8 10y ago
        Burning wasn't necessary. Most texts that weren't copied continuously were simply lost. Our oldest sources for written Chinese are on dinosaur bones -- but the script already had characters that clearly show they also wrote with pen on bamboo slips, but we don't have any surviving examples of that until the Classical Chinese era.
  - Spooky23 10y ago
    Not really. In my mind, they won the battle but lost the war. It all depends on your point of view. If you look over the last millennia, the Huns didn't leave a lot of legacy beyond finishing off the corpse of Western Roman Empire, which wasn't really an empire then anyway. Their culture was absorbed and we only know of them because of that. End of the day, they were ultimately just another band of warlords.
67726e 10y ago
.
- jacquesm 10y ago
  What would you consider 'respect your culture'? I've lived in Canada, I did not notice any culture that I should respect other than to learn the language and obey the laws. In other countries that I've lived in (Poland, Romania) it was much the same. And that's being an atheist in countries that were fairly religious. Do you want refugees to start acting like the locals in every respect? Do you want them to start wearing local traditional dress and pretend that they're part of something they do not feel in their hearts? Do you feel threatened by people that you can't easily communicate with, that have different customs than you do and that pray to different gods? Should they convert to some local religion? > In other words: don't let them in. Why? Refugees are the people that will help your descendants a few generations down the line when the tides have turned. Likely they or their children will be the ones to wipe your ass when you're old and gray and unable to do so yourself. All this fearmongering and irrational angst of other cultures isn't doing any good whatsoever. In the same spirit: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/06/magazine/06lives-t.html http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/06/magazine/06lives-t.html
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - wahern 10y ago
    Actually, I think there is a strong culture in Canada and the United States that in each case is a testament to their political and economic success. In the case of the U.S. that culture would be the WASPy social ethic of the original elites, which was carried forward until recently. That's more Puritan in New England, less so in Virginia, and non-existent in the Deep South. I'd call it the protestant work ethic, but I think there's something much more distinct in the U.S. Whatever Canada has going on is also distinct, though definitely seems close to the U.S. Mid-Western Lutheran culture. The irony is that these days I'd argue it's immigrants that come closest to exemplifying the traditional, dominate U.S. ethic. Previous immigrant groups, like the Irish and Italians, didn't bring that culture but merely adopted it--in some cases poorly. (Maybe because they were less educated than the current influx, or because the British Empire left such a tremendous technocratic legacy throughout Asia, especially compared to Southern and Eastern Europe.) The past 50+ years a poor, white, Southern ethic seems to have come to dominate popular U.S. culture. That culture emphasizes the pursuit of wealth and the trappings of wealth rather than valuing work for it's own sake, despite the rhetoric. It also emphasizes blue collar "authenticity" over respecting the dictates of the elite, which on balance is a net negative. This is why that culture looks down on education, and why it's lost on so many people that so-called "book learning" is actually a kind of labor--a labor that alot of people dislike just as much as mopping floors, but something you endure nonetheless because it's what the WASPy work ethic demands, especially in the current economic environment. A college education is for many people the same kind of sublimation of personal aspirations that going straight to the factory was for people a few generations ago. It's a shame we don't accept more Syrian refugees. By and large they're the middle class of Syria--educated, family-oriented, and instinctively averse to radicalism and fundamentalism. They've spent decades learning to avoid dependencies on political solutions and to grow business organically rather than through rent seeking. Syria's loss could be our gain. Such a wasted opportunity. It's especially egregious given how grim and horrendous the situation is there.
empath75 10y ago
The Fall of Rome podcast had a really interesting episode on The Huns: https://m.soundcloud.com/fallofromepodcast/fall-of-rome-episode-9-attila-and-the-empire-of-the-huns https://m.soundcloud.com/fallofromepodcast/fall-of-rome-epis... He makes the argument that in the later Roman Empire, the Huns treated the Roman Empire as either a vassal or a buffer state to their own empire. They demanded tribute from them and even forced the romans to chase down and return refugees. It's really interesting to look at the Roman Empire from a hun-centered point of view-- just one more border state along a small section of a vast empire. They seem to have been one of a long series of steppe empires with the same basic organization-- from the Scythians to the Mongols.
- arethuza 10y ago
  Speaking of Scythia - somewhat bizarrely Scottish legends claim that the Scots were originally from there! "They journeyed from Greater Scythia by way of the Tyrrhenian Sea and the Pillars of Hercules, and dwelt for a long course of time in Spain among the most savage tribes, but nowhere could they be subdued by any race, however barbarous. Thence they came, twelve hundred years after the people of Israel crossed the Red Sea, to their home in the west where they still live today." Declaration of Arbroath, 1320.
  - tacomonstrous 10y ago
    It's not an unreasonable legend. Conventional wisdom is that all Indo-Europeans sprang from the steppes of Central Asia. Having it mentioned in a 14th century declaration is pretty fascinating!
    - empath75 10y ago
      Sort of. The languages did. But there were people in Scotland before any indo Europeans got there.
      - wavefunction 10y ago
        And people before those people, most likely!
mrtri 10y ago
they also called the Berbers who live in north africa barbarians, the elongated skulls were inspired by aliens who visited earth
mtgx 10y ago
Surprise, surprise. Propaganda and "fake news" existed during Romans' time, too.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
viggity 10y ago
Fun fact, "Barbarian" is a Greek word as a label for non-Greeks. To the Greeks, foreign languages just sounded like they were mumbling "bar-bar-bar", hence Barbarians = Non-Greeks.
- gnicholasgreen 10y ago
  I've heard this oft repeated over the decades. I wonder if there is a legitimate historical source for it.
  - gmarx 10y ago
    Pretty sure this explanation is just really old speculation. Even if the ancient greeks kept records of word origins, those documents would likely be lost by now
    - astine 10y ago
      Judging by this link: http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=barbarian http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=barbarian, the reasoning is based on words in other indoeuropean languages having a similar root to 'barbarian' being used to refer to stammering or incoherent speech.
      - jumasheff 10y ago
        The most interesting part is this: `...meaning "rude, wild person" is from 1610s.`
  - gglitch 10y ago
    "from Greek barbaros 'foreign, strange, ignorant,' from PIE root *barbar- echoic of unintelligible speech of foreigners (compare Sanskrit barbara- 'stammering,' also 'non-Aryan,' Latin balbus 'stammering,' Czech blblati 'to stammer')." I don't know if the source I'm quoting is reliable, but I find the same reference to Sanskrit in a variety of sources.
qordoba 10y ago
Looks like racism in Europe haven't evolved much. Europeans are human rest is animal.
- qordoba 10y ago
  The number of downvotes will reveal how many are disconnected from the fact that racism raising (once again) in Europe.
  - dpark 10y ago
    The number of downvotes will reveal that your initial comment adds little to the conversation and your second comment is basically a downvote complaint.
    - remind_me_again 10y ago
      You're only making Geert Widers and his ilk happy.
- digi_owl 10y ago
  Humanity as a whole has not evolved much once one start scrubbing of the layers of verbal coating we have applied over generations. In the end we are wired to be tribal apes.
endisukaj 10y ago
Wow. What a weak article. It basically tells nothing other than the fact that the Huns were people (we knew that) and that different people may lead different lives (we knew that also).
- etrevino 10y ago
  I was thinking the same thing. As someone who spent a lot of his PhD time with Late Antiquity as a secondary area of specialization, I can say that an enormous amount of this is "duh". It does not uproot the commonly accepted research by any stretch.
  - Erik816 10y ago
    I'm sure most popular press articles are "duh" if you have PhD in the field or a closely related field ...
    - clw8 10y ago
      Indeed. I've spent many a Sunday at university libraries reading about history and this was interesting and largely new to me. That people with some expertise thinks it's a duh article makes me happy that I didn't just read a bunch of bullshit!
      - cema 10y ago
        That people with some expertise thinks it's a duh article makes me happy that I didn't just read a bunch of bullshit! A good point, by the way.
amk_ 10y ago
There are a couple of good books on the Hun-Roman relationship if you want to learn more about that era: The End of Empire is a more casual read: https://www.amazon.com/End-Empire-Attila-Fall-Rome/dp/0393338495%3FSubscriptionId%3DAKIAILSHYYTFIVPWUY6Q%26tag%3Dduckduckgo-d-20%26linkCode%3Dxm2%26camp%3D2025%26creative%3D165953%26creativeASIN%3D0393338495 https://www.amazon.com/End-Empire-Attila-Fall-Rome/dp/039333... The Huns by EA Thompson is older but as far as I know one of the canonical works: https://www.amazon.com/Huns-Thompson/dp/0631214437%3FSubscriptionId%3DAKIAILSHYYTFIVPWUY6Q%26tag%3Dduckduckgo-d-20%26linkCode%3Dxm2%26camp%3D2025%26creative%3D165953%26creativeASIN%3D0631214437 https://www.amazon.com/Huns-Thompson/dp/0631214437%3FSubscri... Another fun fact: Attila (aka King Etzel) assists the protagonist Kriemhild, widow of Siegfried, in the medieval saga "The Song of the Niebelungs"
digi_owl 10y ago
I thought by now we knew that Romans used the label "barbarian" on any group not Romans.
- gmarx 10y ago
  Came here to write this. I think it's the headline writer who made the error. The first part of the article just says the Romans thought they acted like animals. So the issue is really what was the culture of the Barbarians.
- the_af 10y ago
  In the context of the article, it's clear they mean the now common meaning of "barbarian: a person in a savage, primitive state; uncivilized person." TFA even mentions the Romans considered Huns "scarcely human". Obviously they are not referring to the Roman meaning of "any non-Romans", because that would be a tautology.
dghughes 10y ago
I've seen forensics shows where the person was identified using oxygen isotopes in the water the person drank. I wonder how mixed up we are now with bottled water from Fiji, strontium in toothpaste and other weird non-local molecules. Cops talking "Hey Frank He's from Fiji but seems to have lived in Siberia too."
- startupdiscuss 10y ago
  I would love to see a cop procedural where all the science keeps leading them to the wrong conclusion. I presume it is easiest to write it as a comedy, but might be pulled off as a drama too.
  - Steko 10y ago
    How about a dystopian Law and Order where every week a new batch of innocent people are sent to prison based on dubious science and willful ignorance from police and prosecutors.
- bbctol 10y ago
  Fun fact: for radiocarbon dating and similar techniques, when something is identified as from "ten thousand years before now," "now" is defined as January 1st, 1950. Anything past that date is too screwed up compared to historical trends to use standard archaeology on.

116 points by benbreen 10y ago

ourmandave 10y ago

Is it ironic that the Romans were great wall builders too?

kelvin0 10y ago
Yup every great Empire has it's 'Terrorists'.
hugh4life 10y ago
About as ironic as the Romans taking Visigoth refugees kicked out of the Black Sea area by the Huns... and that the Visigoths ended up sacking Rome within a few generations. http://www.ancient.eu/visigoth/ http://www.ancient.eu/visigoth/
- cmrdporcupine 10y ago
  If by "taking refugees" you mean "using as troops and mercenaries in their wars against other border groups" sure. They played a chess game with the people around them, and the right to settle or not within their rather arbitrarily defined borders was part of the game. Remember that the borders that they gave rights to enter were borders they established through imperial conquest anyways... The Franks and the Goths both Romanized and created successor states that mimiced the Romans. To many of the people who lived in these areas the transition from Rome to these new states was so gradual they never fully clued into it. The successor states of Francia, Visigothic Spain, Lombardic Italy, etc. all inherited most of the legal and cultural framework of Rome. Additionally the Western part of the empire fell for reasons probably not much related to barbarian invaders but more to economic and political decline. Taxation models shifted, landholding models shifted, raising large successful armies became harder, and the empire became harder to defend. And the eastern half of the Empire continued with significant vibrancy for quite some time. I really like this book on this topic: "The Inheritance of Rome: Illuminating the Dark Ages, 400-1000" https://www.amazon.ca/Inheritance-Rome-Illuminating-Dark-400-1000/dp/0143117424 https://www.amazon.ca/Inheritance-Rome-Illuminating-Dark-400...
  - Amezarak 10y ago
    > If by "taking refugees" you mean "using as troops and mercenaries in their wars against other border groups" sure. He was informed that the North was agitated by a furious tempest; that the irruption of the Huns, an unknown and monstrous race of savages, had subverted the power of the Goths; and that the suppliant multitudes of that warlike nation, whose pride was now humbled in the dust, covered a space many miles along the banks of the river. With outstretched arms and pathetic lamentations they loudly deplored their past misfortunes and their present danger; acknowledged that their only hope of safety was in the clemency of the Roman government; and most solemnly protested that, if the gracious liberality of the emperor would permit them to cultivate the waste lands of Thrace, they should ever hold themselves bound, by the strongest obligations of duty and gratitude, to obey the laws and to guard the limits of the republic. I think it is more than fair to describe this as "taking refugees", though the Romans didn't really have the option of saying "no", because the consequence would have been more immediately ruinous. It was thought expedient that an accurate account should be taken of their numbers; but the persons who were employed soon desisted, with amazement and dismay, from the prosecution of the endless and impracticable task;(67) and the principal historian of the age most seriously affirms that the prodigious armies of Darius and Xerxes, which had so long been considered as the fables of vain and credulous antiquity, were now justified, in the eyes of mankind, by the evidence of fact and experience. A probable testimony has fixed the number of the Gothic warriors at two hundred thousand men; and if we can venture to add the just proportion of women, of children, and of slaves, the whole mass of people which composed this formidable emigration must have amounted to near a million of persons, of both sexes and of all ages. http://www.ccel.org/g/gibbon/decline/volume1/chap26.htm http://www.ccel.org/g/gibbon/decline/volume1/chap26.htm Yes, the Romans did use Goths in their military, but this particular situation was quite a bit different.
    - Spooky23 10y ago
      It's an apples and oranges discussion. The ancient empires weren't modern nation states. People, particularly the Roman designated barbarians were more mobile. The Romans used these peoples as buffer states to keep other tribes migrating from the East away from their borders. Even the "Roman" lands weren't necessarily Roman. There were petty kingdoms and tribes in there too, with scattered Roman settlements. As the empire declined economically, they started depending more and more on the non-Roman kingdoms to fight as mercenaries, etc.
- redsummer 10y ago
  On the same day London is attacked, Turkey says that Europe 'will not walk safely on the streets': http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/turkey-erdogan-germany-netherlands-warning-europeans-not-walk-safely-a7642941.html http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/turkey-erdoga...
  - jacquesm 10y ago
    Let's just say that we're not impressed. And plenty of people of Turkish origin living in European countries aren't impressed either. Erdogan is working hard to undo approximately 80 years of Turkish progress. He may succeed in Turkey, but I highly doubt he will succeed to destabilize the rest of Europe or to make good on his threats of using Turkish citizens that have moved abroad as some kind of fifth column. He's mostly playing to a local audience with statements like that and likes to depict himself as the strong man in a struggle that is mostly initiated by Erdogan himself. I feel pretty safe on the streets here. Much safer than I would feel in Ankara or Istanbul, and much safer than plenty of Turks feel in their own country.
  - tunocina 10y ago
    Thank our spineless European leaders. I can't believe we are letting Muslim nations pull the strings here--how did we let this happen? It was usually the opposite.
    - notsofastmister 10y ago
      Thank our spineless Western leaders for committing war crimes in Yemen... From american white phosphorus weapons [0] to british cluster bombs [1]. [0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/checkpoint/wp/2016/09/19/saudi-arabia-appears-to-be-using-u-s-supplied-white-phosphorus-in-its-war-in-yemen/?utm_term=.086d22acf631 https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/checkpoint/wp/2016/09/19... [1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/dec/19/saudis-dropped-british-cluster-bombs-in-yemen-fallon-tells-commons https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/dec/19/saudis-dropped...
      - tunocina 10y ago
- jacquesm 10y ago
  From the linked article: > Mistreatment by provincial Roman governors soon led to widespread discontent among the Visigoths and, by 376 CE, open rebellion had broken out. In other words: treat your refugees as if they're people.
  - amyjess 10y ago
    So, this is also how Rome fell in 476. My source for this is a documentary I watched about a decade ago (back when the History Channel actually aired history stuff). By the mid-470s, the Eastern Empire was rich, but the Western Empire was poor and struggling in every capacity. The Western Empire's army was so dependent on Germanic soldiers that the Emperor was a puppet of the commander of the Germanic forces, Ricimer. Ricimer would even kill emperors who stopped acting as loyal puppets! After Ricimer died, the emperor of the Eastern Empire decided enough was enough, and he took the opportunity to restore Roman rule to the Western Empire by sending Julius Nepos to lead an army to depose both Ricimer's successor Gundobad and his puppet Glycerius. Julius Nepos was successful, establishing himself as the new emperor of the Western Empire. He appointed two key generals who he believed were loyal to him: Orestes leading the Roman forces, and Odoacer leading the Germanic forces. Shortly after this, there was an uprising in Gaul by a group of Germanic tribes who were upset over not having enough land. Julius Nepos sent Orestes to put down the rebellion, which wound up being a fatal mistake. Orestes had a dream his entire life of restoring the Western Empire to its former glory, and he believed Julius Nepos wasn't strong enough to do so. In fact, he believed that the only person who could make Rome great again was himself. So when he arrived in Gaul, he made a deal with the rebels. He told them that if they followed him home to the capital in Ravenna and helped him overthrow Julius Nepos, he'd grant them all the Italian land they want. And so Orestes and an army of Germanic rebels entered Ravenna and sent both Julius Nepos and his remaining general Odoacer into exile. Orestes knew that it would be a mistake to take the throne himself -- nobody would tolerate an emperor who had the last guy kicked out -- so he instead appointed a puppet he could control, his nephew Romulus Augustulus ("Augustulus" being a nickname for "little emperor", not his actual name). But then Orestes made his own fatal mistake. He turned his back on the Germanic forces who helped him defeat Julius Nepos and said "I lied". He gave them no land and told them to beat it back to Gaul. They weren't happy at all. They were so pissed in fact that they tracked down Odoacer in his exile and begged him to lead them to overthrow Orestes and his puppet. Odoacer agreed. In the civil war that resulted, Orestes and his brother were both captured and executed, Ravenna was sacked, and Romulus Augustulus sent into exile. Odoacer was nice enough to actually give the kid a generous stipend and sent him to live with the rest of his family, since it wasn't really his fault Orestes put him on the throne. Tired of the cycle of conflicts over the emperorship, Odoacer declared himself King of Italy and sent all the imperial regalia to Constantinople along with a note saying that an emperor in the west is no longer needed. And the Germanic refugees got all the land they could ever want. And that is how the Western Roman Empire ceased to exist. Breaking your promises to your refugees is a good way to get overthrown. (edited to fix a typo; thank you jacquesm for pointing it out)
arethuza 10y ago
Multiple walls in some cases - although around here it was to keep the people from the North out of the South - but I'm in the bit that was described as the "uttermost confines of the earth and of freedom" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calgacus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calgacus There is supposed to be the remains of one of Agricola's camps on the hill behind our house.
mjfl 10y ago
But their primary defense was offense. The Roman response to true enemy was always "kill them all, man woman and child". That's why they genocided Carthage, the Gauls, destroyed Israel, massacred rebelling slaves in Sicily and lined the roads from Campania to Rome with crucified rebels. To bring in a modern political analogy is stupid. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appian_Way#The_crucifixion_of_Spartacus.27_army https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appian_Way#The_crucifixion_of_...
- arethuza 10y ago
  "To robbery, slaughter, plunder, they give the lying name of empire; they make a solitude and call it peace." Probably invented by Tacitus.
  - mjfl 10y ago
    And believe it or not, the Huns/Gauls/Carthaginians were worse.
- Spooky23 10y ago
  That's the human condition. If you think that we're any better, you're wrong. If any nation today had the ability to slaughter their enemies, they would. When the United States had that ability in the 1940s, we planned on doing so and reengineered the entire military complex to do so. When the Germans had the ability to do so in Angola in the early 1900s, they did.
  - dpark 10y ago
    > If any nation today had the ability to slaughter their enemies, they would. This is untrue. Most citizens don't have the stomach for total war or civilian massacre. It's not considered acceptable or moral by most people. There was no lack of ability constraining the US from carpet bombing everything habitable in Afghanistan after 9/11, but relatively few people were advocating for that.
    - Spooky23 10y ago
mason240 10y ago
At certain times they were, and their borders were very effective during the time they were powerful enough to defend them. There're not much to be gained by such a generic statement about an entity that lasted 1000 years.
dang 10y ago
You started a flamewar from hell with this unsubstantive comment. Please don't throw lit matches around here again.

vacri 10y ago

So, they weren't barbarians because some of them farmed? Seems to be a rather low bar.

mythrwy 10y ago
Washington Post has become a rather low bar in general the last few years. I've stopped reading it all together and am disappointed to see the number of articles from it cropping up on HN lately. Also (off topic) they have begin a policy of shadowbanning commenters in their comment sections who disagree with their "official" policy on things. It's really barely one step above Brietbart now days in my opinion.
- dpark 10y ago
  > Also (off topic) they have begin a policy of shadowbanning commenters in their comment sections who disagree with their "official" policy on things. This policy is known to exist or you believe it does? Serious question.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - mythrwy 10y ago
    You mean is it a published policy? Not that I know of. Does it happen? At least once (personally observed) and I assume more. They really ought to get rid of comments if they are going to shadowban. An echo chamber of Clinton support is kind of sad at this point and I doubt it fools anyone. It is their paper and they have a right to publish whatever propaganda they want. And they certainly have been doing that. It's kind of sad to see the major paper of our nations capital sunk to this level but I guess it's the trajectory of big media right now.
namenotrequired 10y ago
My interpretation of what the article says is they weren't all barbarians because some of them seem to have coexisted with the locals peacefully.

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yawz 10y ago

History is written by the... victors. It's not surprising to get a single-sided story when the other side didn't care much about leaving written detailed records.

tonmoy 10y ago
The Huns were victors though, so the age old adage may need some updating
- wu-ikkyu 10y ago
  "History is written by the victors, unless the victors can't write."
- marcosdumay 10y ago
  Yep. History is written by... the people that cared to write it down. And Romans wrote a lot.
  - vetinari 10y ago
    That and the random chance of having your writings preserved through centuries. Burning down the libraries in not something unheard of.
    - clw8 10y ago
      Burning wasn't necessary. Most texts that weren't copied continuously were simply lost. Our oldest sources for written Chinese are on dinosaur bones -- but the script already had characters that clearly show they also wrote with pen on bamboo slips, but we don't have any surviving examples of that until the Classical Chinese era.
- Spooky23 10y ago
  Not really. In my mind, they won the battle but lost the war. It all depends on your point of view. If you look over the last millennia, the Huns didn't leave a lot of legacy beyond finishing off the corpse of Western Roman Empire, which wasn't really an empire then anyway. Their culture was absorbed and we only know of them because of that. End of the day, they were ultimately just another band of warlords.

67726e 10y ago

jacquesm 10y ago
What would you consider 'respect your culture'? I've lived in Canada, I did not notice any culture that I should respect other than to learn the language and obey the laws. In other countries that I've lived in (Poland, Romania) it was much the same. And that's being an atheist in countries that were fairly religious. Do you want refugees to start acting like the locals in every respect? Do you want them to start wearing local traditional dress and pretend that they're part of something they do not feel in their hearts? Do you feel threatened by people that you can't easily communicate with, that have different customs than you do and that pray to different gods? Should they convert to some local religion? > In other words: don't let them in. Why? Refugees are the people that will help your descendants a few generations down the line when the tides have turned. Likely they or their children will be the ones to wipe your ass when you're old and gray and unable to do so yourself. All this fearmongering and irrational angst of other cultures isn't doing any good whatsoever. In the same spirit: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/06/magazine/06lives-t.html http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/06/magazine/06lives-t.html
- deleted 10y ago
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- wahern 10y ago
  Actually, I think there is a strong culture in Canada and the United States that in each case is a testament to their political and economic success. In the case of the U.S. that culture would be the WASPy social ethic of the original elites, which was carried forward until recently. That's more Puritan in New England, less so in Virginia, and non-existent in the Deep South. I'd call it the protestant work ethic, but I think there's something much more distinct in the U.S. Whatever Canada has going on is also distinct, though definitely seems close to the U.S. Mid-Western Lutheran culture. The irony is that these days I'd argue it's immigrants that come closest to exemplifying the traditional, dominate U.S. ethic. Previous immigrant groups, like the Irish and Italians, didn't bring that culture but merely adopted it--in some cases poorly. (Maybe because they were less educated than the current influx, or because the British Empire left such a tremendous technocratic legacy throughout Asia, especially compared to Southern and Eastern Europe.) The past 50+ years a poor, white, Southern ethic seems to have come to dominate popular U.S. culture. That culture emphasizes the pursuit of wealth and the trappings of wealth rather than valuing work for it's own sake, despite the rhetoric. It also emphasizes blue collar "authenticity" over respecting the dictates of the elite, which on balance is a net negative. This is why that culture looks down on education, and why it's lost on so many people that so-called "book learning" is actually a kind of labor--a labor that alot of people dislike just as much as mopping floors, but something you endure nonetheless because it's what the WASPy work ethic demands, especially in the current economic environment. A college education is for many people the same kind of sublimation of personal aspirations that going straight to the factory was for people a few generations ago. It's a shame we don't accept more Syrian refugees. By and large they're the middle class of Syria--educated, family-oriented, and instinctively averse to radicalism and fundamentalism. They've spent decades learning to avoid dependencies on political solutions and to grow business organically rather than through rent seeking. Syria's loss could be our gain. Such a wasted opportunity. It's especially egregious given how grim and horrendous the situation is there.

empath75 10y ago

The Fall of Rome podcast had a really interesting episode on The Huns: https://m.soundcloud.com/fallofromepodcast/fall-of-rome-episode-9-attila-and-the-empire-of-the-huns https://m.soundcloud.com/fallofromepodcast/fall-of-rome-epis... He makes the argument that in the later Roman Empire, the Huns treated the Roman Empire as either a vassal or a buffer state to their own empire. They demanded tribute from them and even forced the romans to chase down and return refugees. It's really interesting to look at the Roman Empire from a hun-centered point of view-- just one more border state along a small section of a vast empire. They seem to have been one of a long series of steppe empires with the same basic organization-- from the Scythians to the Mongols.

arethuza 10y ago
Speaking of Scythia - somewhat bizarrely Scottish legends claim that the Scots were originally from there! "They journeyed from Greater Scythia by way of the Tyrrhenian Sea and the Pillars of Hercules, and dwelt for a long course of time in Spain among the most savage tribes, but nowhere could they be subdued by any race, however barbarous. Thence they came, twelve hundred years after the people of Israel crossed the Red Sea, to their home in the west where they still live today." Declaration of Arbroath, 1320.
- tacomonstrous 10y ago
  It's not an unreasonable legend. Conventional wisdom is that all Indo-Europeans sprang from the steppes of Central Asia. Having it mentioned in a 14th century declaration is pretty fascinating!
  - empath75 10y ago
    Sort of. The languages did. But there were people in Scotland before any indo Europeans got there.
    - wavefunction 10y ago
      And people before those people, most likely!

mrtri 10y ago

they also called the Berbers who live in north africa barbarians, the elongated skulls were inspired by aliens who visited earth

mtgx 10y ago

Surprise, surprise. Propaganda and "fake news" existed during Romans' time, too.

deleted 10y ago
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viggity 10y ago

Fun fact, "Barbarian" is a Greek word as a label for non-Greeks. To the Greeks, foreign languages just sounded like they were mumbling "bar-bar-bar", hence Barbarians = Non-Greeks.

gnicholasgreen 10y ago
I've heard this oft repeated over the decades. I wonder if there is a legitimate historical source for it.
- gmarx 10y ago
  Pretty sure this explanation is just really old speculation. Even if the ancient greeks kept records of word origins, those documents would likely be lost by now
  - astine 10y ago
    Judging by this link: http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=barbarian http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=barbarian, the reasoning is based on words in other indoeuropean languages having a similar root to 'barbarian' being used to refer to stammering or incoherent speech.
    - jumasheff 10y ago
      The most interesting part is this: `...meaning "rude, wild person" is from 1610s.`
- gglitch 10y ago
  "from Greek barbaros 'foreign, strange, ignorant,' from PIE root *barbar- echoic of unintelligible speech of foreigners (compare Sanskrit barbara- 'stammering,' also 'non-Aryan,' Latin balbus 'stammering,' Czech blblati 'to stammer')." I don't know if the source I'm quoting is reliable, but I find the same reference to Sanskrit in a variety of sources.

qordoba 10y ago

Looks like racism in Europe haven't evolved much. Europeans are human rest is animal.

qordoba 10y ago
The number of downvotes will reveal how many are disconnected from the fact that racism raising (once again) in Europe.
- dpark 10y ago
  The number of downvotes will reveal that your initial comment adds little to the conversation and your second comment is basically a downvote complaint.
  - remind_me_again 10y ago
    You're only making Geert Widers and his ilk happy.
digi_owl 10y ago
Humanity as a whole has not evolved much once one start scrubbing of the layers of verbal coating we have applied over generations. In the end we are wired to be tribal apes.

endisukaj 10y ago

Wow. What a weak article. It basically tells nothing other than the fact that the Huns were people (we knew that) and that different people may lead different lives (we knew that also).

etrevino 10y ago
I was thinking the same thing. As someone who spent a lot of his PhD time with Late Antiquity as a secondary area of specialization, I can say that an enormous amount of this is "duh". It does not uproot the commonly accepted research by any stretch.
- Erik816 10y ago
  I'm sure most popular press articles are "duh" if you have PhD in the field or a closely related field ...
  - clw8 10y ago
    Indeed. I've spent many a Sunday at university libraries reading about history and this was interesting and largely new to me. That people with some expertise thinks it's a duh article makes me happy that I didn't just read a bunch of bullshit!
    - cema 10y ago
      That people with some expertise thinks it's a duh article makes me happy that I didn't just read a bunch of bullshit! A good point, by the way.

amk_ 10y ago

There are a couple of good books on the Hun-Roman relationship if you want to learn more about that era: The End of Empire is a more casual read: https://www.amazon.com/End-Empire-Attila-Fall-Rome/dp/0393338495%3FSubscriptionId%3DAKIAILSHYYTFIVPWUY6Q%26tag%3Dduckduckgo-d-20%26linkCode%3Dxm2%26camp%3D2025%26creative%3D165953%26creativeASIN%3D0393338495 https://www.amazon.com/End-Empire-Attila-Fall-Rome/dp/039333... The Huns by EA Thompson is older but as far as I know one of the canonical works: https://www.amazon.com/Huns-Thompson/dp/0631214437%3FSubscriptionId%3DAKIAILSHYYTFIVPWUY6Q%26tag%3Dduckduckgo-d-20%26linkCode%3Dxm2%26camp%3D2025%26creative%3D165953%26creativeASIN%3D0631214437 https://www.amazon.com/Huns-Thompson/dp/0631214437%3FSubscri... Another fun fact: Attila (aka King Etzel) assists the protagonist Kriemhild, widow of Siegfried, in the medieval saga "The Song of the Niebelungs"

digi_owl 10y ago

I thought by now we knew that Romans used the label "barbarian" on any group not Romans.

gmarx 10y ago
Came here to write this. I think it's the headline writer who made the error. The first part of the article just says the Romans thought they acted like animals. So the issue is really what was the culture of the Barbarians.
the_af 10y ago
In the context of the article, it's clear they mean the now common meaning of "barbarian: a person in a savage, primitive state; uncivilized person." TFA even mentions the Romans considered Huns "scarcely human". Obviously they are not referring to the Roman meaning of "any non-Romans", because that would be a tautology.

dghughes 10y ago

I've seen forensics shows where the person was identified using oxygen isotopes in the water the person drank. I wonder how mixed up we are now with bottled water from Fiji, strontium in toothpaste and other weird non-local molecules. Cops talking "Hey Frank He's from Fiji but seems to have lived in Siberia too."

startupdiscuss 10y ago
I would love to see a cop procedural where all the science keeps leading them to the wrong conclusion. I presume it is easiest to write it as a comedy, but might be pulled off as a drama too.
- Steko 10y ago
  How about a dystopian Law and Order where every week a new batch of innocent people are sent to prison based on dubious science and willful ignorance from police and prosecutors.
bbctol 10y ago
Fun fact: for radiocarbon dating and similar techniques, when something is identified as from "ten thousand years before now," "now" is defined as January 1st, 1950. Anything past that date is too screwed up compared to historical trends to use standard archaeology on.