Visiting a monastery in Italy I have seen the painting of Alaric burning Rome commissioned by Pope. The Goths were depicted more or less as barbarians in Holly

Visiting a monastery in Italy I have seen the painting of Alaric burning Rome commissioned by Pope. The Goths were depicted more or less as barbarians in Hollywood movie. Historic Alaric the Goth was born in Dacia (former Roman province abandoned already at the time), he spoke fluent Latin, was a Christian (however Arian so heretic for Pope) and before burning Rome had a career in Roman Army. The book Alaric the Goth [1] by Douglas Boin published this year is quite interesting if little thin on historical facts. Fun fact I have learned from the book - to keep its cultural cohesion late Roman Empire at one point banned trousers and shoes as barbarian and non-Roman. And look at European streets today. > Though Boin doesn’t advance an explicit argument, a preoccupation lurks within his language. “Alaric’s actions,” he writes at one point, “forced a difficult, long-overdue conversation about acceptance, belonging, and the rights of immigrant communities.” That’s a very 21st-century formulation. Was there a Ravenna Ideas Festival? The collective term he uses for Goths, Vandals, Huns, and other groups is always “immigrants.” In his pages we encounter “border patrol,” “border separation,” “gated communities,” and “cultural warriors.” He refers to the Danube River as a “fence.” He describes a “new combustible mix of xenophobia and cultural supremacy” that encouraged public figures to work “populism and nationalism into their applause lines.” Alaric the Goth is not a polemic. [1] [1] https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/07/douglas-boin-alaric-the-goth/612268/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/07/douglas...