Watch on the Rhine

When the pans dredged from the river are lined up in a museum, as if on identity parade, it looks as though all the cookware in Roman Germany had banded together, commandeered a wagon, and made a break for freedom over the Rhine.

In fact, the pans had accomplices: the barbarian Alamanni, who invaded the Roman empire in A.D. 259. When the raiders turned for home, they took with them wagons piled high with loot. But perhaps in the face of Roman counterattack, or perhaps because a raft was greedily overloaded, one of those wagons, carrying nearly a ton of metal goods, toppled into the Rhine.

What German scholars call with pleasant irony the “barbarian treasure” from Neupotz, exhibited last year at Speyer, contains some coins and a few handsome bits of silver. But most of the thousand-odd metal objects are the most prosaic imaginable: pots and more pots (carefully packed for transport, the little ones nested in the big ones, like an Ikea starter set for newlyweds), casserole dishes and strainers, plates and cups, bowls and kettles and spoons, carafes and water jugs, carving knives and wood-axes, cooking racks and smithy tongs, files and hammers, chisels and awls and adzes, wool shears and sheep-bells, horseshoes and lengths of chain. And metal door-locks, too, laboriously cut from the doors they once protected.

Study of this piled junk reveals that it did not come from the area of Germany where it was found, but instead from Limousin in the southwest of France, over 350 miles away as the crow flies (and crows are bad at pulling wagons). A little epic of human effort ended when the wagon and its pots clattered into the river.

You’ve got to wonder about a people who would walk round-trip the distance from New York to Peoria to plunder Kmart. And from that wonder come misgivings about the new school of late Roman history, “Barbarian Studies” (named from the prophetic New Yorker cartoon depicting two horsemen bristling with weapons, and a third wearing a tweed jacket and smoking a pipe, captioned “Two barbarians and a professor of barbarian studies”).

According to this school, of which Michael Kulikowski’s Rome’s Gothic Wars is exemplary, any high jinks the barbarians got up to were always, deep down, the Romans’ fault. A naturally peaceful folk were militarized by Roman aggression born of imperial politics and the emperor’s need to find martial busywork for his soldiers. Scholars had examined Roman-barbarian relations since the days of Edward Gibbon, and found plenty of fault on either side: Only now has Rome become the sole garden of dark flowers; only now has the Roman empire become Mordor.

Roman authors, of course, had a different view: They tended to regard the barbarians as, well, barbarians. Barbarians raided and invaded because they were greedy and aggressive, or because they were pushed over the Roman border by tribes more greedy and aggressive than they. The Professor of Barbarian Studies dismisses these ancient views as prejudice.

“That sort of essentialist explanation can hardly be enough for us,” he sniffs, while cheerfully applying exactly the same kind of explanation to the Romans. In blaming the Romans for barbarian attacks in the third through fifth centuries A.D., he slights the detail–upon which the Romans themselves remarked–that Rome’s relations with her neighbors changed over the course of her long history. Once upon a time the Romans had, indeed, been extremely aggressive, but after Augustus’ loss of Varus’ three legions in Germany in A.D. 9, Rome for the most part stood on the defensive behind her Rhine and Danube river borders.

Tacitus, appalled by this newfound meekness, tells us why: The calculus of autocracy made military aggression too dangerous for the regime. Defeats undermined imperial power, and victories raised up successful generals as rivals to the purple. The professor’s insistence that “military victories were a vital legitimizing device for imperial power” would have puzzled a number of Roman emperors of the first and second centuries A.D., who felt quite free to do without such victories, preferring to root their power in the protection of a prosperous peace. Even the ubiquitous traces of fourth-century Rome’s defensive-mindedness, the fortifications along the Rhine and Danube strengthened in such desperation and at such cost, can be dismissed as “grandiose” manifestations of eccentric pride or made part of Rome’s aggressive plans: The new castles “could serve as advance posts for Roman military action.”

Trying to recover the barbarian point of view can be useful. Kulikowski is right to wonder whether the Goths, in fact, wandered from afar onto Rome’s Danube border, as the romantic tradition has it, or whether they were simply a league of tribes already there, like their kin the Alamanni (the chagrined and exhausted drivers of the wagon full of pans) further west. He is right to support his case with an account of the archaeology of the Gothic domains, where so many ways of life mixed and where the boundaries between archaeological cultures match poorly with the tribal borders suggested by historical accounts. (But potential readers may justly suspect from this last sentence that Rome’s Gothic Wars is a book with much academic argument and little thrill of the adventure of history.)

Kulikowski is right to emphasize the role of Roman favoritism in the rise of barbarian powers like the Goths, whose Rome-supported local dominance could make them very dangerous enemies for the empire, when the empire appeared weak. But Roman interests, too, need to be taken seriously: The main reason Rome promoted the power of favorites among the barbarians was to have stable borders–in order that friendly, strong barbarians should intimidate the less friendly ones. If Rome had really valued the barbarians chiefly as punching bags to produce the easy victories needed to prop up the imperial regime, she would have wanted to keep all her neighbors weak, rather than make some of them strong.

Why Barbarian Studies’ vilification of Rome, in the face of ancient testimony and modern common sense? Both the old Romans and their students today can be smug, and near-irresistible targets for a good, sharp poke. But by old and unhappy convention we also identify our own civilization–and, since the Cold War, the United States in particular–with Rome. Once before, historians decided that the Romans–much older Romans, those before 100 B.C.–were aggressive and wicked: They did so activated by the passions of Vietnam. Now there is another American war unpopular in the universities. Could that be why the Romans are once again to blame?

The journey of the Alamanni wagon reminds us that all ancient peoples were greedy, that many, like the Alamanni and the Goths, were both greedy and needy, and that ancient people were, for the most part, far more aggressive and warlike than we are. The wonder is that amidst all the greed, need, and aggression, a people–the imperial Romans–ultimately forsook the conquest of farther acres, and used the preponderance of their power to establish, however imperfectly, the Roman Peace. The pans in the Rhine hint at the hazard of trying to establish a civilization of peace in a world of barbarians.

J.E. Lendon, professor of history at the University of Virginia, is the author of Soldiers and Ghosts: A History of Battle in Classical Antiquity.