The Sack of Rome in 410 AD: The Event, Its Context, and Its Impact. Proceedings of the Conference held at the German Archaeological Institute at Rome, 04–06 November 2010 ed. by Johannes Lipps, Carlos Machado, Philipp von Rummel (review)

Few events have served both to capture the popular imagination and to define a historical period as much as the Gothic leader Alaric’s sack of Rome from August 24 to 27, 410 ce. Popular media still present the sack of the former imperial capital as marking the end of the once powerful Roman Empire and the threshold of a barbarian “dark ages.” The event also looms large in specialist academic literature in the field of Late Antiquity, forming the backdrop to a wide variety of scholarly debates on topics as diverse as religious conflict and identity, Roman/barbarian relations, and the transformation of the late antique city, as well as the traditional, overarching question of how best to describe the changes associated with the fifth-century Roman West—“decline and fall” or simply “transformation.” As such, the present collection of articles is a welcome contribution to the study of the later Roman Empire, offering a bridge between disciplines and advancing our collective understanding of this important event.

The Sack of Rome in 410 ad derives from an international conference held at the German Archaeological Institute at Rome in 2010, in honor of the 1600th anniversary of Alaric’s infamous conquest. Conference organizers Johannes Lipps, Carlos Machado, and Philipp von Rummel brought together an impressive list of late antique scholars of different disciplines with the stated goal of reevaluating the sack in light of recent methodological advancements in our approach to material and literary sources. The resulting conference proceedings reflect the international scope of the conference participants, consisting of twenty-nine articles in Italian, English, German, and French. These are arranged into four major sections, each focusing on a specific aspect of the event.

The opening chapters contain a general introduction to the volume, as well as excellent articles by Philipp von Rummel and Riccardo Santagneli Valenzani that provide thoughtful, if somewhat apologetic, commentaries on the discrepancy between the sometimes exaggerated accounts of destruction in our literary sources and the general absence of direct material evidence for this in the archaeological record. While archaeologists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries frequently identified traces of the sack in their excavations, few modern archaeologists are willing to attribute direct causal links between the sack and their finds. Valenzani and von Rummel attribute this current state of research to the emergence of archaeology as a scientific discipline in recent decades, distinct from history’s emphasis on grand narratives derived from literary sources. While both authors ultimately leave the implications of this lack of evidence open to interpretation, they also note that current archaeological research does not indicate that the sack was a painless affair or that Alaric’s troops inflicted no damage on urban structures. Rather, there are simply no remaining traces. Valenzani and von Rummel both point out that archaeology as a discipline is best suited for studying changes in communities over an extended period of time, as opposed to brief and isolated events that rarely leave material remains.

The second section of the book, on “Context,” contains three articles intended to situate the sack in its proper historical setting. Arnaldo Marcone provides an interesting overview of the of the ways in which contemporary authors attempted to reconcile recent Roman political and military crises, extending from the catastrophic Battle of Adrianople in 378 through Alaric’s sack of Rome in 410, with the myth of the unconquerable Roman Empire. Carlos Machado uses a statistical analysis of the various grades and imperial careers of...