We are all obsessed by the Second World War. So when I was invited by my daughter to watch an opera by Kurt Weil written in 1946 I was on the lookout for Nazis. Weil was a communist Jew who had fled to America to escape Hitler who would have taken a dim view of his political avant garde musical work to date.
I am a development scientist. I work in a lab wearing a white coat mixing things up, just like people imagine scientists do. It is actually a fairly skilled job that I have acquired through long hours and much repetition. I’d be a little miffed if somebody off the street could walk in and do my job as well as I do. So I am not too bothered that my modest blog and associated videos reviewing history books are perhaps not the the greatest bits of writing or presentation around. I am after all, very much an amateur. But there is an element of taste to these things as well. There are professionals whose work I find I simply don’t like. And then there are those whose very careers are a mystery to me. And of those, the most mysterious is Melanie Phillips. Why does anybody read her? She has a range of controversial opinions of course. Why not? Controversy can make things interesting and introduce some passion. But our Melanie succeeds in making her controversies boring. The reason is not so hard to fathom. She works to a fairly narrow and fairly predictable formula. She denigrates the integrity of her opponents, and she cherry picks nuggets of information – often a great many of them – to justify what she is saying.
While the invasion by Alaric threw Italy into a crisis, Germany was in turmoil. There was increasing pressure from the Huns in the East – Gibbon traces its origin all the way back to China, which is probably fanciful but I suppose isn’t impossible. From this emerged a new barbarian leader who rapidly became an enemy of Rome. Alaric was a Christian who understood the empire intimately. In contrast the new leader was an out and out barbarian. His name was Radagaisus and he was not just a pagan, but a sincere one who regularly sacrificed to his gods. He treated the civilised world with contempt rather than envy. It was widely believed that he had taken a vow to reduce the city of Rome to rubble and to sacrifice the senators to his heavenly supporters.
This is a novel that works on several different levels – Dan Brown style pot-boiler, girlie relationship stuff, ghost story, thriller. But I am going to ignore all that and just talk about the historical bit.
Alaric may well be the best known German barbarian in Roman history. He was a Goth of high rank and bizarrely for someone who is mainly remembered for wrecking the empire, his role model was probably the man who was for a time to become his great enemy: Stilicho, whose military expertise had given him effective control of the Empire in the West.
I had a couple of glasses of wine and decided to review a Victorian
Things are just crazy in my house sometimes. Anyway here is the video – there is no script as I was extemporising like the hell raiser that I am.
Some time ago I decided to stop following the news on the grounds that I would be better informed if I didn’t. This has worked very well and now even though I have only the vaguest notion of what is going on I feel I have a better grip on current affairs than I did when I was a news junkie.
While the east was in the hands of the scoundrel Rufinus, in the west a very different man came to prominence. This was Stilicho. Stilicho’s father was a Vandal, but his mother was a Roman and he lived his entire life in the empire and in service to it. Neither he nor his contemporaries seem to have regarded his German heritage as remotely important so I suggest we don’t either. He was married to the niece of Theodosius, but this was the result of his rise to power rather than the cause of it. He owed his position to his ability not his birth.
I was born in Eastbourne on the south coast of England, which is the location of a Napoleonic fortifcation called the Redoubt. When I was growing up it was the home of an exceptionally kitsch model village and a rather charming aquarium called the Blue Grotto. This was an eccentric use for an historic monument, and the council decided to turn into something more appropriate. There was, as there always is in small towns, an outcry about the change to a much loved local amenity. The argument went on until some vandals broke in one night and smashed the model village up.
Theodosius was both a good soldier, and just the kind of soldier the empire needed at the time. He was decisive when the need arose, but was cautious generally. He was basically fighting defensively – the game plan was survival not conquest. Typical of his initiatives was improving the defences of Constantinople, adding the Golden Gate to the walls built by Constantine. This project was taken up by his grandson Theodosius II, who rebuilt the walls completely making the city virtually impregnable. These were to stand the empire in good stead over the centuries. Built to last, they are still there. Only the invention of the canon finally rendered them useless.
