Day: December 9, 2013

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.