- The Library -

[Diocle]

Simpler to drawn than spangenhelmets

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Here the cover for the nest issue of Desperta Ferro magazine:

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

https://cdn3.despertaferro-ediciones...180731-2-1.jpg

Artwork by Radu Oltean.

Radu Oltean is an Artist.

[Gäiten]

This is another upcoming publication from Pen & Sword:

Armies of the Late Roman Empire AD 284 to 476 by Gabriele Esposito

https://www.pen-and-sword.co.uk/Armi...rdback/p/15540

Wonder if this is the same as this (https://www.google.de/search?q=late+...=1536512986155).

[Gäiten]

Visigoths seize Ostia 410AD
https://scontent.fham1-1.fna.fbcdn.n...12&oe=5C587254

To the victor goes the spoils of war:
https://scontent.fham1-1.fna.fbcdn.n...97&oe=5C541603

[Diocle]

Visigoths seize Ostia 410AD
https://scontent.fham1-1.fna.fbcdn.n...12&oe=5C587254

To the victor goes the spoils of war:
https://scontent.fham1-1.fna.fbcdn.n...97&oe=5C541603

Nice pics, I commented the second one on fb with the following: "Perterritus deinde taetro visu" , here, I'd like to add that I feel in this artwork by Master Rava, the influences of Milo Manara and Angus McBride.

[Gäiten]

While I like the artworks I still wonder how the Visigoths are depicted. as if they had just come from Barbaricum directly and not tthat they have been living in Roman Empire for some decades.
IMHO These Visigoths should have looked like more Roman, differ little from their Roman Counterparts.

[Diocle]

While I like the artworks I still wonder how the Visigoths are depicted. as if they had just come from Barbaricum directly and not tthat they have been living in Roman Empire for some decades.
IMHO These Visigoths should have looked like more Roman, differ little from their Roman Counterparts.

I fully agree! Even though, even in Roman territory (perhaps, especially in Roman lands), they should have maintained something characterizing their common belonging to the German nation of the Goths, maybe some Eastern influence in their clothes, in their hairstyle, trousers, caps or cloaks.

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

In that ancient age "The Look" was not the idiotic pastime of the modern debauched youth, it was the symbol of ethnic belonging and ethnic belonging is a pretty serious concept, capable of changing the history of peoples, then as now.

[Magister Militum Flavius Aetius]

A goth under Alaric or Theodoric wouldn't have differed much from a Roman comitatensian infantryman. The primary cultural identifier would have been his use of the Gothic Kaftan or Zostarion, which is depicted on the Bargello Ivory. He also likely would have chosen to wear sturdier boots like calcei rather than campagi, the low-riding "slippers" popular among the army and bureaucrats at this time. He also probably would have had pontic-danubian style sword and belt fittings, rather than Roman style ones.

But their helmets and armor and shields would have been Roman. They wouldn't have had hexagonal or "coffin" shields (the latter of which never existed at all). Their shield patterns and shields would have been in styles seen in the Notitia Dignitatum.

They also would have had Roman military style hair. That infamous "prince charming" haircut. As seen on the Halberdstadt Cathedral Dyptich.

it was the symbol of ethnic belonging and ethnic belonging is a pretty serious concept, capable of changing the history of peoples, then as now.

That is categorically false. These peoples had virtually no idea they shared overarching language families, cultures, DNA, or skull morphological features. They had some sort of concept of ethnicity but it was more fluid and akin to identity, not ethnicity itself. The idea that ethinicity was a fundamental facet of the Germanic cultures is a holdover from 19th/early 20th century scholarship which has long been disproven (in part by two world wars).

The fundamental basis for group identity in the Germanic world was family ties.

[SeniorBatavianHorse]

I wonder how much myths and shared epic tales also played in identifying an 'ethnic' identity or what I might call a symbolic indentifier? These oral traditions shared and propagated would do more to cement an understanding of self and tribe than perhaps clothes and weapons signifiers. These latter are hard material symbols whereas the former are moulded and developed among groups who own the tales and mythologies as a collective identifier. This is a more powerful bond than a single belt clasp or sword pommel design. Tales and heroes and epic events can even transcend a language group to form a wider symbolic identity. religion alone testifies to that.

[Magister Militum Flavius Aetius]

That's true and we know they had this, we just don't know how the process of these myths getting combined together, distorted, etc. is. Hell we don't really know what the myths were, Cassiodorus/Jordanes basically completely made the ones in his Getica up.

[Diocle]

A clarification about the concept of "Ethnic bond" I've used about the Goths.

In my opinion, if thousands women, men, children, old men decide to live, fight and die togheter, for years and years, crossing half Europe to find a land on which they can settle and live as a collective entity, suffering any kind of pain in their way, then, we must accept the idea that some sort of cement, some ideological/ideal glue, some form of strong ideal bond, strong enough to held them together for years and years, it must have existed in some form, strong enough to keep them all together for so many years.

Now, being considered by the 90% of the public of TWC a Far Right poster, I've voluntary chosen the concept of "Ethnic identity", or "Ethnic belonging" to describe the common bond that held the Goths together in their migration, anyway, being an open minded Far Right man, I'm not so tied to the concept I used, so, choose whatever you prefer guys, but please, don't forget that this bond has to be a strong bond, a terrible force (maybe even an evil force), possibly one of the strongest forces you can conceive, a force able to inflame and move huge massess of men and women, through space and time, towards a common destiny.


Now I leave you guys and I go to listen Der Ring des Nibelungen, sipping a glass of Passito di Lampedusa while reading "Rivolta contro il mondo moderno" by Julius Evola.

Vale.

[SeniorBatavianHorse]

The bond is interesting because it can be both a unifying force bringing people together in the face of adversity or equally a constraint forcing people together out of resentment or persecution. Are individuals uniting out of belief in something or against something? Of course, the rise of the 'Goths' from a fleeing mass of individuals, families, clans and tribes into a single polity goes through many stages and equally passes through different tonal reaches. But what is the tipping point when contingency and need move into something larger and more cohesive which unites these disparate masses? A single individual can unite a mob and a single momentous event can transform a crowd. After Adrianople what happened to Fritigern? Where are his epics and oral tales? His founding myths? We here in the west perceive Adrianople as something which portended the doom of the Roman Empire but to those tribes and peoples under Fritigern it was something else. Something perhaps they never truly desired. Was Fritigern 'removed' so that those tribal leaders and chieftains could now deal with the Roman polity to get what they had always wanted? A place - home even - within the Empire? If that is the case, then expediency triumphs over identity. The bond twists in the wind as it has always done . . .

[Gäiten]

Do not forget religion.
Especially for the Germanic migratting tribal groups, religion (being Pagan or following a form of Christianity) was an important bond.

For example, the Vandals were Arian Christians.

[Diocle]

Do not forget religion.
Especially for the Germanic migratting tribal groups, religion (being Pagan or following a form of Christianity) was an important bond.

For example, the Vandals were Arian Christians.

Yes religion was important but, at least in Western tradition, religion doesn't forge peoples, it helps the forge, we may say it plays the role of carbon in iron forging, but the real work is made by something else. Almost all the Germanic confederations acting in Europe during the V and VI century were Christian Arians, but what actually is the glue keeping togheter the Goths and making them different from the Langobards, for example? Which is this bond, in which any member of any tribe forming the confederation, or better the new nation, can identify his personal and family roots?

Possibly it was just this bond the object obsessing Hitler and the nazi archaeologists, who spent years and years searching for the roots of the Langobards and their ancestral legacy; this mysterius, arcane bond which accompanied a small Germanic people in the longest migration ever made, holding them together and forging their identity, from Scandinavia to Hungary and from there to the marshes of the Po valley in a journey lasted at least from the second to the seventh century AD. Was it an utilitaristic, elastic concept, ready to change with the situation, the political opportunity, or the theater in which the migrating nation was acting? Or was it something deeper? Was it this bond a concept which had to be acted, or was it a mysterious force, itself acting, or better directing, the actions of the men who had adopted it? So strong that the Ostrogoths preferred the annihilation, rather than being absorbed in the multiethinc Byzantine Empire?

All in all the question troubling me is: once you are settled into Roman land, why do you keep your damn ethnic identity? Why do you consider the collective name your ancestors gave to your people a bond so strong, so deep and so desperately necessary to your self identification as man, to die for it? What is there, beyond the sound of that name? Which values, if they were actual values? Which stories, traditions, collective memories were such a necessity, that for them, you was still ready to die as Ostrogoth when everything was lost and the only future for you on that damn mountain, the locals called Mons Lactarius, was death and nothing else than death? What the hell is so strong on earth?

As for me, in a (absolutely) personal interpretation of the concept, I've decided to call it: Ethnic Identity, a soul geography.

[Magister Militum Flavius Aetius]

In my opinion, if thousands women, men, children, old men decide to live, fight and die togheter, for years and years, crossing half Europe to find a land on which they can settle and live as a collective entity, suffering any kind of pain in their way, then, we must accept the idea that some sort of cement, some ideological/ideal glue, some form of strong ideal bond, strong enough to held them together for years and years, it must have existed in some form, strong enough to keep them all together for so many years.

Except then you fundamentally don't understand the barbarian migrations. These weren't average people, these were basically small aristocratic groups with their personal comitatus who migrated. The average man couldn't afford to pick up and move. Identity shifted over time as these aristocracies and cantons moved and changed. These "migrations" were more like armies than immigrants.

[Gäiten]

Well these people were "a people in arms". Being a warrior and having weapons were the status of the free men, peasants were warriors too. They were not as good eqipped as to the comitatus of the nobles, but without them there would never have been successful migrations. The noble and their comitatus preferred raids.

[Gäiten]

A reconstruction of a Villa Rustica
https://www.welt.de/img/geschichte/m...la-rustica.jpg

[SeniorBatavianHorse]

Great image!

[Gäiten]

A reconstruction of the fortifications and harbour of Noviomagus (today Speyer):
https://www.welt.de/img/geschichte/m...eyer-Hafen.jpg

[tomySVK]

Amazing drawings Especially the first one – idyllic Roman rural life. One suggestion – maybe we should start a new thread, something like “Impressions of Late Roman world” to post something like this and keep this thread for books/articles.

Back to the topic – books J I found few interesting books (ordered one already):
ReOrienting the Sasanians: East Iran in Late Antiquity by Khododad Rezakhani, Edinburgh University Press.

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

The Roman Empire in Late Antiquity: A Political and Military History by Hugh Elton, Cambridge University Press.

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

Also I found interesting German book - Die Ausrüstung der römischen Armee auf der Siegessäule des Marcus Aurelius in Rom by Boris Alexander Nikolaus Burandt. Sadly it´s in German language (so many interesting titles by German historians – I wish I had learned German language at school), but it should have black and white illustrations. Do you have this book? Do you know how many reconstructions of Roman soldiers contain this book? Thanks.

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

Also I would like to see printed version of this book - The Army of Severus Alexander AD 222 – 235 by Bernard Michael O'Hanlon.

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

[Renatus]

One suggestion – maybe we should start a new thread, something like “Impressions of Late Roman world” to post something like this and keep this thread for books/articles.

I agree. This thread has gone somewhat off-piste recently with illustrations that may or may not relate to publications and a discussion on Goths and the Roman army that really belonged somewhere else.