Rome and the Barbarians, 100 B.C.-A.D. 400 Paperback - 2009

From the jacket flap

The barbarians of antiquity, so long a fixture of the public imagination as the savages who sacked and destroyed Rome, emerge in this colorful, richly textured history as a much more complex--and far more interesting--factor in the expansion, and eventual unmaking, of the Roman Empire. Thomas S. Burns marshals an abundance of archaeological and literary evidence, as well as three decades of study and experience, to bring forth an unusually far-sighted and wide-ranging account of the relations between Romans and non-Romans along the frontiers of western Europe from the last years of the Republic into late antiquity.

Anyone who has struggled to convey to a class the manifold ways in which the establishment of a legionary fortress revolutionized the life of a region will envy Burns' pedagogical fluency.--Bryn Mawr Classical Review

I recommend the book highly as an informed, up-to-date, and well-written review of a huge amount of data, easily readable and well referenced.--International History Review

[A] book that will delight both academics and their students.--Ancient West and East

A remarkably even-handed portrait of Roman-northern action and reaction.--Classical Review

Thomas S. Burns is the Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of History at Emory University. His many books include The Ostrogoths: Kingship and Society; A History of the Ostrogoths; Barbarians within the Gates of Rome: Roman Military Policy and the Barbarians; and, with John W. Eadie, Urban Centers and Rural Contexts in Late Antiquity.

Media reviews

Citations

• Reference and Research Bk News, 08/01/2009, Page 35