Hi, everybody. Welcome to another episode of The Fall of Rome. As always, I'm your host, Patrick Weiman.

We began the last episode with a quotation from the Roman historian Amionus Marcellinus.

In that excerpt, Amionus described how the Goths, one of the barbarian peoples who lived beyond the Empire's frontiers,

were driven to the Danube River, the border between the Roman world and what lay beyond.

The Romans were happy to let the Goths in that fateful year of 376 AD, seeing them as a potential source of new recruits for the army.

According to Amionus, this was the beginning of the end for the Roman Empire.

Quote, with such stormy eagerness on the part of insistent men he wrote in hindsight, was the ruin of the Roman world brought in.

That's the Roman view on these events. Within two years, the Goths would be an open rebellion against the Romans.

They would defeat a Roman army in open battle and leave an emperor dead on the battlefield.

30 years later, in 410 AD, these people and their descendants would capture and sack the city of Rome itself.

From that point, the end of the Empire inevitably followed.

That's the view most modern historians have been happy to adopt. After all, this is the date that we've chosen as the starting point for this podcast, too,

so I'm every bit as guilty as my compatriots.

But it's easy to lose sight of the barbarians themselves and all of this talk about the long-term ramifications of theirs and the Romans actions.

Why did they come to the Empire?

Why? Two years later, where the Goths in open rebellion against the Romans, and how did they destroy an entire Roman army and leave an emperor dead on the battlefield?

What happened during this rebellion? What led to the Goths sacking Rome some 30 years in the future, and how did they end up holding a large chunk of southern France as an independent territory shortly after that?

Think about that for a moment. In less than 40 years, the Goths went from refugees begging for entry into the Empire to the first group of barbarians to establish their own kingdom within its borders.

They did something that no other group had done in the entirety of Roman history, or at least it seems that way in hindsight.

On many occasions before this, barbarians had entered the borders of the Empire, but before this they had practically always been either driven off back beyond the frontiers, captured and or slaughtered wholesale, or assimilated on mass.

Instead, this time the Goths won. That's a stunning shift in fortunes by any measure, and that story is what we'll be focusing on in this episode and the one that follows.

More specifically, we're going to attempt to answer a potentially unanswerable question.

...