Did you know that the Barbarians of Ancient Rome were not cruel, war-hungry people? In Ancient Rome, Barbarians were people who did not speak Latin and were not citizens of Rome. Since they were isolated and not welcomed by Romans, these Barbarians hated Rome. Later on, some of them would do actions that would forever change history. Let’s learn more about them. Open this book today!

Did you know that the Barbarians of Ancient Rome were not cruel, war-hungry people? In Ancient Rome, Barbarians were people who did not speak Latin and were not citizens of Rome. Since they were isolated and not welcomed by Romans, these Barbarians hated Rome. Later on, some of them would do actions that would forever change history. Let's learn more about them. Open this book today!

The author marshals an abundance of archaeological and literary evidence, as well as three decades of study and experience, to present a 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.

Maybe you've heard about Pompeii - that unfortunate city now buried in ashes. Perhaps when you hear the word today, you would immediately think about the horrors residents went through when Mount Vesuvius erupted. But Pompeii was once a thriving city and its residents full of life. Let’s experience Pompeii when it was still full of glory. Open this book today!

Empires and Barbarians presents a fresh, provocative look at how a recognizable Europe came into being in the first millennium AD. With sharp analytic insight, Peter Heather explores the dynamics of migration and social and economic interaction that changed two vastly different worlds--the undeveloped barbarian world and the sophisticated Roman Empire--into remarkably similar societies and states. The book's vivid narrative begins at the time of Christ, when the Mediterranean circle, newly united under the Romans, hosted a politically sophisticated, economically advanced, and culturally developed civilization--one with philosophy, banking, professional armies, literature, stunning architecture, even garbage collection. The rest of Europe, meanwhile, was home to subsistence farmers living in small groups, dominated largely by Germanic speakers. Although having some iron tools and weapons, these mostly illiterate peoples worked mainly in wood and never built in stone. The farther east one went, the simpler it became: fewer iron tools and ever less productive economies. And yet ten centuries later, from the Atlantic to the Urals, the European world had turned. Slavic speakers had largely superseded Germanic speakers in central and Eastern Europe, literacy was growing, Christianity had spread, and most fundamentally, Mediterranean supremacy was broken. Bringing the whole of first millennium European history together, and challenging current arguments that migration played but a tiny role in this unfolding narrative, Empires and Barbarians views the destruction of the ancient world order in light of modern migration and globalization patterns.

What did the ancient Greeks and Romans think of the peoples they referred to as barbari? Did they share the modern Western conception—popularized in modern fantasy literature and role-playing games—of "barbarians" as brutish, unwashed enemies of civilization? Or our related notion of "the noble savage?" Was the category fixed or fluid? How did it contrast with the Greeks and Romans' conception of their own cultural identity? Was it based on race? In accessible, jargon-free prose, Erik Jensen addresses these and other questions through a copiously illustrated introduction to the varied and evolving ways in which the ancient Greeks and Romans engaged with, and thought about, foreign peoples—and to the recent historical and archaeological scholarship that has overturned received understandings of the relationship of Classical civilization to its "others."

Describes what the work of archaeologists has revealed about the Roman armies and the "barbarians" from Northern Europe whom they fought in the period of approximately 150 B.C. to 150 A.D.