Chapter 4 examines the post-Roman reconfiguration of national and political identities under the influence of barbarian “invaders” and probes how, if at all, the decline of the Western Roman Empire affected the idea of the nation. The chapter focusses on two post-Roman successor kingdoms, the Ostrogothic kingdom in Italy and the Visigothic kingdom in Spain. The first section takes a close look at the representation of national diversity in Cassiodorus’ Variae. The collection of letters bears testimony to the sophisticated rhetoric of state that was employed to legitimize Ostrogothic rule in Italy and documents the court’s sustained efforts to promote political unity precisely by accommodating the cultural and social distinctness of Goths and Romans. The bulk of the chapter then engages in an analysis of the seminal but today largely underrated work of Isidore of Seville, including his Etymologies and Chronicles. His writings demonstrate the continued conceptual distinction between nation and people and reveal a distinctly multinational vision for the Visigothic kingdom as he appropriates the imperial ideal for the Visigothic rulers.

The book is devoted to the relationships between Nicene and Homoian Christianities in the context of broader religious and social changes in post-Roman societies from the end of the fourth to the seventh century. The main analytical and interpretative tools used in this study are religious conversion and ecclesiastical competition. It examines sources discussing Nicene–Homoian encounters in Vandal Africa, Gothic and Lombard Italy, Gaul, and Hispania – regions where the polities of the Goths, Suevi, Burgundians, and Franks emerged. It explores the extent to which these encounters were shaped by various religious policies and political decisions rooted in narratives of conversion and confessional rivalry. Through this analysis, the aim is to offer a nuanced interpretation of how Christians in the successor kingdoms handled religious dissent and how these actions manifested in social practices.

This chapter examines the different lenses through which Corippus represented the Moorish world. It looks first at the many terms the poet used to refer to all of the ‘Moorish’ groups within North Africa – ally or enemy alike. It then considers the specific ethnonyms within the Iohannis and addresses their value for our understanding of North Africa in this period. It notes that Corippus’ accounts of ‘Laguatan’ identity (an ethnonym preserved in many forms in the Iohannis, but unique to the poem) may well indicate forms of affiliation that were much more fluid than has previously been acknowledged, and incorporated a range of different groups, regardless of their origins.

The chapter closes with a discussion of the ‘catalogue of tribes’ in Iohannis Book II, which has been central to much modern scholarship. It argues that this catalogue was intended to evoke the final triumphal ceremony which marked the conclusion of John’s campaigns in 548. This has an important narrative function, but also reveals the cognitive assumptions which underpinned imperial views of the Moorish world from Carthage. This was not an ordered ‘map’ of tessellating tribal groups, but was instead an image of a diverse – but ultimately subjugated – world.

Thucydides’ History is a rich source for our understanding of the character and interrelations of the ethnic sub-groups of the Greeks and different communities within the Greek world, as well as the relations between Greeks and non-Greek (‘barbarian’) communities. After establishing some key methodological principles relating to studying ethnicity in the Greek world, this chapter explores Thucydides’ contribution to our understanding of Greek ethnicity. It analyses the role of descent and cultural factors in the construction of ethnicity. It also explores the role that ethnicity plays in Thucydides’ description and analysis of the Peloponnesian War.

The chapter shows how Jacob Grimm’s idea of culturally autonomous peoples was troubled by the intimate interactions that he uncovered in his historical scholarship on ancient German tribes. Seeking to unify his knowledge of diachronic linguistics and ethnic history in a final work, Grimm paid special attention to the one thing that had survived of the myriad tribes – their names – but also conceded that names were always generated by outside observers; names, Grimm admitted, were never chosen, always given. When Jacob Grimm explored the prehistory of Germany, then, he found not proud acts of autonomous self-naming by nations, but only boundary-defining encounters between groups and peoples. Grimm suspected that such cultural encounters had first become visible within the structures of literate imperial civilizations that housed multiple peoples and languages. Indeed, the practice of philology itself with its comparative grasp of several languages and cultures was an imperial phenomenon. The nationalist philologist, Jacob Grimm’s own writings ironically suggested, was the inheritor of the transnational and polyethnic empire rather than self-enclosed Germanic tribe.

The book’s concluding chapter summarizes its content and contextualizes the ideas in a broader historical and cultural perspective. It is the story about the transformation of the ways in which the increasingly Christianized elites of the late antique Mediterranean experienced and conceptualized linguistic differences. Confessional and linguistic identities of the time overlapped in ways that produced an astonishing variety of dynamic combinations, hybrid loyalties, and local peculiarities. The chapter raises the question of what we do with language when we speak and how references to a linguistic code through which communication happens can be no less informative than the content of communication itself. It problematizes the concept of “other languages” and different ways in which different cultures, including early Christianity, imagine their principal alloglottic Other. We introduce the concept of “communities of linguistic sensitivities” – a group that share similar language-related socio-cultural stereotypes and subscribe to approximately the same views and ideas about linguistic history and linguistic diversity. The history of Christianity in Late Antiquity could be described in terms of the formation of several such related communities around the Mediterranean – communities that developed dynamically, constantly readjusted, and mutually influenced each other.

The chapter explores language ideologies and various solutions to which Greek, Latin, and Syriac intellectuals resorted when they needed to articulate their attitudes to the alloglottic Other, while forging their distinctly Christian and specific confessional identities. The discussion starts with the views of early Christian apologists on foreign languages and continues by inquiring into further transformations that their initial universalist views underwent in the post-Constantinian era. The chapter highlights the main points of the cultural dialogue between the “Christian universalists” and “cultural isolationists” and analyzes the formation of a distinct rhetoric of alienation of foreign language speakers in Christian discourse. The trend was most visible in the Greek milieu, where the feeling of cultural superiority over “barbarians” had been especially deep-rooted. Then, the chapter explores how representatives of different literary traditions – this especially concerns Latin writers – attempted to promote the status of their own tongues as legitimate and authoritative vehicles for Christian self-expression. The final section analyzes metalinguistic remarks in Syriac literature – remarks that bear witness to acute linguistic awareness among local writers and their ability to resist the major cultural biases of their colleagues from the Classical tradition.

This chapter focuses on ideals relevant to those liable to military service. The first half examines the relationship between military service, citizenship and property ownership. During the Republic the latter two were regarded as essential requirements for service in the legions, on the assumption that citizens and those with a minimum amount of property had the strongest incentive to fight on behalf of the Roman state; this gave rise to the related ideals of the citizen-soldier and the farmer-soldier. Over time, however, these reference-points shifted. During the late Republic property ownership became less important while citizenship was gradually extended to provincials, culminating in Caracalla’s universal grant in 212. Nonetheless, these ideals continued to be influential through Late Antiquity. The second half focuses on the ideal of courage, especially as epitomised by the concept of virtus. Its relationship to performance in battle (including single combat), to manliness and to religious ritual during the Republic is considered, as is the evolution of the concept during the Principate and Late Antiquity. Attention is also given to instances of female courage.

The original Goths were a Germanic people who played a crucial role in the fall of the Roman Empire and the rise of medieval Europe. In 410, a Gothic army led by Alaric sacked the imperial city of Rome, and at the end of the fifth century kingdoms ruled by Visigoths and Ostrogoths dominated much of the post-Roman West. The last Gothic kingdom disappeared more than a thousand years ago, when Visigothic Spain fell to the Muslim Arabs in 711, yet the Gothic legacy endured. The Renaissance depiction of the Goths as destructive barbarians was balanced by the Reformation’s respect for Gothic vigour and freedom, which gathered momentum in Germany and England and inspired the cultural revival from which the modern Gothic emerged. This chapter provides an introduction to the Goths of history, from their legendary origins to the downfall of Visigothic Spain, for only against that historical background, it claims, can we understand the attraction of the Gothic from the seventeenth century to the present day.

Although there has been a tendency in modern scholarship on the Roman Empire in late antiquity (early third to early seventh century BCE) to view the period through the lens of transformation rather than violent upheaval, warfare undoubtedly became more frequent, at least compared with the first two centuries BCE, and impacted on regions of the empire long insulated from significant military conflict. The empire of late antiquity faced more significant external challenges, as well as more regular bouts of civil war. Increased use of archery, with its potential to inflict mass casualties, was a distinctive feature of battle in this period; siege warfare became more common, so that civilian populations experienced the violence of war more directly; and expansion in the size of the army placed increased pressures on recruitment and logistical support – pressures which resulted in greater use of force by the state to maintain the military establishment. Changes in the structure of the army also meant that troops were more frequently billeted on the civilian population, who thereby became more exposed to casual violence at the hands of their own troops. In these different ways, late antiquity can be considered a period of Roman history when military violence became more prevalent.

In the late eighteenth century, Swiss Cantons had been ruled by privilege, inequality, and conflicts; yet thirty years later a modern political nation was born that quickly caught up with developed England. Was this an internally-driven miracle or the most successful improvement in governance known in history following an external intervention? Chapter 1 deconstructs the transformation of Switzerland during the French Revolution and Empire, to inquire why a similar Napoleonic ambition seems to have met with less success in our own times.

In his London years, Pound had ambivalent feelings about the marginal status of the country of his origin, the United States. On the one hand, he had a strong desire to position himself in the centre of Western civilization; on the other hand, he could not help being conscious of his origin in the margin – the frontier – of that civilization. For example, at the beginning of ‘What I Feel about Walt Whitman,’ published in 1909, he wrote, ‘From this side of Atlantic I am for the first time able to read Whitman, and from the vantage of my education and … my world citizenship’ (SP 145), but in his poem ‘A Pact’, published in 1916, he addressed to his imaginary Whitman, ‘We have one sap and one root – / Let there be commerce between us’ (PT 269).