Raptor redux

Gary Jennings back in the middle 1990s wrote a book Raptor, set in the decades of the Latin/Gothic Late Antiquity. Jennings argued (by illustration) that these decades weren't a Dark Age... quite yet. The age was however a fragile one, with the darkness pressing inward.

In AD 476 Odoacer was king of Italy by the legal-fiction of being the Christian Empire's agent, which sole ruler reigned from Constantinople. By this fiction, Odoacer kept the legitimate Western emperor Julius Nepos from doing his emperoring from actual Rome. Four years later, Nepos was dead. Odoacer then let his flag fly as a German king. He held no respect for Latin or generally-Roman norms (losers!). The surviving Roman Emperor, Leo in Constantinople, took this as the insult it was. It happened that Leo was a Thracian ruling over lands which not all the Goths had yet vacated for the west. After much mutual conflict, Leo sent those Goths west - under Theoderic.

When I read Raptor I'd figured this whole span as an historic detail at best (pardonnez-moi pour le Lepenisme). Apparently people still care about it. Hans Kerrinckx has uploaded a review he'd done in 2016 of a book in 2015, Jonathan J. Arnold's Theoderic and the Roman Imperial Restoration. This he did, I suppose, before Peter Heather could write such a book first, as Heather was hitting up Justinian instead.

I'd like to report that Kerrinckx had read enough about these years to critique Arnold. Kerrinckx at the time was a MA or at least candidate. Sadly he does not, delivering only a book-report. He even whines about Arnold's prose being difficult. I would red-mark this if this were a BA-candidate essay; it does not deserve MA status. Further: does Academia.edu need book-reports? As they say on 4chan: get a blog.

BACKDATE 9/14