"Thorough and convincing... likely to become the standard work on the subject." Library Journal

"Highly readable." Medieval Literature

"A major work of synthesis." Walter E. Kaegi

"Burns has achieved much for the modern study of Ostrogoths." Antiquaries Journal

"Excellent." --The Reader's Review

"Thomas Burns takes us thoroughly through this moment of crisis, giving us a precise analysis of the principal players in this period of transition."--Military Illustrated

"The book is well-written and throws new light on the events in the West a short while before the Fall of the Empire. Highly recommended " --The Journal of Indo-European Studies

"With this impressive study Burns has greatly enriched late antique scholarship." --Religious Studies Review

"This is a substantial and well documented book which has reminded me that the...

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 archeological 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...