Hidden enemies. The two faces of the barbarian in fifth-century Gaul

Roberto Chiappiniello - The University of Manchester

This paper analyses the various perceptions of barbarians reflected in the polysemy of the word barbarus in Christian texts of fifth-century Gaul.

I sketch briefly the evolution in the use of the word barbarus in Rome, drawing examples from Latin historians and philosophers. I show that the word barbarus (sensu proprio, anyone or anything alien to the Greco-Roman world, the 'outsider'), began to be used in a metaphorical sense to mean "irrational" or "ruled by passion". It was this metaphorical use of the term which led, in the wake of the fourth-century Gothic invasions, to Ambrose's famous image of a two-fold struggle against one's hostes extranei (external enemies) = barbarus - sensu proprio, and one's hostes domestici (internal enemies) = barbarus as a metaphor for man's invisible enemy, vice (in a sense, the 'insider'). Ambrose here develops an interesting model, in which external circumstances are made the cognitive model of one's inner world. In the eyes of Ambrose, vice is equated with the physical barbarians faced by the Gallo-Romans, both are irrational and dark, both must be combated with all one's strength

I show with examples from a number of fifth-century Gallo-Roman Christian texts that this famous distinction of Ambrose between hostes extranei and hostes domestici is widely used. I argue that in these texts a juxtaposition of these two meanings of barbarus is in play. The assault by the historical barbarus, the irrational being, is identified with the destructiveness of the metaphorical barbarus, vice and its effect, sin. The recurrence of the motif suggests that the source domain of barbarian invasion and war, and its associated language, was all too familiar to the reader.