We are the prisoners of preconception and periodization. We imbue preconception in images of the barbarians that surround us in school and in popular culture from our earliest childhood. Whether a New Yorker cartoon depicting barbarians in horned helmets and furs confusedly invading a modern office, or Marinetti's fantasies of mustachioed Ostrogoths eating pasta out of holes in the ground with their hands, imagery of barbarian primitivism, violence and, above all, imagery of difference from equally stereotyped Roman behavior, is impossible to avoid. The Nazis celebrated their version of the violent heroism of “Germanic” barbarians, and biker gangs today preserve vestiges of imagery associated with barbarians since the nineteenth century and before.

Despite decades of scholarship on the barbarians, we cannot easily escape these preconceptions, themselves inherited from the literary and artistic depictions of Graeco-Latin ethnography. Theoderic the Great was, alongside his classical education and the enormous subtlety and enlightenment of his propaganda and policy, an unpredictably violent man who murdered his predecessor and one of his courtiers with his own hands. Scholarly commentators have associated Theoderic's violence with his barbarianness, although the Roman Emperor Valentinian III had similarly murdered his general Aetius fifty years earlier.