Review: Ancient China and the Yue: Perceptions and Identities on the Southern Frontier, c. 400 BCE – 50 CE, by Erica Fox Brindley

Abstract

Erica Fox Brindley. Ancient China and the Yue: Perceptions and Identities on the Southern Frontier, c. 400 BCE – 50 CE . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. 302 pp., 12 b/w illustrations, 3 maps, 3 tables. ISBN 9781107084780. $103.00. Historians of the later Roman Empire, especially those interested in the barbarian migrations, are familiar with the vexing problems inherent in writing the history of peoples who were enormously important but about whom we know very little. Or rather, about whom we know only the opinions held by their adversaries and overbearing neighbors, and what their material remains reveal to the archaeologists. It is a rare modern scholar of, say, the Goths, Vandals, Huns, or Franks, who has not let slip a hint of frustration at the complicated and occasionally opaque ancient sources when constructing a history of these peoples within and along the borders of the Roman empire on the basis of commentators such as Salvian of Marseilles, for whom “the people of the Saxons [are] savage, that of the Franks treacherous, the Gepids ruthless, the Huns impudent.”1 Matters are rendered even more complex because many of these Franks, Huns, or Goths were in fact Roman citizens or had lived in the Roman Empire for decades—so what makes a Goth Gothic, and a Roman Roman? When a source calls a Goth a Scythian, in the age old tradition of Herodotus, does the author actually mean a Goth or someone entirely different, thus confusing modern historians even further? …