Battleangel

Barbarians at the gates! Terry Jones’ new BBC series “Barbarians” (with the accompanying book by the same name) is about to go on air and so he summarizes the idea behind the project for The Sunday Times. Very timely and eerily familiar …

The Romans kept the Barbarians at bay for as long as they could, but finally they were engulfed and the savage hordes overran the empire, destroying the cultural achievements of centuries. The light of reason and civilisation was almost snuffed out by the Barbarians, who annihilated everything that the Romans had put in place, sacking Rome itself and consigning Europe to the Dark Ages. The Barbarians brought only chaos and ignorance, until the renaissance rekindled the fires of Roman learning and art.

It is a familiar story, and it’s codswallop.

The unique feature of Rome was not its arts or its science or its philosophical culture, not its attachment to law. The unique feature of Rome was that it had the world’s first professional army. Normal societies consisted of farmers, hunters, craftsmen and traders. When they needed to fight they relied not on training or on standardised weapons, but on psyching themselves up to acts of individual heroism.

The fact that we still think of the Celts, the Huns, the Vandals, the Goths and so on as “barbarians” means that we have all fallen hook, line and sinker for Roman propaganda. We actually owe far more to the so-called “barbarians” than we do to the men in togas.

Not an entirely new argument per se, but Jones knows how to present the information and connect the dots. Needless to say, I have myself made this assertion and more to the point compared the Roman “barbarian” myth to U.S. hegemony and the way America thinks of the outside world and itself. The same can be said for the British empire as well even if few tell the story from the point of view of the British nowadays (or do they?). There is much one can learn from history and history always has a bearing on the present, without it one is blind or as one Roman statesman put it, “To remain ignorant of things that happened before you were born is to remain a child.”

About the book / series:

Amazon - In place of the propaganda spectacles the Romans pushed on our noses, we’ll see these people as they really were. The Vandals didn’t vandalize - the Romans did. The Goths didn’t sack Rome - the Romans did. Attlia the Hun didn’t go to Constantinople to destroy it, but because the emperor’s daughter wanted to marry him. Show an “Asterix” comic to an ancient Gaul and - surprise, surprise - he wouldn’t realise that it was supposed to be about him. His life was more sophisticated than a Roman’s, not more primitive. Terry Jones travels round the geography of the Roman Empire - through Europe and Africa - bringing wit, irreverence, passion and the very latest scholarship to transform a history that seemed well past its sell-by date, and make it relevant to living with the new American world empire.

Even as empire borders vanish and their physical manifestations pale, the idea of their glory days is held in reverence. Which in turn makes you realize how fragile empires really are since they, beyond militarism and the professional army, rely on myth making as the basis for power. And interestingly, even empires fall for their own propaganda and social constructions. So, in summary, everyone could benefit from critical thinking and to put it bluntly, iconoclasm. It is high time to realize that the Roman empire was hardly the quintessential state and that its achievements largely depend on turning a blind eye to everything else that went on at the time. Essentially blanketing the non-Roman world with pejoratives like “barbarians.”

So hold your heads high barbarians!