BARBARIANS: AN ALTERNATIVE ROMAN HISTORY by Terry Jones.

Terry Jones and Alan Ereira, Barbarians: An Alternative Roman History (BBC Books, 2007). A companion to the four-part BBC TV documentary and DVD set, Terry Jones’ Barbarians.

Also available on Nook and Kindle.  

(HISTORY)

Reviewed by Laird Addis

Terry Jones is best known as a member of Monty Python, but he is also an amateur historian, having written four books on medieval England, as well as authoring several children’s books.

History, they say, is written by the victors, and this book is largely concerned to correct the history of the Roman Empire as was written by the Romans and their successors, especially representatives of the Roman Catholic Church, over the centuries since.  It is a highly entertaining (Jones can’t completely forget his Monty Python years) and very instructive account of the interactions of many kinds of the Romans over several centuries (roughly, 200 BCE to 500 CE) with the Celts, the Goths, the Hellenes (Greeks), the Vandals, the Huns, and other peoples.  In general the Romans treated all of these peoples (with the partial exception of the Hellenes, whose culture they consciously adopted in many respects) as “barbarians,” that is, as primitive and inferior peoples who, if they came into contact with the Romans, deserved to be conquered and ruled by the Romans, especially if they had the temerity to attack any territory claimed by Romans as theirs.

What we learn is that all of these peoples, even the Huns whom the Romans gave an especially bad reputation, were in their various ways cultured and inventive ones, some even with literatures of their own from which much of the evidence Jones relies on is taken.  It was actually the Romans, Terry Jones argues, who were the “barbarians” in the sense that they were especially prone to savagery, intolerance, and repression in their dealings with the peoples they had conquered and ruled.  Perhaps most important in the long run, Jones is able to show, is that much of what was good in Roman culture was brought to the Romans by the conquered peoples, and that they were important contributors to Western civilization as we know it.