Terry Jones' Barbarians

'[The propaganda goes] The Romans kept the Barbarians at bay as long as they could, but finally they were engulfed, and the savage hordes over-ran the Empire, destroying the cultural achievements of centuries. The light of reason and civilization was virtually snuffed out by the Barbarian hordes who swarmed across Europe, annihilating everything 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's a familiar story, but it's codswallop. The unique feature of Rome was not its arts or its science or its philosophical culture, not its attachment to law, its care for humanity or its sophisticated political culture. In fact, in all these areas it was equalled or even surpassed by peoples whom it conquered. The unique feature of Rome was that it had the world's first professional army...

We actually owe far more to the so-called barbarians' than we do to the men in togas. And the fact that we still think of the Celts, the Huns, the Vandals, the Goths, the Visigoths and so on as barbarians' means that we have all fallen hook, line and sinker for Roman propaganda. We are still letting the Romans define our world and our view of history. In the last 30 years, however, the story has begun to change. Archaeological discoveries have shed new light on the ancient texts that have survived, and this has led to new interpretations of the past.

We now know that the Roman Empire brought much of the development of science and mathematics to a grinding halt for about 1500 years, and that a great deal of what was known and achieved before Rome took over had to be relearned and rediscovered much more recently. Rome used its army to eliminate the cultures that surrounded it, and paid its soldiers with the wealth it took from them. It Romanized' these conquered societies and left as little record of them as possible. The truth is that much of what we understand to be Roman civilization' was plundered from the Barbarian world. The Romans conquered with swords, shields, armour and artillery that were copied from the people they fought; their cities were built with the loot from the wealthier cultures that surrounded them; and as for the famous Roman roads, well, read on ... Sadly, many of the engineering and scientific achievements of the Barbarian world were destroyed so completely that, even when evidence of them turned up, it was either disbelieved or the achievements attributed to the Romans themselves. Now, however, we are beginning to realize that the story of a descent from the light of Rome to the darkness of Barbarian dominion is completely false ...

What we know of Celtic law comes from the Irish Brehon Laws, the rules of a legal system of self-help without courts or police, and which depended on communal respect. These laws respect individuals more than property, treat contracts as sacred, impose duties of hospitality and protection to strangers, and assume that women have equal property rights to men and can divorce. It seems certain that these laws are of great antiquity. They list 14 grounds on which a woman can demand a divorce, including being treated badly in public by her husband and being beaten by him. Beating your wife, if you were Roman, was about as significant as breaking your crockery: she was property. In these Celtic law codes a wife has the same rights as anybody else, so if she was beaten, there were fines and tables of compensation... In Rome, rape was not a crime against a woman, but an injury to her male guardian, an offence against his property ...

Tacitus put a savage condemnation of the conquest into the mouth of one British leader [Britain was partially invaded by Romans then]. His words echo with a chill that transcends the centuries and reverberates today: 'Robbers of the world; having exhausted the land by their universal plunder, they rifle the deep. If their enemy is rich, they are rapacious; if he is poor, they lust for power; neither the east nor the west has been able to satisfy them. Alone among men they covet with equal eagerness poverty and riches. Robbery, slaughter and plunder they misname empire; they make a wilderness and call it peace' ...

The great Greek doctor Galen, who lived in the second century AD, explained why malnutrition was so widespread in rural communities. It was, he said, all the fault of the rapacious townsmen: The city-dwellers, as was their practice, collected and stored enough corn for all the coming year immediately after the harvest. They carried off all the wheat, the barley, the beans and the lentils and left what remained to the country-folk.' Few Roman cities could supply their own needs; they had to ransack the countryside in order to keep their larders supplied. In this way, the 10 per cent of Romans who lived in the cities exploited the 90 per cent who lived outside ...

Since the [Roman] troops took at least 70 per cent of the budget, there was a considerable shortfall. It was made up by raising the poll tax – bad news for the less well off. So long as Rome was expanding, there was no great problem. The army paid for itself in captured land, captured booty and captured slaves to act as the cheapest of cheap labour. Slaves [servi] are so called because commanders generally sell the people they capture and thereby save [servare] them instead of killing them. The word for property in slaves [mancipia] is derived from the fact that they are captured from the enemy by force of arms [manu capiuntur]' ...

The sacks of Rome by the Goths and Vandals were not great acts of destruction. The Goths destroyed only one building, the Vandals none at all. Both were armies of Christians. But the Roman Empire itself had already adopted a particular form of Christianity – Catholicism – and, being Rome, it was trying to impose this form of the religion on everyone else. The Catholic Church triumphed, and – again in the great Roman tradition – did all it could to remake people and history as it wanted them. The Church decided which documents would survive and which would not: all our sources come to us from medieval Catholic copyists. So again, our picture of the past has been given to us in a very particular way ...

The Catholic version of Jesus, with the same nature as God himself, was a kind of transcendent emperor. A mosaic in the apse of the church of Santa Pudenziana in Rome from about 390 shows Theodosius' new imperial Christ, haloed, bearded like Jupiter and, like the old Roman god, sitting on a throne facing the onlooker. He has replaced Jupiter as the Empire's protector. The Arch of Constantine in the city shows the Emperor seated on a throne with a halo – which at the time was the symbol not of sanctity, but of imperial authority. The figures around him raise their arms in supplication, just like the disciples in the Church mosaic. As Ambrose put it, Christ was now at the head of the legions. ...

There may well have been a whiff of popular discontent in people's reluctance to attend Catholic churches, possibly connected with the incorporation of Jesus into the imperial power structure. The Catholic Church emphasized not his human incarnation but his transcendent magisterial authority, his right to judge the living and the dead and to determine their fate for all eternity. Basically, the terrible power of Roman authority was presented as being derived from the even more terrible power of Jesus, a looming supreme God painted on the apse ceiling over the altar where his blood was to be drunk and his body eaten.