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Barbarians
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Message 1.聽
Posted by Idamante (U1894562) on Saturday, 27th May 2006
Anyone watching the new Terry Jones series on 麻豆约拍?
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Message 2
Posted by Idamante (U1894562) on Sunday, 28th May 2006
Obviously not...
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Message 3
Posted by Mick_mac (U2874010) on Sunday, 28th May 2006
Gaiseric,
I watched it. For me (I'm Irish) there was nothing new in it. For TV and armchair historians/archaeologists I'd say it may have had one or two surprises. -
Message 4
Posted by TonyG (U1830405) on Monday, 29th May 2006
I thought Terry Jones did a good job of presenting the anti-Roamn case inan interesting and informative way. Maybe not too much new material (although the calendar device was not someting I'd heard of) but he brought it all together well.
Interestingly, I also a prohramme about Carthage on the Discovery Channel on Saturday which was spreading pretty much the same message - history written by the Romans about their enemies should be taken with a large pinch of salt. -
Message 5
Posted by Danus24 (U4457002) on Friday, 9th June 2006
I have watched all the Bartbarian programmes thus far and am quite disappointed. Three is enough.
All the programs thus far are heavily biased, basically conveying Mr Gillian's anti-Roman views. Facts are taken out of context, misrepresented and only a part of the story is conveyed. Well what is new? I suppose that is history.
The programme cannot even get it's ADs and BCs correct.
A waste of time. We seem to be getting a lot of programmes these days conveying the personal views of amateurs. -
Message 6
Posted by Mick_mac (U2874010) on Saturday, 10th June 2006
Can you elucidate a little, please? Generalised condemnation is OK if it is justified.
I only saw the first of these programmes in which Terry Jones talked about the Celts and I thought that it was quite good. Admittedly some of the mocked-up scenes and illustrative film footage was occasionally amateurish but the historical presentation was accurate and interesting.
What are your specific criticisms of this series. What facts were taken out of context? What was misrepresented? How did it get its BCs and ADs wrong?
As to the personal views of amateurs, which is worse: a biased professional or a biased amateur? -
Message 7
Posted by Anglo-Norman (U1965016) on Saturday, 10th June 2006
I haven't bothered watching the whole series, just one or two bits and pieces. It struck me that whilst a series on the technology and other advances or Rome contemporaries was an interesting idea, why did it have to be presented as an attack on Roman culture? It seems ironic that a series intended to promote the culture of other races could still only be done in the context of Rome.
And for for episode on the Greeks, its the first time I've heard them described as barbarians, or it being implied that the fact they were light years ahead in many respects had somehow been hidden from view. I don't think the Romans were generally particularly shy of acknowledging their debt to Greece, and we learnt a bit about the Greeks at prep school! -
Message 8
Posted by leedstrev (U4327086) on Saturday, 10th June 2006
Yes, I have watched them all so far, and I thought they looked at it from a different view point to the "normal" history programmes.
The one thing that has spoilt it, as it has spoilt the vast majority of similar programmes, has been the use of over loud and totally unnecessary so called backing music.
Terry Jones's commentary was drowned out half the time, and it was difficult to follow sometimes. Why can't the sound engineers get the levels correct, after all it's not rocket science -
Message 9
Posted by heuvel (U1763810) on Saturday, 10th June 2006
Danus24 (message 5):
麻豆约拍2 22:00 (The barbarians): The Romans were a bunch of corrupt property dealers who were also technically and organisationally incompetent.
麻豆约拍1 23:00 (The News): There are housing and water shortages in London (what鈥檚 new).
My conclusion: The Romans did not leave Britain in 410 AD. They are alive and well in London. The 麻豆约拍 is either too incompetent to figure this out or so corrupt that they won鈥檛 tell us what is really going on. Either way, they鈥檙e no better than the Romans. Or maybe they ARE the Romans. -
Message 10
Posted by heuvel (U1763810) on Saturday, 10th June 2006
Mic_Mac (message 6):
To provide context you need to present all the facts, or at least a representative cross section of them. The Parthians may have clobbered the Romans a number of times, but the opposite is equally true. And whilst you are slagging off Romans emperors, like Philip (who made a dishonourable settlement with the Parthians so that he could get to Rome and consolidate his postion as emperor which he had obtained by subterfuge), you might like to point out that he, like many of them, was not an ethnic Roman. He was from Syria and is often known as Philip the Arab. For Edward Gibbon this was a reason to make what we would now consider to be a non-PC remark. But Gibbon was a man of his time, just like Philip who could build a reservoir to relieve a chronic water shortage in Rome whilst at the same time organising enormous games for the 1000th anniversary of Rome. The Parthian monarchs were also men of their time and were quite willing to promote the arts AND indulge in murder if it suited their political ends. The 麻豆约拍 is also of its time when it distorts the facts to promote its political message. And I am wasting my time, but I鈥檝e always found facts to be more interesting than hype, and I think the average viewer would too, if they were given the chance. -
Message 11
Posted by severin (U1756267) on Saturday, 10th June 2006
While Terry Jones' series is showing the worst side of the Romans, this is not necessarily a bad thing as they were long held up as paragons and role models - within the British Empire, for example.
They were a superbly organised military society that had the benefit of a central organisation that facilitated cultural, legal and fiscal unity. This allowed them to have a large standing army. The Northern Europeans, for example, had none of these things at that time.
But they were also a society built on violence, exploitation and conquest (as most empires were and to a certain extent still are). In nearly all the battles they fought, they were the aggressors, not the defenders.
In the same way, Alexander the Great was seen as a hero rather than a ruthless exterminator and exploiter. Some recent books and documentaries have pointed this out too.
Providing a counterbalance is no bad thing, both in terms of the violence and in terms of other contemporary cultures not being as 'barbaric' as Roman (and Victorian empire building) propaganda made out.
It could be argued that it was not the fall of Rome that brought about the so-called Dark Ages but the actions of Rome in destroying/suppressing/Christianizing other cultures over a long period. The killing of Archimedes exemplifies this. The Arab countries mostly resisted Roman influence which is why knowledge survived there, to be rediscovered by Europe only in the Middle Ages.
For all of their achievements (they were great engineers, for example), the Romans were the Borg of the ancient world - assimilate or die. -
Message 12
Posted by U3153557 (U3153557) on Saturday, 10th June 2006
heuvel - I saw only one of the programmes - the one about the Germans - and found it, like almost all TV programmes, the desperately slow product of a great deal of aimless expense. I already knew most of the 'facts' - the new point seemed to be the identification of the actual battlefield.
On a related issue, don't you think the 'facts' concept is a wee bit problematic? Were, for instance, some imaginary people called 'Celts' in advance of a very widespread 'people' loosely called 'the Romans'? Its a matter of opinion, I suppose, but even to HAVE an opinion drags us into all sorts of assumptions about 'civilization'and the like. I, for instance, come from a background that values poetry - so I think the Somalis (Cardiff people I've met and like) are to be preferred to Ethiopians/Abyssinians. My opinion, sub speciae aeternalis (is it) is valueless, obviously.
I am most impressed with your postings, but they bring out some very old stuff in me. I was brought up in schools run by (take my word for it?) deeply racist Anglo-Saxonists who knew no 'Welsh' but had no doubt about their superiority to me and all my people, based on what I still don't know. They also knew that the Romans were, so to speak, Permanent Top Nation. I did classics only to 'O' level, and at least learned to think the Greeks were rather more attractive Tops. I have the requisite degrees to be a scholar, but History is not my subject, just an obsession. I feel the old rage, reading your postings, about being put down by people with a very selective knowledge I don't share, who have been granted the right, somehow, to establish the'facts'. What to do? Not interested in the later novels of D.H. Lawrene, are you? -
Message 13
Posted by heuvel (U1763810) on Saturday, 10th June 2006
Rhys Gethin (message12):
I use the word 鈥榝acts鈥 in a scientific sense. The sun has come up every day of my life (as far as I know). I suppose you鈥檝e had the same experience as have most people, so most of us can agree to treat this as a law of nature, based on which, we expect the sun to come up tomorrow (although we can鈥檛 be sure it will).
Historical facts are more difficult since they don鈥檛 repeat themselves. However, it is a fact that we possess various documents which experts agree are authentic and which describe historical events. You may dispute the truth of what these documents say. If, however, you do not dispute that A and B did happen as described in the documents, then it is unacceptable to use event A to prove a certain point when event B could be used to prove the opposite. This is what is happening in 鈥楾he barbarians鈥 as in most 麻豆约拍 TV history programmes and this is what I object to.
I am not interested in opinions (other than as statistics), only in things which can be measured based on agreed criteria. If we can鈥檛 agree on criteria then all opinions are equally valid. 鈥楾he Celts were in advance of the Romans鈥. 鈥楾he emperor Constantine was the greatest Briton鈥. Such statements are meaningless to me without further qualification. I like red wine and I don鈥檛 like mayonnaise, so I drink the first and I don鈥檛 eat the second. However, it would never occur to me to say that red wine is better than mayonnaise. In your position I would not say 鈥楽omalis are to be preferred to Ethiopians鈥. I would say something like: 鈥業 like the company/culture/poetry of Somalis more than that of Ethiopians鈥.
I think I understand your feelings about English supremacists. I am not one of them. I do not think I have been granted the right to establish what the 鈥榝acts鈥 are. However, I do have the right (and the expertise) to challenge value judgements made by experts in any field. That includes you as an expert in Welsh (a language which I don鈥檛 speak) and Gordon Brown as an expert in ecomomics (which I did not study formally). Whenever Gordon says 鈥淚t鈥檚 good for the economy鈥 I鈥檓 praying that some 麻豆约拍 journalist will ask: him: 鈥淗ow do you measure that?鈥 But they never do, and we continue to live in a world of bla bla. So, if I challenge you, it鈥檚 not to put you down but to find out what the basis is for your claims.
I鈥檓 afraid I鈥檓 not very familiar with the works of D.H. Lawrence. -
Message 14
Posted by fascinating (U1944795) on Sunday, 11th June 2006
Danus24, I fully agree with you.
Terry Jones' bias against the Romans is very evident, and he is over-egging the pudding a great deal.
Though it is Jones who is primarily to blame for such a tendentious program, the 麻豆约拍 must also take its share. This institution is handed 拢3 billion a year for the express purpose of producing quality programs that educate and inform, without having the need to compete with commercial channels and make sensationalist/contreversial output.
A 麻豆约拍 which respected the study of history for it's own sake, which genuinely wanted to inform the public about history, would not let an amateur make such a deliberately unbalanced series.
The 麻豆约拍 we do have is run by producers who do not care about history or science. They love controversy above eveything. -
Message 15
Posted by fascinating (U1944795) on Sunday, 11th June 2006
Wanted to add an important point - the origin of the word 'barbarian'.
Barbaros was the Greek word which simply meant 'stranger'. The Romans adopted the word, and it came to mean (this is my understanding) 'people who do not live in towns'. Thus they were 'uncivilised' (= not city-fied).
The word was perjoritave, especially when hordes of Goths and Huns came invading and destroying (and, no matter what Terry Jones tries to tell you, they DID destroy and kill).
But as far as I know, city dwelling Greeks, also Egyptians and other nations that were settled in towns, were NOT called barbarians by the Romans. Jones is twisting things by implying the Romans called the Greeks 'barbarians', in fact there is evidence that the Romans acknowledged their debt to Greek culture (eg Pliny's letter to future governer of Achaea). -
Message 16
Posted by fascinating (U1944795) on Sunday, 11th June 2006
Severin, I too am fairly convinced that the Roman Empire, built on brutality and theft as it was, cannot have been conducive to the development of humanity! The Romans, as you say, presided over the decline of the ancient world to a medieval one (I am including the history of Byzantium here).
(A very poignant document, from 2nd century Egypt, is a list of the names of farmers who were tax refugees, ie they had abandoned their land rather than pay taxes; and a document dated a couple of years later shows that most still had not appeared).
Still an assessment of the impact of the Romans might point out how many aqueducts and roads were built under their primacy, a huge amount of building that no other ancient culture ever came close to. And I would strongly suggest that much of ancient literature became more widely available in the ancient world, and much of this store of books was transmitted to us via the Roman Catholic church.
Terry Jones is not engaged in a serious assessment of the Romans. His message is 'actually the Romans were bad, therefore the barbarians were good'. He does not take relevant facts and weigh them up. He just chooses certain facts that support his case then puts a spin on them. -
Message 17
Posted by Alaric the Goth (U1826823) on Monday, 12th June 2006
I found it very weird that a programme in a series on 'Barbarians' should be about the Greeks and the Persian Empire. It makes a nonsense of language! Those were 'civilisations', and ancient authors, even Roman ones, would I have thought acknowledged this with few exceptions (and the latter would probably have an anti-Persian or anti-Hellenic axe to grind!).
It saddens me, for I would love a series about the peoples generally, and more appropriately, referred to as 'barbarians' by Roman writers and their successors like Gibbon! Let's have some good stuff on the Vandals, the Langobards, the (Merovingian) Franks and more, please on the Goths!
I see the last programme is going to focus on my namesake and on Attila, but the announcer at the end of Friday's programme already has me worried that this is going to be one more about 'bashing' the Roman Catholic church for suppressing/rewriting history. I am a protestant rather than a Catholic, but I know my 麻豆约拍 and it will be a way of it attacking Christianity generally, one of the Beeb's favourite pastimes. -
Message 18
Posted by U3153557 (U3153557) on Monday, 12th June 2006
Heuvel - that the sun 'comes up' every day is not a fact but a particular use of language to describe a particular viewpoint, clearly, and I do know a little about the EXTREME unreliablity of 'texts' to establish anything outside themselves. I agree, however, that to say, 'The Celts (who they?) were in advance of the Romans (who they? when?)' is as near half-witted as is possible. I didn't THINK I was post-modernist, and when I hear 'fact' used like that I feel nostalgic. We are more at one than I had supposed!
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Message 19
Posted by lolbeeble (U1662865) on Monday, 12th June 2006
Good grief, of course it can only be done in the context of Rome, who was it who branded them all barbarians. True in 290BC at the battle of Sentinum the Romans sought to identify themselves with the Urban Greeks by evoking Delphi because it wss spared from a Gallic incursion a few years earlier, suggesting they wanted to be identified among the civilised by the Hellenic world. However it seems that as they got more and more involved in the Adriatic and Eastern Mediterranean so they became rather more scornful towards Greeks outside Italy figuring that their contempraries were a shadow of their illustrious predeccessors having adopted the trappings of orientalism. As such Latins and Greeks seem to have spent the next few hundred years arguing about this however.
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Message 20
Posted by heuvel (U1763810) on Monday, 12th June 2006
Rhys Gethin (message 18):
The fact is not that the sun comes up every day but that we agree it does (for the purpose of inference). If we didn鈥檛 we鈥檇 have to go our separate ways.
Apart from that I鈥檇 prefer not to get into a discussion on semantics or philosophy but I鈥檓 glad if you feel that we are, to some extent, at one.
Regards
Heuvel -
Message 21
Posted by Anglo-Norman (U1965016) on Wednesday, 14th June 2006
Message 19:
But why not make it a programme purely celebrating Rome's contemporaries rather than using those contemporaries as a stick with which to beat the Romans? -
Message 22
Posted by Nik (U1777139) on Wednesday, 14th June 2006
Though one cannot deny the fact that the Roman civilisation has been critical to the development of Europes wester/northwestern lands, documentaries like the one you are talking, perhaps a bit excessive and over-salty (downgrading Romans to that level) maybe helpful to see things from another perspective, that of Celtics.
Celtics were by no-means one united people having the same culture from north Spain to north British iles. On the contrary that was a generic group of people living in different (most often opposing, to the extend of being Greek-style) kingdoms/federations with substantially different cultures ranging from down primitive to quite developed. As the documetary commented indeed Gauls had developed some road system (though primitive) but one has to remember that these people used extensively the rivers as a system from transport (the most logical) and the commerce from South France to north France had been substantially developed. Most of the Gauls, especially in modern France, had been quite open to new cultures being in trade with Greeks (whom they admired, since to their eyes (also) Greek culture was judged as superior and there was a substantial number of religious/political leaders that were 'hellenists'.
By no means were Celtics a bunch of uncultured primitive bunch of tribes and it is certainly the picture that fitted within Roman propaganda of those times. Lets not forget that Romans, living in the fringes of the Greek world were perceived as such only years before they set for their Empire, while there were federations and kingdoms within the heart of the Greek world (like Macedonians, Epirots, Aetolians, Acarnanians, Eyrataneans - states that occupied Greek symbols like the mountain Olympus (Macedonians) and Delphi (Aetolians) that were considered as being uncultured, obviously for political reasons. Spartans were also considered as uncultured while Spartans would say the same for the rest. Greeks would blame the Asians as corrupted, Romans would say the same about Greeks, Germanic tribes would say the same about Romans... all these terms of who is barbaric and who is cultured are directly linked with the politics that are going on in a given time and to which side is the author or you here.
One may imagine that had it not been for Roman conquest, this trend of gradually opening to the world that the Celtics had been on would continue and certain of the various Celtic states would have further developed into more advanced forms of culture and/or science and/or political organisation (like did the Romans, then Arabs, Slavs etc. when came in contact with greek culture). Roman conquest only stopped that evolution and their influence gave one new culture-style in the area - the French like to call it Gauloromaine (funny enough as if Gauls influenced heavily the Romans, well they did so but not to the extent of employing such a term, there can exist only the term "Hellenoroman"). That by no means that the culture of Celtics was one of barbarians (meaning that it was all swords, bows and axes, forests and wild-pig hunting!). -
Message 23
Posted by Rule_Britannia (U2429840) on Thursday, 15th June 2006
I apologise is anyone has already mentioned this but i did'nt have time to read the whole post, just the first few.
A while ago there was a few episodes about london, it was very interesting and even though the presenters view shed an interesting light on London most don't see, i felt annoyed how he made not one nice comment that i can remember. he aslmost described it as a man made hell for the commoner (i know london was bad at times) but there must have been nice points aswell, surly.
I can't believe i'v not seen this board before, i'v been stuck on wars and conflicts thinking none of the others would interest me, and yet, i find myself happy to have disscovered bbc messagboards again. lol. -
Message 24
Posted by heuvel (U1763810) on Tuesday, 11th July 2006
Alaric the Goth (message 17):
You long for 鈥渟ome good stuff on the Vandals, the Langobards, the (Merovingian) Franks and more, please on the Goths!鈥. You may be interested in the 2002 4-part German TV production 鈥淪t眉rm 眉ber Europa鈥 (available on DVD from Amazon Germany and based on a German book).
I am currently watching this series on Belgian TV where it is entitled (in translation) 鈥淭he Barbarians are coming鈥. Watching it, I keep thinking I鈥檓 seeing images from the Terry Jones series, but I can鈥檛 be sure. Maybe the two series are related in some way but, the German series deals entirely with the wanderings of the Germanic peoples and their interaction with Rome. There are episodes devoted principally to the migration of the Cimbri and Teutons, the Goths, the Vandals (and the role of the Huns), and the Franks and Visigoths (haven鈥檛 seen this last one yet). The object of the series appears to be to celebrate the role of the Germans in the formation of the nations of Western Europe and in continuing the Christian tradition. It is popular history and succumbs to the usual clich茅s, hype and inaccuracies. It also engages in some Roman-bashing whilst at the same time mentioning, in passing and without further comment, that the Goths robbed and subjugated the peoples they encountered during their long trek. Having said this, it is, in my opinion, much more informative than the Terry Jones series, perhaps due to the use of an invisible narrator rather than a personality as presenter.
You are unlikely to learn anything new from this series but it might provide you with a pleasant few hours indulging your passion for this period of history.
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