Terry Jones' Barbarians

[DecimusCaesar]

I have read Terry Jones' Barbarians a few months ago and although I didn't agree with a lot of his views he did provide a fairly good counterbalance to all the pro-Roman texts. The book was bound to infuriate many Romanophiles and Jones goes out of his way to show that the Romans were evil, barbaric people, while the barbarians were all civilised, peaceful and respectable to other people's rights.

 

I never got a chance to see the TV show the book was based on, but now two episodes from the series have been posted on Google-videos:

 

The Savage Goths

 

 

The Huns and the Vandals

 

Unfortunately I cannot find the other 2 epsidoes about Celts and the Easterners (Greeks and Persians). They might take a while to load.

[Pertinax]

This series (unlike the recent BBC offering) is well worth seeing. Even if you disagree with Jones , you can pick up useful information and get a slightly different perspective. I think he likes to be devil's advocate -but he does it with affection and humor-so it's like having your mad Uncle round for Dinner , he goes off on odd tangents , but the conversation is worthwhile.

[WotWotius]

I utterly disagree with his historical stance; however, as it is Terry Jones we are dealing with, I still found his series entertaining, and, to a certain extent, informative.

 

I love Terry so much that I once slapped a public school boy for saying: 'trust a pleb to have Terry Jones as their favourite member of Python'.

[longbow]

I liked his perspective of the Gaulish 'Celts' but i thought his view of the Goths was a mile off.But as you say, its Terry Jones! and his humour does add a lot to the show.

 

 

I love Terry so much that I once slapped a public school boy for saying: 'trust a pleb to have Terry Jones as their favourite member of Python'.

 

LOL,i too was called a Pleb by a public school boy down in Barnard castle,he too was punished :boxing: .I'm proud to be a Pleb but when you get called one by some inbred toffee nosed w*****! it gets your back up.

[spittle]

I enjoyed Terry Jones' CRUSADES series/book but thought o9nr of the Amazon customer reviews was accurate. The reviewer pointed out how many Muslim committed atrocities they had overlooked in order to push their revisionist 'Muslims were more civilised than European Christians' manifesto.

 

The bits of Barbarians that I have seen strike me as the same very basic but very entertaining type of thing. Its a great way of making my 9 year old son involved in my interest but he quickly returns to his dinosaurs when I try introducing something a little more complex.

[DecimusCaesar]

I enjoyed Terry Jones' CRUSADES series/book but thought o9nr of the Amazon customer reviews was accurate. The reviewer pointed out how many Muslim committed atrocities they had overlooked in order to push their revisionist 'Muslims were more civilised than European Christians' manifesto.

 

I enjoyed that one too, though what he was doing wasn't all that revisionist at the time, after all the series and the book were written in 1997 when a lot of other scholars, following in the footsteps of Steven Runciman's Crusades histories of the 1950's (plus Le Goff, Maalouf etc) were saying that the Crusades were a terrible period of history. To quote 'A History of the Crusades vol.3, 1954' by Runciman :

 

"In the long sequence of interaction and fusion between Orient and Occident out of whcih our civilization has grown, the Crusades were a tragic and destructive episode...There was so much courage and so little honour, so much devotion and so little understanding."

 

It is only after the events of September 11th that historians began re-assesing the Crusades once again. Jones' book wasn't really revisionist at the time as he was just following what Runciman et al had been saying since the 1950s. Although once again he did try to portray the war as 'good Arab Muslims' versus 'bad Christian Crusaders' sort of thing (Playing the devil's advocate as Pertinax said).

Historians of the past, influenced by post-colonial regrets at how the Western world had exploited many countries would see parallels in the cruelty of the Crusaders while avoiding atrocities committed by Arabic armies. Post September 11th it's the other way round, with historians drawing parallels of the Muslims of the Crusader era as being the equivalent of Al-Qaida, while the Crusaders are being portrayed as noble defenders of Christendom and Western Civilisation.

 

The truth no doubt is somewhere in the middle between both ideas, or perhaps they are both wrong.

 

As for Terry Jones claiming that the Barbarians arent as bad as they were, he isn't proposing a new revisionist history, he's just agreeing with what historians have been saying for the last few decades..."the fall of Rome was just a peaceful transition from Roman to Germanic Europe"...The Barbarians weren't really barbaric....etc. it's only in the last few years that historians like Peter Heather and Bryan-Ward Perkins have gone back to the traditional 19th century view that the Roman Empire was destroyed by savage, technoloigcally backward barbarians, whose actions set Europe back centuries with the Dark Ages. Terry Jones ideas might seem radical a lot of the time, but the truth is he is just re-packaging old ideas, although he's does it in a very entertaining, humorous way.

 

Even so a good Terry Jones' book I recommend is Medieval lives, which is excellent.

Edited November 8, 2006 by DecimusCaesar

[spittle]

Revisionist was the wrong word to use. I enjoy Terry Jones' but get sick of white/western/christian guilt leading authors into downplaying certain aspects of history and conflict. In the final analysis its a form of manipulation and I'd rather have the facts in order to come to my own conclusions.

 

Since 9/11 I have found that many liberal historians use their work to place Islam on a pedistal. 'Saladin's forces were the first occupying regime to allow freedom of religion'..., etc. I don't see how that excuses the radicals of a millenium later from encouraging suicide bombers and mass murder.

[DecimusCaesar]

Since 9/11 I have found that many liberal historians use their work to place Islam on a pedistal. 'Saladin's forces were the first occupying regime to allow freedom of religion'..., etc. I don't see how that excuses the radicals of a millennium later from encouraging suicide bombers and mass murder.

 

You are right about that. Then again conservative historians are now portraying the Crusaders as noble defenders of Christendom and the West. 'Threatened by the rise of Islam they turned to bring the war to the muslims in the holy land' they say, forgetting that Pope Urban II had urged them to go free the Holy Land, not as an attempt to stop a muslim invasion of Europe, but rather to capture pilgrimage sites for the Church. One book called 'The Politically Incorrect guide to Islam and the Crusades' likes to downplay the atrocities committed by the Crusaders (especially the Massacre of Jerusalem, 1099), while at the same time portraying them as heroes fighting for their beliefs. You could therefore say that it works both ways, with liberals and conservatives pushing their own agendas. Best hope is to buy one liberal book and another conservative one and try to reach a balance between, because let's face it, we aren't going to get a non biased history in a hurry... (Too bad they are usually both as bad as each other.)

 

By the way, if anyone comes across the other 2 documentaries in the series, perhaps they could post them here.

[Guest Remolabarca]

Perhaps the next series of Terry Jones (a brit) will examine the British Empire and how they civilized the corners of the earth.

Besides the irony, of course the British empire was mostly positive but in modernizing other countries they did do barbaric acts (for example in India). Plus we must keep in mind that the religion and values of the British empire was based on Christianity. This of course was not true for the romans and barbarians for most of their history.

 

Ok - besides my criticism - Terry Jones documentary is well made and does give you a different angle of viewing the Roman civilization.

 

However, I do find that his personal views and negative judgments of the Roman civilization come out too often.

[Titus001]

i just seen terry's show and one thing i have to say he was almost as biased to the romans as the roman writers were to barbarians kind of ironic,but in a way it was a funny show

[Viggen]

I just watched it now, and i must say i liked it allot, everyone should see it, raised some interesting questions...

[Macerinus]

I just watched it now, and i must say i liked it allot, everyone should see it, raised some interesting questions...

 

I read the book ages ago and quite liked it, but I've never seen the television series.

Is there a place to watch them online? as the google links seem to have expired.

 

I cannot watch anything from the BBC website (or sort like website) due to my location.

 

Cheers,

Macerinus

[guy]

Although it is always good to hear the non-Roman perspective, parts of the series are both sheer fantasy and sensationalistic. Jones, for example, insists on telling us that the Sassanians, who supplanted the weakened Parthians as a result of Roman aggression, were less culturally developed and more brutish than their Parthian successor. Oh, how simplisitic...and wrong.

 

Not surprising, however, he fails to make the same criticism about the successors to the Sassanian Empire, the Arabs. Interestingly, it was the bloody and enervating conflicts with the Roman and later Byzantine Empire that weakened the Sassanian Empire and that led to its eventual decline and collapse. But let us not discuss that. It might upset some people's sensibilities.

 

 

guy also known as gaius

Edited March 20, 2011 by guy

[Ursus]

I had heard Jones series was more about American foreign policy than about ancient cultures (i.e., how a supposedly advanced superpower is culturally inferior to civilizations with whom it is at war).

 

In any event, I can't take Jones seriously. Why? Including the Greeks in his "barbarian" musings is preposterous. The Greeks invented the word "barbarian," and among all their subject peoples, the Roman held classical Greek culture in high esteem.

 

 

 

[Hus]

The Greeks were seen by the Romans as 'barbarian' enemies (ie. Syracuse, etc?), Jones is supposing? I enjoyed his series, and did indeed raise fascinating points.