Terry Jones: "Barbarians"

Terry Jones series is continuing on BBC2 and is proving very interesting.

His main premise is, and he argues it very well, that far from the Romans advancing civilisation among the people they called "barbarians", precisely the opposite was the case.

http://enjoyment.independent.co.uk/books/features/article496524.ece

This is popular history with an edge, and an agenda. Jones gleefully and wittily takes the side of the maligned Britons and Persians, Goths and Vandals, to argue that "the story of a descent from the light of Rome to the darkness of Barbarian dominion is completely false". The "barbarian" hordes so slighted by victor's history emerge as more sophisticated, humane and resourceful than the Roman killing-machine that marched out to rob and ruin them. Take the quite un-vandalistic Vandals: when they entered the chaos that was Rome in 455AD, "not a single building was destroyed".

Revisionism runs rampant, as Rome's "civilising mission" stands revealed - with the help of cutting-edge scholarship - as a pretext for genocide and plunder from Anglesey to Antioch: "At the heart of Rome was death". On the bloodied sands of the arena, Jones locates the dead and deathly centre of imperial power: "To enjoy watching people suffer and die was the very essence of Roman identity."