Let's get this out of the way first: Terry Jones, the co-author of this book and presenter of the television show it accompanies, was in Monty Python, the British comedy legends. However, in recent years Jones has forged a new career as an ambassador for history, making iconoclastic and humorous history programs directed at the general public, and they have responded by watching. Jones' name on a book does not indicate a big joke.
The cover of Barbarians proclaims that it 'accompanies the tv series', but fortunately not in the 'behind the scenes pictures and filming anecdotes sense'. Instead, Barbarians is 288 pages of text on the subject matter, with three banks of colour plates. A short introduction makes the book's aim clear: centuries of pro-roman and anti-'pagan' bias have presented a wholly misleading view of the so-called barbarians which Rome fought, and a corrective is needed, and as the Romans considered everyone who wasn't Roman a barbarian, there are a lot of misrepresented people for the book to cover.
Much of this passionately expounded introduction is spot on: there is a relative dearth of sources for the non-Roman peoples, those sources we do have tend to be from the Romans view and decades of western schoolchildren have been taught how the great Roman Empire was torn down by stupid hairy invaders. Unfortunately, while Jones and Ereira do look at modern research, they don't provide a subtly argued or nuanced corrective but a barbarian version of the roman bias they're against.
The text is divided up 'ethnically', with chapters – and in the case of the Celts, the whole of Part 1 – tackling various 'barbarian' groups including the Dacians, Greeks, Persians, Celts, Goths, Germans, Sassanians, Vandals and Huns. Jones and Ereira always make it clear that historians aren't sure whether these groups really thought of themselves as groups, nor do we know how they formed and interacted. Much of the book follows the same pattern: the barbarian group in question are named, the high points of their culture and politics summarised, their destruction by Rome chronicled and the Romans criticised for it. The exception is Part 4, which also deals with the collapse of the Western Roman Empire and the rise of Catholic Europe.
A book of this sort, essentially an argumentative comparison of Rome and its neighbours, was never going to have room for an expansive discussion of the various 'barbarian' peoples and their way of life, so readers looking for depth will have to look elsewhere, the summaries are shallow. Indeed, if you’re interested in the Celts you should just turn straight to the works of Barry Cunliffe, from which Barbarians mainly draws. What Jones and Ereira have succeeded in doing is picking out potentially surprising and intriguing aspects of these 'barbarians' and showcasing them. The Dacian's possessed a religion and philosophy considered by contemporaries alongside Buddha, Zoroastrian and Pythagoras; the Celts built roads of smoothed planks. Unfortunately, these achievements are often overstated: the Greeks may have had a chain driven repeating bolt thrower, but it wasn't a machine gun.
Hand-picking the cream of barbarian achievement is only half of Jones and Ereira's attempt to recast the 'barbarians' in a new light; the other is criticising the Romans. This is an incredibly easy thing to do, because the list of Roman activities which we in the modern world find (or claim to find) repugnant is long and filled with topics like genocide and murder as entertainment. Unfortunately, the authors don't resist the chance to morally compare the Romans and their neighbours. The Celtic practice of beheading enemy casualties and parading them around on a chariot is held up, by Jones and Ereira, as morally superior to the Roman practice of having captives killed in an amphitheatre while thousands watched. (The Celtic practice of decorating your entranceway with enemy skulls isn't mentioned.) Moral equivalency is a difficult topic at the best of times and the authors get stuck in the muddy swamp of human brutality.
