Will the Real Barbarian Please Stand Up?

I was watching a couple of episodes of Terry Jones’ “The Barbarians” (2006) the other night. Terry Jones, in case you don’t remember him, is a Monty Python alum. He is also a medievalist. And an entertaining fellow. And as willing, as it turns out, to play with the facts every bit as much as anyone else in order to prove a point.

Facts are funny things, you see. They are, if they truly are facts, indisputable. Put them all together and you get a picture – generally a realistic picture. The problem is, there tend to be LOTS of facts. If you leave a few facts out, are the facts that remain still facts? Well, yes, they are, but they form an incomplete picture. In other words, your facts are still facts but the factual sum of the parts does not equal the factual parts. This is a case where facts can be made to lie.

Terry Jones is quite anxious to show that those nasty old Romans weren’t really the civilized party. Or, to put it more accurately perhaps, that those nasty old barbarians the Romans were always going on about, weren’t really the barbarians. In the first of the two episodes I took a look at, he talked about Gaul and Caesar’s conquest. It was very interesting and he had me smiling a time or two, sometimes because he’s a witty fellow and other times because of his attempts to spin the facts. To make them dance for him.

One example was the fate of Vercingetorix. If you’ll remember, the defeated Gaul was brought to Rome and thrown into a pit, or prison, for five years while Caesar finished the Civil Wars. He was then trotted out, along with some other conquered leaders, and paraded in Caesar’s triumphal procession. He was then quietly strangled and his body dumped. Jones gleefully pointed out how barbaric the nasty old Romans were. Now I’m not trying to assume the posture of a Roman apologist, but let’s be fair, at the very least, Terry! You point to Vercingetorix? I invite you to look at what we still do to foreign leaders today. Take a look at Nuremberg, if you will. Or if that’s not recent enough for you, to Saddam Hussein. We still kill defeated leaders. Are you telling me the Gaul’s wouldn’t have killed Caesar had roles been reversed?

Or let’s look at another nifty attempt to spin the facts. Jones, ever so apparently guileless but clever, almost with daemonic glee, built up the tension as he led into some deep, dark, horrible secret about the Gauls that horrified the Romans. What was it? Human sacrifice? No, of course not. It was the role of women. Apparently, if we are to believe Jones, the Romans were terrified of the Gauls because the Gauls granted women a higher status in society than the Romans did. Funny, what I remember horrifying the Romans was human sacrifice. You see, by Caesar’s day, nobody could remember human sacrifices in Rome. The last had been while Hannibal was knocking on the gates of the city itself. Caesar was as removed from the reality of human sacrifice as we are from slavery. We can’t imagine the reality of it and unless you’re a member of the Republican base, you don’t much care for the idea. We find it horrible.

But Rome attacked Gaul because Gaul treated its women well?

I’m not saying some peoples did not treat their women better than others. Or probably to be fair, differently. But let’s face facts. Gaul and Brennus no more attacked Rome in the fourth century BCE over its treatment of women than Caesar and the Romans attacked Gaul in the first century BCE over its treatment of women. The Romans tended not to be terribly offended by what other cultures did. Mock them, yes. But everybody mocks every body else because they’re different. We still do that in today’s world. But the Romans, like America in Iraq, attacked not out of moral outrage, but out of avarice and other usual excuses, such as natural resources, glory, avarice, etc.

And let’s face another fact: fact cannot be, should not be, taken out of context of other facts. This applies not only to my point about how we treat defeated leaders, but about historical context. Caesar didn’t invade Gaul in a vacuum. Jones was right to bring up the memory of Brennus and how much it affected even the Romans of Caesar’s day. Historical memory can be long. Ask the Russians. Ask the French. But history did not hop from 387 BCE to 58 BCE. There is the little issue of continuity – the arrival of the Cimbri and Teutones in Gaul and the crushing defeat of several Romans armies and the threat posed by these migrations to Rome itself. Rome, like Russia, remembered invasion – Russia from the east, Rome from the north. Or, to use another example, France remembered well the march of the Prussian army across France in 1870 when World War I began – about the same span of time from the invasion of the Cimbri and Teutones to Caesar’s consulship.

But we don’t want to let some facts get in the way of other facts, do we? It’s nearly impossible not to let how we feel about things get in the way. And I understand Jones’ point. He wants to point out that we understand the barbarian peoples through the lens of Roman writing. And of course, the victor writes the history. Point taken. There is more to the “barbarians” than we have been led to believe. Going only from a Roman PoV is no more fair than looking at Pagan culture through a Christian lens. Another sin historiography has long been guilty of – and at times, still is.

But in our quest for truth, we should not “lie” to make our point. It rather diminishes the nobility of our goal, and taints our success.

Another little point Terry Jones forgot to mention, in his efforts to make the Gauls, and in a second episode, the Celts as a whole, look good, besides ignoring the issue of human sacrifice (after all, they had a more accurate calendar than Rome!) is head-hunting. Yes, the Gauls and Celts were head-hunters. They’d lop them off and hang them from walls. Welcome to my home! Yes, this is Getorix. I killed him last year. Handsome chap, eh? They had religious reasons, of course. But human sacrifice had religious motives as well. We still find it horrifying. So did the Romans. And the Celts were still doing it in the Middle Ages.

But pointing out that his near perfect Gauls had this unappealing habit might might have diminished his attempts to make the Gauls look good by making the Romans look bad. A fair and balanced treatment, I will argue, could have achieved the same results. In fact, I’d have been much more impressed had he taken the trouble to mention the Cimbri and Teutones (rationale: If Rome controls Gaul, Rome can better defend Italy and Rome) and if he’d mentioned human sacrifice and head hunting rather than the role and status of women in society. After all, if Gauls treated women better than Romans, Pagan Romans still treated women better than the Christianized barbarians who followed in their wake – as a medievalist like Jones should know. In fact, they treated women better than some cultures treat women today. After all, Roman women could be priestesses and even have authority over men. You won’t see that happen in the Catholic Church or in many conservative Protestant denominations.

So let’s at least attempt, as we study history, to use a fair and balanced approach, and accept history with all its warts and blemishes thrown in. No culture is perfect. Since there cannot be a cultural “norm” towards which all should reach, it’s a silly idea. Cultures are not superior or inferior. They’re different. And one country does not attack another country over cultural differences. Religious, yes, but even Jones did not attempt to turn Rome’s invasion of Gaul into a crusade.

I think there is a lesson here for all of us, for Pagans and Christians alike. We have to accept the fact, as we look backwards in time, that there was no Golden Age. I know I’ve said this before but I think some modern Pagans still get that silly notion that life was perfect before the rise of Christianity. It wasn’t. It never will be. If Christianity disappeared today the world would not magically transform into utopia. People are people. They will always be people. And whatever religion dominates, whatever culture dominates, there will always be crooks and sociopaths and those who seek to better themselves at the expense of others.

It’s simplistic to say the Romans were the “good guys” and the Gauls were the “barbarians.” Yes. But it’s not an improvement to say the Gauls were the “good guys” and the Romans were the real barbarians.

The lesson here? When you read anything, watch anything, even here on my blog, take it with a grain of salt. We all have points of views and its virtually impossible to avoid an agenda of sorts when you write. Take the opportunity instead to educate yourself. Read, read, read. Then read some more. And most importantly, THINK. Think and analyze and reason and come to your own conclusions.

Addendum: In the interest of fairness, I should also point out that Jones did mention one less than savory practice of Roman culture – the exposure of unwanted infants. Using Medieval texts he then argued that the ancient Celts cared for the old and infirm as well as the young. I don’t know how accurate this claim is because I’m no expert on Celtic culture, but again, in the interest of fairness, he should also then have mentioned the head hunting and human sacrifice.