Rome, 23rd of August in the year 410 A.D... Tomorrow Alaric the Goth will sack Rome. It will be one of the most traumatic moments in history. The whole of the western world will be shaken to its core. Blood and violence! Rape and slaughter! Death and destruction! The cradle of civilization burned to the ground and left in ruins!
Well, not really. It was all much more extraordinary than that.
-Terry Jones' Barbarians
So what do you do after you've been part of the most famous comedy troupe ever? Well, pretty much anything you like. The members of Monty Python have gone on to become critically acclaimed directors, actors in films, and the host of a series of travel shows. Terry Jones (among other things) has turned his interest in the past into a series of TV documentaries on medieval history. Starting out in 1995 with The Crusades, Jones has written and hosted several such series, the latest being 2006's Barbarians, now available on DVD. An engrossing and interesting documentary, it challenges much of what we've been taught about the Roman Empire in a very convincing way.
The series is broken down into four episodes, each of which looks at a different barbarian race. The first thing that Jones makes clear is that according to the Romans, a barbarian is simply anyone who isn't Roman. The xenophobia that the Romans felt is clearly visible in their writings about other races, all of which are described as inferior and uncivilized. But was that really the case? Probably not.
As the old saying goes, history is written by the winners, and that is doubly true when the losers have not form of written language. Most of what we know of the Goths, Vandals, and Celts comes from Roman texts, a decidedly one-sided look at things.
https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/31978/terry-jones-barbarians/
(Who is a barbarian and who is civilized?)
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