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Now available from Netflix and other outlets, Monty Python alumnus Terry Jones’s “Barbarians” is a superlative exercise in historical revisionism. As this 2 DVD set makes abundantly clear, the real barbarians were the Romans, not the people they robbed, murdered and raped. The first disk looks at the Celts and the Goths, while the second takes up the Persians, the Goths and the Vandals. On almost all criteria associated with “civilization”, the Roman Empire comes off looking atrocious. The central point that Jones keeps hammering away as narrator and writer as he travels about Europe in pursuit of the truth is that history is written by the winners. If American and British history has a triumphalist and self-vindicating character, so does Roman history.

By correcting the record, Jones implicitly helps to undermine the imperialist mindset of today, which by no accident appropriates many of the themes of the Roman Empire. Within the walls of the civilized world (New York, London, Paris, et al), there is reason and goodness; outside that world (Baghdad, Tehran, Khartoum), there is nothing but insanity and evil. This worldview is virtually the same that the Romans put forward as an excuse for their conquests. As Jones points out, the real motivation for the conquests was the desire to control gold and other precious resources, not to “civilize”.

For those of you who were inspired by Cliff Conner’s ground-breaking “People’s History of Science,” you will likely applaud Terry Jones’s determination to set the record straight on who was the real scientific pioneer, “civilized” Rome or its “barbarian” enemies. It turns out that the real scientific breakthroughs were taking place in the Celtic territories, which ranged from Ireland to Eastern Europe, before the Roman conquest. We learn that Rome set out to colonize the Celts because they had immense supplies of gold that was extracted from the earth using advanced mining techniques that were unknown to the Romans. The Celts also created roads all across Europe that linked trading centers. While none of their cities were as large as Rome, they were every bit as “civilized”. And they certainly did not have wild animals eat people in coliseums for “entertainment”, the precursor to today’s football games.

Just like George W. Bush today, Julius Caesar launched the Gallic Wars against the Celts in the name of self-defense. Unless the Celts were stopped in Gaul, they might invade Rome. It turns out that Julius Caesar was motivated much more by the desire to resolve a long-standing problem of public debt in the Roman Empire than anything else. He even used a bogus casus belli to muster support for his invasion. He claimed that it was necessary to “rescue” the Helvetii people who were being threatened by the Celts. As masters of propaganda, the Romans clearly provided lessons in how to manipulate public opinion to Woodrow Wilson, Lyndon Johnson, Tony Blair and others in the modern epoch.

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It was, actually, Rome who drew "first blood" against the Germanic tribes. Rome wished to claim the lands north of the Rhine river for its own. Up to that point in time, the Germanic people had been content to "live and let live", with a few border skirmishes and forays. When Rome crossed the line and entered the Teutonic lands with intent to conquer, the Germanic tribesmen rose up in fury. After several failings, the Teutons managed to defeat the Roman invasion at the battle of Teutoberg Forest (circa C.E. 9) to such a great extent that Rome never again tried to conquer the barbarian Germans.

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