Romans and Barbarians
Throughout the text, I have used the term ‘barbarian’ not, I hope, in a pejorative sense, but simply to designate the Germanic peoples who overran the Western half of the Roman Empire and for a time (the Ostrogoths in particular) caused considerable trouble within the surviving Eastern half. The main and most obvious difference between Romans and barbarians was about culture and literacy. Especially literacy. In recent times there has been a movement to rehabilitate the barbarians: the Vikings were explorers and traders, rather than blood-thirsty marauders; Saxons intermarried peaceably with Romano-Britons instead of going in for ethnic cleansing; the exquisite craftsmanship of Celtic and Teutonic jewellery and weaponry puts these peoples on a par with the Romans; and so on. Recently, Richard Rudgley and Terry Jones, in their identically titled books, Barbarians, put up a well-argued case for the defence. Both, however, in my view, ignore the elephant in the sitting-room: the barbarians were illiterate.
Writing alone enables ideas to be recorded and transferred, which in turn allows them to grow and develop. Without writing, sciences, philosophy, literature, etc. – the very building-blocks of civilization – would be inconceivable. All of which is rather stating the obvious. Without writing, societies are prisoners of the immediate, limited by memory and experience as to how to shape their plans and actions. Oral transfer of knowledge can’t compete with libraries.
The virtues and defects of shame-and-honour barbarian warrior societies compared to those of Graeco-Roman civilization need not be examined here, as they have been touched on fully in the text.
The popular image of the barbarian as ferociously brave, but with mind and emotions at the mercy of physical urges, in contrast to the rational Roman, whose ordered intelligence was always firmly in control of his body, is over-simplified and something of a cliché. (Shades of Bonnie Prince Charlie’s Highland warriors, and the polite society of Georgian England that was given such a fright by them!) Nevertheless, although based to some extent on Roman propaganda, it does contain a useful grain of truth. However, it’s perhaps worth reminding ourselves that barbarian societies weren’t static, and could evolve quite quickly into ones that could in no way be described as such. The heroic savages described in Beowulf are separated by only a few generations from that great polymath the Venerable Bede.