Barbarians - Terry Jones

Any book with an ex-Python involved with it is going to be a fun read anyway. When said ex-Python is also a formidable Historian in his own right, even a TV tie-in book becomes worth it.

Terry Jones offers us an alternative view of the Roman Empire; many believe that the Romans were, in terms of technology and progressive thought, the greatest thing since sliced bread. Balls. They were indeed very good, but what they were really good at was unashamed looting of ideas that weren't their own, imposing their version of events on everyone else, beating seven shades of Hell out of anyone who said different or failing that, rewriting history to blot out people who were just as good at kicking arse as they were.
So I for one never heard much detail about the Celts, the Huns, the Palmyrians and the Visigoths whilst at school and nor, I suspect, did many. Oh I knew they existed but was always of the impression that they were weak little proto-kingdoms who were no match for the might of Rome and her Legions of professional soldiers.

But as Jones says himself, it wasn't like that. It wasn't like that at all.

And for 260 always entertaining and frequently enlightening pages he goes to some lengths to point out why this is so. Jones may have started as a comedian, but the man can do his research and put across a point as adroitly as anyone I've yet come across - yes, sometimes you get the feeling this was written with an eye more towards entertainment than scholarship but there are some serious points made here, some of them making for rather uncomfortable reading at times but such will always happen when preconcieved notions are swept away. E.g: we have the recieved wisdom that when the Goths entered Rome they sacked, looted and burned every square inch of it. The reality is that not even the Roman version of a garden fence was knocked over - on pain of death, what is more.
We also have the notion that no power in the East was equivalent to the military might of Rome. But the Pathians and Sassanians inflicted Rome's heaviest defeats since Hannibal some centuries before - perfume and jewellery wearing generals notwithstanding.

Jones (and his co-writer Alan Ereira) attempts nothing short of rewriting the history books, albeit in a minor way, and produces what is surely one of the most thought provoking books that I've read in a long time and, I suspect, in your time as well.

7 out of 10