>
> Date: Fri, 12 May 2000 13:13:24 -0700
> From: David Dunham <david_at_a-sharp.com>
> Subject: Re: Good Lunars?
>
> Adam Betteridge
>
> > >But the Romans were bad guys.
> >
> >Dave you obviously haven't met General Maximus yet.
>
> Nope.
>
> But the Romans are the ones who wiped out the Celts and the
> Carthaginians.
Only they didn't "wipe them out". All they did was replace an elite exploiting aristocracy with a remote set of rulers, and coincidentally introduce a somewhat better set of laws. If I wasn't in the noblity, I'd choose Roman law over Brehon law (with its12 different castes) anyday. Besides, trade and stability improved the living standards. And don't forget the aquaducts!
> (Who I invariably root for when I read military
> history. Come on, you've got to admit that Vercingetorix and Hannibal
> kick butt. Or for that matter, Arminius the German.)
Can't agree with you there. Personally, I find Tacitus' account of the conquest
of Britain riveting, especially the ruses that Claudius used to make native
superstitions work against the Britons.
Besides, Rommel, IHMO, was a far better general than most of the Allied
Generals in WW2. Doesn't affect who the Good Guys were in that conflict. (Did I
just Godwin myself?)
For your average Celt who wasn't in the nobility, they stood less chance of having their property expropriated, or being killed in an inter-tribal raid, or being killed or robbed during a journey, under the Romans than under their own anarchic aristocracy. Heroism, fighting and raids are great if you're not the one who has to go hungry after your crops are burnt/livestock stolen/family slain.
That's why the Gauls after a few decades were such a quiet province, compared to, say, Judea. Imperial taxes were a small price to pay for stability (until after Justinian, anyway).
It's easy to romanticize the Celts, 'cos in reality we don't actually know that much about them, save classical accounts by the likes of Caesar & Diodorus Siculus, and the much later vernacular texts from Ireland & Wales, plus what we can piece together from archeological evidence. That still leaves a lot of gaps in our knowledge of their lives, especially in their religion and social customs.
It doesn't help that a lot of the writing for laypersons is also done by Celtic nationalists of one sort or another (like Peter Beresford Ellis, who's an Irish Republican Socialist, and reading him you'd think the ancient Celts were too), or new-age mystics with abysmal standards of scholarship. Ideological agendas tend to fill in the gap in our knowledge about the Celts.
(Frex, French socialists tend to identify more with Gauls than the Franks; the French Gaullists identify more with the Franks. Hence, debates on the history of the Celts in France rapidly become political).
> And who doesn't
> root for the underdog? We don't know what evil was done by the Empire
> of Star Wars. It's enough to know it's an Empire.
Yup. But Star Wars also raided Merkin mythology of its own origins, as well as other mythologies.
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