Barbarians

[shereads]

Just finished (barely) reading "Justinian's Flea" by William Rosen. I don't know about you, but I have one hell of a time differentiating among my late-antiquity barbarian hordes.

Huns, I get, thanks to Atilla. I picture him as Yule Brenner with bad manners and unfortunate dental hygeine.

Goths: too many kinds. Visigoths, Ossigoths, regular Goths. What's up with that?

My favorite barbarian horde: the Vandals. I'll bet they had fun. Imagine having nothing more pressing to do in the waning days of the Roman Empire than spray-painting monuments with "ROME SUX," leaving dead mice in the aqueduct, etc.

"Uh-oh. Here come those damn Vandals again."

"Kids these days!"

Discuss.

 

[cloudy]

Just finished (barely) reading "Justinian's Flea" by William Rosen. I don't know about you, but I have one hell of a time differentiating among my late-antiquity barbarian hordes.

Huns, I get, thanks to Atilla. I picture him as Yule Brenner with bad manners and unfortunate dental hygeine.

Goths: too many kinds. Visigoths, Ossigoths, regular Goths. What's up with that?

My favorite barbarian horde: the Vandals. I'll bet they had fun. Imagine having nothing more pressing to do in the waning days of the Roman Empire than spray-painting monuments with "ROME SUX," leaving dead mice in the aqueduct, etc.

"Uh-oh. Here come those damn Vandals again."

"Kids these days!"

Discuss.

Wasn't Brian of Nazareth a Vandal?

"What's this, then? "Romanes eunt domus"? People called Romanes, they go, the house?"

 

[rgraham666]

"Around about the time the Goths were picking their noses in the Forum and wondering what the villa lavatories were for…"

One of my favourite lines from The Day The Univers Changed.

I always think of H. Beam Piper when I hear the word 'barbarian'. From his book Space Viking.

"Every civilization rests on a barbarian base. People who don't under stand civilization and wouldn't like it if they did." I'm inclined to believe this is the truth.

 

[dr_mabeuse]

I want to know what all those barbarians were doing before they started sacking Rome. Were they just marching in circles in the Black Forest for 4,000 years? They couldn't have been farming. There was no one else to pillage, so what were they doing?

I have a feeling they all came out of a trap door in the Alps: the Goths, the Loons, the Flems, the Handles, the Wimps, all of them.

 

[cantdog]

Goths are a Germanic people. Archaeology has made a lot of strides recently, casting some illumination on these rather mysterious people. Pomerania, Poland, and then the northern hinterland of the Black Sea. In the middle of the first century AD, Pomerania and south along the rivers. By the 4th century AD, Gothic power dominated between the Danube and the Don.

Through the first three centuries AD, the Goths are non literate, and we have written records only when Roman sources chose to refer to them. This only gets serious during the migration period; during the Roman Iron Age, they are only mentioned, as by Pliny and Strabo, as a group beyond the groups which were dealt with directly by the Romans. They had influence in inter-Germanic politics, but didn't impinge on Rome directly.

We know they retreated before the Huns after 375, and it is since that time that we find confederations called East and West Goths, but both those groups seem to be ethnically mixed.

I kind of dig the Goths. There's a couple of very cool Gothic bibles.

 

[Lisa Denton]

I want to know what all those barbarians were doing before they started sacking Rome. Were they just marching in circles in the Black Forest for 4,000 years? They couldn't have been farming. There was no one else to pillage, so what were they doing?

I have a feeling they all came out of a trap door in the Alps: the Goths, the Loons, the Flems, the Handles, the Wimps, all of them.

Yes, you can just look at thier descendants today and see they never done no farming. Crips and Bloods.

 

[Edward Teach]

Don't know much about the Goths, Visigoths, et al, but I always liked the name Alaric. Wish I had been named Alaric, then you could "call me Ahh-aal, call me Al."

Vandals sound cool too. Bet they had a lot of sex.

 

[Lisa Denton]

Don't know much about the Goths, Visigoths, et al, but I always liked the name Alaric. Wish I had been named Alaric, then you could "call me Ahh-aal, call me Al."

Vandals sound cool too. Bet they had a lot of sex.

Yes Ed, I think the words rape and pillage kinda go together.

 

[slyc_willie]

Barbarians were never without civilization, they just had a different view of it.

The Romans vilified them, because they would not bow to their beliefs. Centuries were spent trying to defeat the 'hordes' of Germania and Brittany and everywhere else, because Rome, like all empires, did not want to acknowledge any other rule in the world but their own.

But the Germanic tribes did have a complicated civlization, rooted in tradition and religion. The earliest Teutonic tribes worshipped an Earth Mother, and numerous shrines were built to honor her. The names Gea and Rhea are descended from these beliefs, and are still revered by many Pagan and Wiccan cults today.

 

[Edward Teach]

Yes Ed, I think the words rape and pillage kinda go together.

Pillage. Is that like drugs and stuff?

 

[neonlyte]

Yes Ed, I think the words rape and pillage kinda go together.

This is the kind of misunderstanding that gets Vikings a bad name. They had a speech impediment, much like the barbarians who today occupy northern Portugal - they can't pronounce the letter 'v' either. The Vikings were the origional Biker Boys, but without the wheels... obviously. The Vikngs were handing out invitations to 'raves' in the 'villages'.

 

[shereads]

I want to know what all those barbarians were doing before they started sacking Rome.

I don't know about the others, but the Vandals were inventing spray paint and bb guns.

 

[neonlyte]

I want to know what all those barbarians were doing before they started sacking Rome.

They were sacking the employees of General Motors - chariot sales were in decline.

 

[Liar]

This is the kind of misunderstanding that gets Vikings a bad name. They had a speech impediment, much like the barbarians who today occupy northern Portugal - they can't pronounce the letter 'v' either. The Vikings were the origional Biker Boys, but without the wheels... obviously. The Vikngs were handing out invitations to 'raves' in the 'villages'.

Wouldn't that make them the Pikings?

 

[JAMESBJOHNSON]

Vandals came to Rome looking for work and wanting a better life for their families. Then the government gave all of them licenses, "So we know who's here!", and they voted themselves into office.

 

[Lisa Denton]

Wouldn't that make them the Pikings?

Liar, I am gonna spank you and Neon both. It took me 20 minutes to figure this out and my head still hurts. It was like learning a new language, even harder than pig latin.

 

[neonlyte]

Wouldn't that make them the Pikings?

No... Pike is a fish

 

[Roxanne Appleby]

Barbarians were never without civilization, they just had a different view of it.

The Romans vilified them, because they would not bow to their beliefs. Centuries were spent trying to defeat the 'hordes' of Germania and Brittany and everywhere else, because Rome, like all empires, did not want to acknowledge any other rule in the world but their own.

But the Germanic tribes did have a complicated civlization, rooted in tradition and religion. The earliest Teutonic tribes worshipped an Earth Mother, and numerous shrines were built to honor her. The names Gea and Rhea are descended from these beliefs, and are still revered by many Pagan and Wiccan cults today.

Correction, Willie: They had a culture. In popular parlance "civilization" has mistakenly acquired a broader connotation equating it with culture, but we already have a word for culture ("culture") and the specific definition of civilization is quite different. Wiki has good article on it. The definition gets a bit blurry at the edges, but it begins with cities and writing.

I have always been fascinated by barbarians. I suspect that they're a lot more interesting and romantic from a remove of 2,000 years.

Supposedly the Goths originated, logically enough, on the island of Gotland in the Baltic.

 

[Roxanne Appleby]

They were sacking the employees of General Motors - chariot sales were in decline.

GM had gone broke by then - overpromised benefits to the guilds, and couldn't compete with the Sassanid chariot builders.

 

[Caitano]

No... Pike is a fish

And a very formidable fish.

 

[Recidiva]

By Pippin's dance steps, this is complicated.

 

[cantdog]

So about Justinian's Flea. What's it about? Should anyone care?

 

[rgraham666]

No... Pike is a fish

No. A pike is something you use to get someone off their horse.

It only gets them off their horse once. But better him than you. And you get to keep the horse to sell it afterwards.

I think like a barbarian, don't I?

Slyc's right about the Romans. Like the Greeks, who they probably stole the idea from, the Romans thought that any one who wasn't Roman was a barbarian.

 

[xssve]

All the Goths are considered Germanic, but Visigoths and Ostrogoths are Probobly more recent Indo-European arrivals - the Visigoths were Arayan, I believe (Persian), and eventually settled in Spain - the Goths, Nordic/Germanic, settled mostly in France, the Ostrogoths, possibly Turkic originally, in Italy.

It's pretty complex, and this is a gross oversimplification, but I think it's roughly accurate if you figure in a lot of overlap and back and forths. One clue is linguistic, France is divided between d'oc and d'oil.

 

[neonlyte]

The Goths were a tribe of wandering apotheceries who brought goth medicine to the masses.