Never On Sunday

Our library now offers another of the Teaching Company’s Great Courses: “Rome and the Barbarians.” It meets the usual high standards of the series: the lecturer is engaging and informative, covering about the amount of material you could get from a semester’s lectures without the assigned reading, or from one really substantial book. The content is about the depth of a standard undergraduate course.

Professor Harl, reasonably enough, takes “barbarians” as the Romans did, meaning “anyone not Greco-Roman,” or possibly even “not Roman”—I can’t be sure which since I haven’t yet reached the Macedonian wars on disk 5. The course, therefore, treats Roman relations with entirely civilized Carthage, Egypt, and Persia, as well as those with the less sophisticated Gauls, Bulgars, Huns, etc., who we usually think of as “barbarians.” Unfortunately, this makes the lectures somewhat hit-or-miss when it comes to interest and instructive value. When it discusses Rome’s relations with the less sophisticated groups lying on the periphery of Mediterranean civilization, it covers ground that’s quite new to me, and I expect to most casual students of history. History courses tend to gloss over the more barbarous barbarians, so a discussion of, say, the decentralized Celtic trading system is welcome. When the lectures discuss Rome’s relations with more familiar rivals, however, they trudge yet again over long familiar territory, especially in the obligatory Punic wars. Not that the material is bad, just old news to anyone who’s studied any Roman history generally, including the Great Course on that subject.

I would much prefer the course to take “barbarians” to mean just those pre-statist tribes about which we hear so little in more general history courses. Admittedly, putting that lecture together would take a lot more work, since the historical records are spottier. There would also be a risk of a disjointed quality if the lecturer skimmed too quickly over the obviously relevant developments in war and diplomacy and home rule unfolding while Rome faced off against other classical civilizations. But I think a Great Courses lecturer could handle the challenge.