Netflix's "Barbarians" - Quintili Vare, legiones redde!

[Ahriman]

The famous battle of the Teutoburg Forest, in which Germanic warriors halted the northward advance of the Roman Empire in AD 9, is the focus of "The Barbarians."

https://www.netflix.com/title/81024039

Looks rather comfy, I'd say. And it's focused on Arminius and the battle of Teutoburg Forest. Anyone watched it yet?

A little background info about Arminius and the events surrounding the battle:

History Channel has done a fairly good episode about him previously.

Arminius is the sole reason Germans don't speak a Romance language, simply put.

 

[MarvinTheParanoidAndroid]

I'm not touching a Netflix product.

 

[Harlay de Champvallon]

I'll look. Too many historical clad fighters in some stupid black gear, so I'll see.

 

[Ahriman]

I'm not touching a Netflix product.

Set sail to the high seas instead, don't give them your money. Win-win!

 

[Reverend]

The leader will be a BIPOC because that's who led the northern germanic tribes during that period.

 

[The Mass Shooter Ron Soye]

I'm not touching a Netflix product.

Give himovies.to a touch.

 

[Samson Pumpkin Jr.]

I wonder how many black romans and lesbian german warriors will be in it. Netflix, unfortunately, lost too many workers in this production

 

[Sinner's Sandwich]

Pls let there be a cameo of Arnold Schwarzenegger as a barbarian.

 

[Squid Diddler]

Looks interesting, but I'm sure they will focus solely on the poor barbarians fighting against big bad Rome and how it's totally the same as antifa or some shit. They were dirty savages who constantly killed each other and performed human sacrifice for thousands of years and badly needed civilizing by based chad Romans.

 

[mr.moon1488]

Set sail to the high seas instead, don't give them your money. Win-win!

 

[Ahriman]

Looks interesting, but I'm sure they will focus solely on the poor barbarians fighting against big bad Rome and how it's totally the same as antifa or some shit. They were dirty savages who constantly killed each other and performed human sacrifice for thousands of years and badly needed civilizing by based chad Romans.

Well you can blame Tacitus for that, he pretty much created the "Romans evil, Germanic tribes good" narrative in his book, in 99AD. "Germania" (Land of the Germani) is the book partially responsible for the idea of the superiority of the Nordic/Germanic "races" because it describes the Germanic peoples as actual "better" people who just happen to have inferior technology.

That led to modern interpretations, in which Tacitus is accused of having a political agenda to criticize the Roman civilization and paint a picture of "noble savages", a description we also tend to apply to native American tribes today (secretly allied to nature and this romantic stuff). Corruption of civilization vs good natural people.

 

[Squid Diddler]

Well you can blame Tacitus for that, he pretty much created the "Romans evil, Germanic tribes good" narrative in his book, in 99AD. "Germania" (Land of the Germani) is the book partly responsable for the idea of the superiority of the Nordic/Germanic "races" because it describes the Germanic peoples as actual "better" people who just happen to have inferior technology.

That led to modern interpretations, in which Tacitus is accused of having a political agenda to criticize the Roman civilisation and paint a picture of "noble savages", something we later know from descriptions of American natives up to today (secretly allied to nature and this romantic stuff). Corruption of civilization vs good natural people.

Yeah I think a lot of that was due to Tacitus' explicit aim to be impartial (which was frequently not the norm among Roman historians), but in doing so overcorrected and erred too much on the other side.

 

[garakfan69]

Looks interesting, but I'm sure they will focus solely on the poor barbarians fighting against big bad Rome and how it's totally the same as antifa or some shit. They were dirty savages who constantly killed each other and performed human sacrifice for thousands of years and badly needed civilizing by based chad Romans.

How dare a people defend themselves against foreign invaders.

 

[Squid Diddler]

How dare a people defend themselves against foreign invaders.

Sometimes, just sometimes, the people are shit and invaders are better.

 

[garakfan69]

Sometimes, just sometimes, the people are shit and invaders are better.

If they were better they wouldn't have failed. They were just barely good enough to conquer France.

 

[Ahriman]

Yeah I think a lot of that was due to Tacitus' explicit aim to be impartial (which was frequently not the norm among Roman historians), but in doing so overcorrected and erred too much on the other side.

If anything, it's interesting to know that that book was pretty much ignored at the time of his release, it wasn't only centuries later that people regained interest in it.

He describes the Germanic races peoples as unmixed -perhaps the Romans valued this- and their stature as fearsome, they did the same with the Gauls as far as I am aware. Greco-Roman civilization long held the northern barbarians (remember that "barbarian" is a pejorative term that covered those tribes) as more warlike than them, although inferior--I would imagine this being a sort of exotic image of the dangerous northern tribesman. As for calling them "better"? I highly doubt a man of antiquity would have been able to completely reject his own customs, heritage and kin for the adoration of some lesser, foreign thing. Nothing in Germania screams to me that Tacitus considered them superior. And the aspects he lauded seemed to be connected to their primitive condition rather than in spite of it. "Silver and gold the gods have refused to them, whether in kindness or in anger I cannot say."

So yes, Tacitus main sentiments expressed in his work are somewhat akin to the noble savage trope that persists today. The superiority of the rural to the urban, of the militant and austere to the opulant and meek. This is nothing unique to Tacitus and is to be found in many other Roman authors. Really, viewing the Romans as evil would be outside the imagination of Tacitus and was not an invention of his. If the Germanic tribes did not think so, then it was invented by German Nationalists somewhere around in, what I assume would be, the early 1800s.

EDIT: For the Romans, color and prejudice weren't linked, so racism as we know it today would be a complete foreign concept. Then again, "racist" was an epithet coined by Trotsky, a wedge term meant to cause dissent among non-communist slavs... but that's a topic for another day.

 

[Squid Diddler]

If they were better they wouldn't have failed. They were just barely good enough to conquer France.

Found the German, lol.

Also that's why I said sometimes. I'm also speaking culturally, not militarily. Although, you'd have to be a special sort of retard to say that the Germans had a better military. Their knowledge of their homeland, neighboring tribes, and sometimes tactics, were occasionally better. That's about it.

When you conquer most of the entire known world, you miss a couple spots, that's all.

 

[garakfan69]

When you conquer most of the entire known world, you miss a couple spots, that's all.

>half of Europe
>missed a spot

 

[Squid Diddler]

>half of Europe
>missed a spot

And how much did the Germans conquer again?

 

[garakfan69]

And how much did the Germans conquer again?

Too much. Never worked out well.