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Roman HolidayBarbarians week on the History Channel.

By Troy PattersonPosted Friday, March 9, 2007, at 1:32 PM ET

The other night on the History Channel, the amethyst sunsets and lilac jazz of a Cialis commercial gave way to an advertisement for one of the network's own potency-restoring products. A hirsute fellow sat in a shadowy room. Before him was a hearty meal—a goblet of mead and a goose leg the size of a moose haunch—and yet, despite this bounty, he wept. A friend rushed in, his voice heavy with concern and piquant with an I, Claudius accent.

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"What's wrong?"

"We sack. We pillage. But for what? In a thousand years, who will care? No one—that's who."

"Oh, but you're wrong," came the consolation, "for I have seen a vision of glooorious prophecy. … 'Tis called Barbarians Week." And the voice-over verily confirms that this was the week to quit whining and feast on the exploits of "four tribes with nothing in common but their hatred of Rome."

That's actually a more academically proper use of "barbarian" than the History Channel intended when, in 2004, it so branded its airing of hour-long quasi-documentaries about Goths, Huns, Mongols, and Vikings. As we recall vaguely from our school days and can read clearly on Wikipedia, medieval historians use that word to describe groups that went sword-to-shield with the Roman Empire—a party to which both Genghis Khan and Eric the Red were rather late. But that is beside the point, and it seems almost a coincidence that Barbarians II, a sequel to that earlier ratings smash, busies itself with the Franks, Lombards, Saxons, and Vandals. The four shows primarily use the term "barbarian" in the sense of Conan the. All that matters is the vicarious plundering and the romance of battle.

Listen to the narrator. His voice booms as if Barbarians II were a very long movie trailer, and his script brings history to life with an italicized argot of rumbling clichés, venerable hokum, and comic-book intensifiers. "Fabled Italy will shake with the war cries of the last and fiercest of the Barbarian hordes. … They have no idea that their world is about to be shattered. … Soon, the Saxons will write their names across the green British countryside—in blood!"

Consider the graphics—goofy, almost deliberately crude. At one point, in the Lombards episode, the channel presents an illustrated map of Europe, and we see tiny icons of men on horseback moving east to crush the Gepids. It looks as if it's an ad for mouthwash, and the Lombards of 567 A.D. were on a campaign against gingivitis.

Wonder at the talking heads. These are real professors from real universities. One hopes that the History Channel has interviewed them on its own turf, on stages designed to look like upper-middle-class living rooms. If that's not the case, then either the profs have allowed the History Channel to redecorate their homes for this occasion or the new trend on campus is to accent your parlor with crossbows and human skulls. Sometimes, the scholars supply essential context and interpretation. Elsewhere, they do their best to usher myth right along: No sooner has a man from Marymount University finished saying that there's no evidence for the historical existence of King Arthur than we see a strapping warrior prince by that name unsheathing his sword to battle the Saxons.

Barbarians prints the legend in a series of historical re-enactments. These are the heart of the event, and they're nearly as kitschy as that glooorious promo spot—the hairy men in chain mail, the lasses picking flowers, all those green grapes on groaning banquet tables. When, in the Franks episode, the pagan—"fiercely pagan"—King Clovis grudgingly allows his Christian wife to hang a cross around his neck, he squirms like a sitcom hubbie having his tie knotted. When the Saxons double cross the Britons at the Night of the Long Knives, the slaughter occurs on a Stonehenge set that only Spinal Tap would envy. The attack isn't even especially messy. Barbarians needs to keep things suitable for the purposes of burnt-out middle-school teachers, so, despite the vast body counts, the programs minimize gore and carnage to the greatest extent possible and then minimize them some more. This makes it a bit awkward when, for instance, the narrator talks about Genghis Khan sealing "his reputation as the bloodiest of all barbarians" while the camera captures a kid with an Elmo-red scrape on his arm.

Such are the weaknesses of Barbarians. They're also strengths. The History Channel has come up with something undeniably corny and yet slightly awesome, a blend of hard fact and watery fantasia. It amounts to camp for straight men—something good for chasing an 8 p.m. scotch or spicing a bedtime cup of cocoa. Watching a handful of Vandals strike down a group of Sicilian farmers—victims who somehow didn't see the assailants streaking across a field of grain until the very last moment—is a well-deserved and relatively dignified treat after a long and thankless day of sacking and pillaging back at the office.

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Troy Patterson is Slate's television critic.

COMMENTS

Remarks from the Fray:

All the sensationalism of this show aside, Barbarians Week takes pains to debunk predominant myths about barbarians. Sometimes it does this subtly by interjecting that textual criticism does not support what the viewer is watching. Patterson alludes to this when he explains that the dramatic reenactment of King Arthur is preceded by the statement that there is no historical evidence that he actually existed.

Sometimes it engages this overtly, by simply telling the non-Roman side of the story. Watching the Lombard episode, I came away with a more robust understanding of why the Lombards attacked Italy. They were duped into thinking they could cross into the Roman Empire to find refuge and receive aid. When they arrived, they were sent to concentration camps, allowed to starve, and their children were sold into slavery. Looting and pillaging became a means of survival, not the Lombard ethnic pastime.

Barbarians Week also makes efforts in various other ways. One commentator explains (although I don't recall the episode) that "barbarian" was a semi-innocuous term coined by the Greeks to describe anyone who was non-Greek, "they certainly did not call themselves barbarians", he explained. It didn't become a pejorative term until it was adopted by the Romans to polemically describe non-Romans. This, in itself, seems like an inert statement, but it helps to illuminate that barbarians were worthy of their individual identities and maintained their own culture despite the picture that they were a conglomerate blood-thirsty horde. They also go to the pain of making the actors of Italian roles speak Latin (fairly well, I add). I suspect that this was just complementary icing, because I cannot imagine what it adds for the bulk of viewers who aren't needlessly purist, like me.

Barbarians Week is a masterpiece because it entertains the core audience while satisfying those of us who can look through the hype to find more cerebral entertainment. The success of the show is a testament to that. Sure, they could sacrifice the former for more of the latter. But then their core demographic would be people like me who only watch cable if someone else is paying for it.

--Shadrach

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