Anybody watching Barbarians Rising on History?

I watched the first episode and have already set to record the second episode. Only complaint - the producers succumbed to PC and depicted Hannibal as black. There is no good reason to suppose he was black.

I think the Carthaginians were descended from the Phoenicians.

Excellent article.

I was initially disappointed in seeing Hannibal as black until I read that he possibly was. I think based on contemporary coins some folk say he was black, despite Carthage being in North Africa and founded by Phoenicians. Who knows. But it is clear from the civil rights rhetoric (Jesse Jackson, really?) what the producers were Going for. It's as if Carthage= black and Rome = white, and the issue was slavery. Carthage had slaves too but you wouldn't know that from this show.

But it's still odd to characterize Carthage as "barbarian" and paint the second Punic war as a simple struggle between oppressors and their weaker subjects. The show also implies that this Punic war was connected to the barbarian incursions which toppled Rome (or which signified an already-weakened Rome).

IMO the show's heavy handed agenda detracts from the history of it. They want to turn the punic war into Roots.

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I am ki d of curious how they are gonna handle the Boudica story.

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That will be an episode not to miss. Always fascinated by that uprising against the Romans - almost drove them out of Britain. Have been reading fiction set in that period - the protagonist had been a member of Legion II which refused to participate in the decisive battle against Boudica. (Lindsay Davis's Marcus Didius Falco series.)

I've always envisioned Hannibal looking kinda like a less ridiculous Xerxes on 300.

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The Punic war should have it's own show and not he lumped in with the Germanic invasions.

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This. Carthage was absolutely not "barbaric" by any stretch of the imagination. They were a complex, multi-cultural, metropolitan society. They were a trading and maritime power. They had some seriously advanced shipbuilding technology that allowed them to shite out warships faster than the U.S. did during World War II. They, as well as Spartacus, had absolutely nothing to do with the Barbarians which besieged the Roman world in the 4th, 5th, and 6th centuries.

I really enjoyed the one about Lusitania. That was one Roman War I was never well versed on.

I laughed seeing the Blackfish and Ser Barristan playing Lusitanians. I kept expecting Jorah Mormont to be Sparticus, Ser Davos to show up as a Gaul, and Tormund to lead the Germanians

I wish The Red Viper or the First Sword of Hype could have played Hannibal.

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I dunno. I try not to ascribe motivations to a show unless it's very clear. I think they may just have been trying to pad the show with one of Rome's big early opponents

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Definitely - they would have been better off including the Gauls as truer early barbarians, but I get what the producers are going after.

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Plus, I think the Romans were probably even more contemptuous of fair aired, fair skinned Celtic and Germanic people.

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Without a doubt, Celtic and Germanic peoples were the scourge of the empire more than anyone else basically during its entire existence. The Romans themselves would laugh at our own depictions of them. Until they conquered and absorbed Gaul, Brittania, Moetia, Pannonia, Illyria, etc., they were a Mediterranean people in every sense of the word.

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It seems pretty definite that the Carthaginians were not barbarians in the modern sense of the word. To the Romans for who it meant essentially "not Roman or Greek". It's more debatable.

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I have heard that the Roman use of the word is closer to "foreigner" - civilized and other - than it is to what we think of as barbarians. Not sure how the scholars would take that, but it is interesting.

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Ironically originally to the Greeks, the Romans themselves were included among "barbarians".

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Yep - Rome's very founding likely included them taking in lowlifes and many other scoundrels and POS's. They needed people, economic activity, and resources however they could get them. The Etruscans were the more civilized people at the time. Ironically enough, at the founding of what would become the capital and crown jewel of the Eastern Roman Empire - Constantinople - almost a millennium later, it, too, was largely inhabited by miscreants and lower echelons of society.

I haven't seen the episodes, but if the History Channel portrayed the Punic Wars as some oppressor/oppressed series of conflicts, they did the Carthaginians a grave disservice. That was more like an ancient version of World I/II than anything else - two cultural, military, and economic titans bound to confront each other eventually. It can probably be argued that the Carthaginians were superior and more advanced than the Romans in almost every way except in sheer manpower and agricultural production before the wars started, and even those differences weren't that large.