"Decline and fall of the Roman myth"

[tlclark]

OK, watched it last night!

And it was ba-aaad.

I figured as much

Laws - Jones paints a very rosy picture of the position of women in Celtic society. How? Well, he takes one grave of a Gallic rich and powerful women, around 300-200 BC, and recites a lot of laws from Ireland -7th c. AD. And E Presto! there's your evidence that all Celts had these laws, always. Compare our laws today with our laws a 1000 years ago, compare both groups and call them unchanged - you'd be laughed at.

What? You mean I can't claim primo nocture here in the states because it existed in England 1000 years ago! DARN!

Actually, this is doubly laughable because outside the Etruscans, the Romans had some of the most enlightened laws regarding women of the age. Roman matrons were not to be trifled with and even slaves that had six male children were granted their freedom. Of course, it was oppressive by today's standards, but that's beside the point. Scholars keep trying to find enlightened people in the past, but it's just projection and self-guilt over our own age. We really DO live in the golden age of man.

Celts - and there we have the biggest problem; who were the Celts anyway? I'll not go into that quagmire hre.. But to take a name and stick that onto a group of peoples and tribes which shared language, culture, material development (but not all of them together at the same time) over a 1000 years and give them one name and treat them as if similar - that's just not scientifically correct.

Helen Evans, curator of the Medieval exhibits of the Met in NY once said in a lecture that if you applied the same standards to the US that you did to the Barbarians, we would be "migrational" peoples too.

Great post. Thanks for the review.

Travis