Bloggin' Historians!

Last night I began reading the of fourth of five Roman histories which Pat had bought me for my birthday: The Decline and Fall of Roman Britain by Neil Faulkner. It promises to be an enjoyable read, despite my disagreeing with his fundamental premiss that ‘Rome was a system of robbery with violence … inherently exploitative and oppressive … and doomed to collapse’. The same cannot be said of the three previous texts which seemed to me to belong to the world of blogging rather than books.
  The first of them, Blood of the Caesars by Stephen Dando Collins, was by far the worst. How the book managed to find a publisher defeats me. Its style seemed to be modelled on those ghastly American programmes infesting Sky’s History Channel which assume that the audience has the attention span and retentive powers of an inebriated gnat: some basic fact is repeated every five minutes - ‘Rome capital of the Roman Empire’, for example - in an over-excited North American equivalent of a Birmingham accent. But at least that fact is true - or was so until the founding of Constantinople. Collins’s ‘fact’ is that Seneca secretly murdered Germanicus, an hypothesis as convincingly substantiated as the Scientologists’ belief that we’re descended from Thetans. Like the blog it’s badly written and batters the reader with the author’s private obsession. Unlike the blogger the writer has been paid to produce this garbage.
  The second and third histories were an enormous improvement on Collins, but were still blogs rather than books if for different reasons. Arthur and the Fall of Roman Britain by Edwin Pace argues that Arthur, Vortigern, or the Proud Tyrant, and Riothamus were the same person. The case is argued carefully with a wealth of detailed evidence. And therein lies the problem: ok they’re the same person, now tell me something interesting. For over three hundred pages Pace carries on like the pub bore - ‘and another interesting fact you may not know is …’ - as the reader’s eyes glaze over and he loses the will to live. One of the great joys for the blogger is that he is utterly free of constraints. There is no sub-editor pruning his verbiage, he doesn’t have to attempt to answer objections to the line he’s preaching, he doesn’t have to care whether there is an audience for his ramblings. Pace should have been a blogger.
  Which brings me finally to Britannia the Failed State by Stuart Laycock. The author had spent time in the former Yugoslavia during the Balkans war. This underlay his insight that by basing their units of local government on existing tribal areas the Roman authorities perpetuated existing ethnic tensions. Once the iron hand of Rome - cf. Tito - had been removed ethnic conflict broke out and ripped apart the civilised fabric the Romans has created. I found the idea convincing and, unlike Pace’s Arthurian idea, significant. But, and it’s a very big but, it was a very dull read. The reason? Laycock’s an archaeologist and archaeologists make accountants seem like fun people. Page after page of the distribution of a particular kind of belt buckle is of no interest to anyone but a professional archaeologist. Laycock had an interesting idea: he simply needed to find a way of putting it across which didn’t suck the life out of it. The details about the buckles should have been saved for an academic conference - or a blog!