Ancient World Review

Book Review: The Collapse and Recovery of the Roman Empire by Michael Grant

The fall of Rome proves beyond doubt that one thing always leads to another, usually in unexpected ways. For example, when the Romans gave up the idea of conquering Germany and switched to a defensive strategy along the Rhine and Danube frontier, they succeeded in blocking the German advance into their territory, but they had no idea that they were starting a long chain of events which would eventually lead to the collapse of the western empire.

The Germanic tribes needed living space. Stymied in their attempts to spread west into Roman Gaul, the various tribes started to move to the east in the Second Century AD and ran into big trouble about a century later. In 372, according to The New Penguin Atlas of Medieval History, "the eastward expansion of the Ostrogoths provoked an explosive reaction from the Huns of the Volga Steppe." When the Ostrogoths intruded into their territory, the Huns drove all the German tribes back towards the Danube like a giant hammer, pounding them against the Roman frontier.

Siddhartha

The first time I read Siddhartha, the classic by Hermann Hesse about a Sixth Century Brahmin's search for Enlightenment, I was a typical brain-dead hippy--a teenaged Romantic with murky ideas about the way the world actually works, to put it mildly.  I liked the book then and I still like it decades later, but I see it differently now. Siddhartha's a great book and well worth reading, but I think you have to be a certain mental age to take it seriously. Romanticism appeals to the young and inexperienced. When you get older, writers like Hesse start to lose their appeal.

The Real Message In The Bible Code

The Bible contains hidden messages which predict the future, according to The Bible Code by Michael Drosnin. These messages can be deciphered by computer--and only by computer, apparently--and they predict everything from World War II and Hiroshima to the moon landing, Kennedy assassinations and the Oklahoma City bombing, not to mention the Apocalypse, which as usual is just around the corner. In other words, the Bible code was created a thousand years before it could be read and most of its predictions have (conveniently) already taken place, but it still leaves a lot of room for End Times paranoia.

Jesus Cult Conspiracy Theories

The obscure origins of the Christian religion make it a natural subject for "hidden history" conspiracy theories. Dozens, if not hundreds of books have been written over the years, arguing, among other things, that Jesus was a magic mushroom, a solar deity, an Essene or a guerilla fighter sanitized to make him more palatable to the Romans. Some authors claim that Jesus was actually the deified Julius Caesar or that the gospels were propaganda written by the Flavian emperors to help pacify a rebellious province. Whatever the argument, the scarcity of original sources and the ambiguous nature of the evidence leave a lot of room for entertaining speculation.

Blood On The Deltoids: Conan The Barbarian

In the interests of improving my mind, I just watched Conan the Barbarian and Conan the Destroyer again, plus I've been reading the original Robert E. Howard stories, the later books by Robert Jordan, and the Dark Horse collections of the Savage Sword of Conan comics. This is all great stuff, even the second movie, which is generally panned as "campy" and too light for serious barbarian action. The Destroyer has its dopey moments, true--quite a few of them, in fact--but I've always been a sucker for stories about evil queens who try to bring ancient gods back to life so they can take over the world. Something always goes wrong, naturally, and they end up releasing monsters which turn on them and run amok. This same general plot was also used by Robert Jordan in his excellent novel "Conan the Triumphant," by the way. It never gets old.