Customer Reviews

Celt and Roman

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

This book was so extremely bias against the Romans that one could easily conclude that the author lost his most beloved ones in a battle against the Romans!! Even his phraseology throughout the book betrays what seems to be a personal hatred of this ancient race. I found his contemptuous remarks to be distracting to the ease of reading. That aside, the author struggles in this book to portray the Celts as a culture much more advanced than was perceived by the first hand accounts of ancient Greek and Roman writers and historians. In doing so he resorts to some fairly weak leaps of logic. His primary view seems to be that to arrive at historical accuracy all one needs to do is to reverse whatever the Roman accounts were in each and every case.

The arguments in this book for Celtic superiority over the Romans is so tainted that in some cases I actually laughed out loud. Reading this book one would think that the armies of Rome won most of their battles by dumb luck. Which is not bad considering that Rome's greatly outnumbered armies eventually conquered almost all of the Celtic lands and added Britian to the Empire, holding it for over 400 years!

If you're interested in names and dates this book is fine. But if you're interested in what the ancient Celts and the Italic/Roman people were actually like, and how the cultures interacted, you'll need to look elsewhere.

Professor Ellis, the author of numerous books on various Celtic groups, has an admirable goal: to give a detailed account of the oft neglected Celtic groups in Northern Italy. Yet the result is highly unsatisfying. Quite simply, Professor Ellis does not have the sheer mastery of Roman histiography to accomplish the task. While he relies heavily upon Livy, he goes out of his way to attempt to discredit Livy at every turn; certainly Livy's patriotic account must be read with a degree of skepticism, but Ellis goes too far.
Ellis proves a dogmatic anti-imperialist, and his constant condemnation of Roman expansionism frequently obscures the nuances of the situation. The nature of Roman imperialism remains a topic of significant historical debate: were the Romans driven by greed, or by a genuine need for security? While Ellis suggests that the Celts were a source or Roman paranoia, he does not engage in the debate, nor does he seem familar with it.
Finally, although Ellis argues that classical sources distort the image of the Celts, he relies excessively upon them. A study that included more archeological evidence would have been more helpful and informative. One might has well read Livy and come to their own conclusions about the Celts rather than read Prof. Ellis' book.

As the other reviewers pointed out this is bad revisionism. The author is rewriting history, and lacks proof. The Celts are the bad joke of European society. This book won't change that.

As the previous reviewer astutely pointed out the author feels the world should take all of the historical records, reverse them completely and we will come to the TRUTH!

His constant degrading of the ancient written sources while relying so heavily on them is "pure hypocrisy & rather unscholarly!" Example: He uses Livy extensively while berating him. The author never tells the reader that Livy wrote some 142 books, but only some 35 have survived. Thus, the title of this review.

His thesis that the Celts were Rome's greatest enemy of all time is laughable. Even though this is mainly about the Romans fighting the Gauls in N. Italy, & they were constantly being aided by the Gauls from north & west of the Alps. "THE AUTHOR FAILS TO EXPLAIN AWAY THAT THE ROMANS WERE FIGHTING OTHER FOLKS AS WELL AS THESE GAULS DURING THE PERIOD THAT THIS BOOK COVERS? ALSO, CAESER'S CONQUEST OF GAUL WAS ROME'S FASTEST CONQUEST??? HE CAN'T EXPLAIN THAT AWAY EITHER.

As the records state, in three wars the Romans lost far more men in fighting their fellow Italics like the Samnites than they ever did against the Gauls. The later won the first meeting when Rome was in its infancy. But since Telamon in 225 B.C. the entire Celtic world has been in an eternal RETREAT! He chose not to mention that the Romans were often fighting on several fronts at once while the Celts had plenty of help in trying to obliterate Rome. He purposely ignores all the archaeological finds that prove conclusively that the Celts could indeed field huge armies, and that they had access to higher quality iron that the Romans did not have untill much later.

The poor Celts are portrayed as both innocent victims and heroes. The fact that they occupied Rome for 7 months from July390-Feb389B.C., and had to be bribed to keep them from EXTERMINATING THE LATIN RACE does not bother the author. Clearly, he wishes that the Romans had been exterpated. This way the chaotic eternal tribal wars could have gone on ad infinatum so that the Celts would earn a supreme place in European history. Bullocks! I suggest reading Marcus Tanner's fine book "The Last Celts." This book deserves no stars!!!!!!

This book is fascinating, and having been raised on the "official" version, i.e. the Roman version, learned in Latin classes many years ago, it makes me realize what should have been obvious all along...."veni, vidi, vici" doesn't begin to cover the events of this period, or of these peoples. Peter's work is brilliant and makes one reconsider these conflicts in a broader context.

Peter Berresford Ellis has done, I think, an excellent job portraying a culture whose accomplishments are far too easily dismissed in favour of other well documented ancient cultures. To present his representation of a culture that traditionally recorded historical events orally, Ellis has had to make some insightful points using the material at hand and has made good work of presenting it in a fashion enjoyable to read.