Sphinx

Tom Holland has been doing the Twitter equivalent of prodding me with a pointed stick, loudly advertising the fact that he, Vic Reeves and Tanni Grey-Thompson were going to be discussing late Roman economic policy on ITV this evening, purely to annoy me. He must have a new book to plug, and wants to provoke a bit of controversy-related publicity. I determined, therefore, not only to watch the programme but to like it; after all, it’s great that there is still a bit of archaeology on television, at prime time no less, and it emphasises the possibility of constructive co-existence between professionals and enthusiastic (and often very knowledgeable) amateurs, and shows a wide range of fascinating objects with interesting back stories, and the celebrity presenters (including our Tom) do the necessary job of refusing to take academic equivocation for an answer from the various experts, without drowning out their caveats altogether. Interesting to note that the unifying theme of the programme was something to the effect that in this ever-changing world in which we live in, some things remain the same, rather than emphasising the equally plausible but perhaps less comforting idea that the past may in many ways be another country. Shades of heritage and Our Island Story…

And then we have Tom’s economic analysis, and, no, my head didn’t actually explode, but it did droop significantly. Accentuate the positive: some of the statements weren’t actually completely wrong. The (“amazing”, according to the press release) coins weren’t exactly radical new evidence of the existence of a single European currency under the Romans, as we kinda knew about that already, but they did illustrate it nicely enough. As for the desperate attempt to link this to a narrative of financial crisis, I must admit I’d been hoping in advance for something related to third-century debasements and supposed inflation, as I could then have tossed the whole thing like a piece of raw meat to my former graduate student Colin Elliott to rip apart at his leisure, but instead we were offered a real financial crisis: the legions withdraw from Britain, they take their money with them, trade collapses and as a consequence the Anglo-Saxons invade (actually I have it in my mind that he said Vikings, but that must be my imagination). How many amazing non-sequiturs can a scriptwriter pack into a single sentence? Someone has homework to do: I’d suggest starting with Chris Howgego’s introduction to Ancient History from Coins, moving on to Sitta von Reden’s Money in Classical Antiquity (note: money is not identical with coinage, and trade can work very well without coins) and then finish up with David Graeber’s Debt, John Lanchester’s Whoops! and Jason Manolopoulos’ Greece’s Odious Debt on the 2008 crash, and maybe then we can talk…

Yes, I’m really too tired and too busy to write this sort of post, but mentioning Tom Holland always does wonders for my viewing stats…

Addendum: Happy to confirm that no Vikings were mentioned – I misheard or misremembered “violent warlords”, which is a perfectly reasonable description – though how a decline in trade led directly to them is a mystery to me, in the absence of a clear indication that this is a ‘Rise of the Golden Dawn in wake of Greek financial crisis’ analogy. Tom has since suggested that he felt caught between the Scylla of the frantic director and the Charybdis of myself, haunting his imaginings; if i could somehow project myself as a ghastly spectre of historical pedantry to all tv history presenters, harrying them back towards the path of exactitude and caution, my time would not have been ill spent… Finally, it’s become ever clearer in retrospect how far Vic Reeves was deliberately subverting the whole enterprise through over-enthusiastic speculation; the sequence where he bullied the poor archaeologist into offering a tentative opinion about the sex of some skull fragments (imagine Mrs Doyle offering a cup of tea) and on that basis constructed a vision of a fierce female warrior princess, the Boudicca of Kent, was a satirical masterpiece. I am only sorry that he wasn’t, as I had been led to assume, involved in the discussion of late Roman economics…