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Arminius, long ago, as the child of a local tribal chief, Segestes of the Cherusci, was given away by Segestes to Varus in order to "keep the peace" - much like you've maybe seen on this season of Fargo. The viewer enters the tale after the Romans have already been in control of the surrounding area for years. The most interesting element in Barbarians is Rupp's Arminius.
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Barbarians looks decent enough, production-wise, for a series that more or less takes place between a village, a camp, and the trees between the two, though it never rises up above a modest roar from a story standpoint. Many "famous figures" make up the roster here, from Gaetano Aronica's General Varus to Jeanne Goursaud's Thusnelda to Laurence Rupp's Arminius.
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It's a classic underdog, rise-from-the-ashes war story that feels ready-made for a series all about sticking it to history's cruel and arrogant arch-nemesis, the Roman Empire. Subscribe to the US edition here.The Romans have conquered Germanic lands occupied by an assortment of splintered, bickering tribes, and the famous Teutoburg Forest tussle involved many of these warring townships banding together to take out Roman legions. This article was originally published in The Spectator ’s UK magazine.
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The Battle of Teutoburg Forest, when it comes, isn’t a patch on Tettenhall. But I did find myself yearning throughout for just a bit more of the shield-biting verisimilitude of Last Kingdom or Vikings. Some of its choices work - such as the decision to have the Roman characters speak in Latin, which the show’s most impressive (and visually striking) performer Gaetano Aronica as Varus does especially well. The acting is mostly good enough but again, certainly not in the league of Last Kingdom where some of the performances - David Dawson’s King Alfred, Ian Hart’s Beocca - are up there with the greats at the Royal Shakespeare Company in the days when it aimed for perfection. Neither Arminius nor his hot, fierce, blonde warrior girlfriend Thusnelda (Jeanne Goursaud) nor his love rival (an invented character called - ludicrously - Folkwin Wolfspeer) are much more than generic cut-outs, going through the motions in vague accordance with historical events. Unfortunately, the German writers just don’t have the gift of Bernard Cornwell and his adaptors for fleshing out an ill-documented period of history and allowing its characters to breathe. But I’m afraid if you’re looking for something in the league of Last Kingdom, you’ll be disappointed. It’s such a powerful, mythopeic story that any dramatization of it was bound to be worth a watch. Arminius (Laurence Rupp) was the German nobleman, snatched as a child hostage from his Cherusci tribe and brought up as a Roman, who rose to the rank of equestrian but then betrayed his own adoptive people by leading their army into a trap. We want our Teutoburg Forest and we want it now.Īt the moment, sadly, we’re sorely lacking an Arminius to lead us to victory.
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One reason for its popularity, I’m sure, is that we’re all sick to the teeth of remote, bullying, supranational entities telling us how to live our lives. Barbarians, a German-language adaptation of the story by Arne Nolting and Jan Martin Scharf, is one of the top-rated dramas on Netflix. What I’ve finally understood in 2020 is that those Roman bastards had it coming.Īnd I don’t think I’m the only one who feels this way. Over the years since I first learned about arrogant, tricked, doomed Roman commander Varus and his three legions (about 20,000 men, almost none of whom got out alive), I’ve often mused pityingly on how it must have felt: trapped in the gloomy forest, hemmed in by a bog, waiting to be slaughtered by hammer, ax or javelin by the hairy, painted, blood-crazed Germanic barbarians. It was the Romans’ Isandlwana - a devastating defeat inflicted by native forces on what was theoretically the world’s most sophisticated, best trained, and almost insuperable military power. Of all the times and places to have been on the wrong side of history, I can’t imagine many worse than to have been a Roman legionnaire in the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest in the year 9 AD.