"In the 1950s and 1960s, the most popular comic books in Spain weren't about Superman and Spiderman - they told of the adventures of El Jabato, an imaginary ancient Iberian hero who fought against the Roman oppressors."
-Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Mankind (London, 2014), Chapter 11, p. 211.
An addendum relevant to Poul Anderson Appreciation: Ancient anti-Roman freedom fighters, including the fictional individual, El Jabato, and the inhabitants of the historical town of Numantia, are regarded in Spain as symbols of national independence. The Numantians were defeated by the Roman general, Scipio Aemilianus, who had previously levelled Carthage. Delenda Est Carthago. All history is one story.
6 comments:
Though ironically enough the Spanish are the cultural -- and since there was very heavy Roman immigration to Spain, often the physical -- descendants of the Romans, not their opponents.
Ditto the French, despite the popularity of Asterix and Obilex.
Yes. The point made in the book I quoted.
Ancient Celtic freedom fighters are celebrated in romance languages.
And the freedom the freedom fighters were mostly fighting for was the freedom to kill their neighbors and hang the heads over the door of the smelly mud huts.
Indeed, they were hardly fighting for democracy or human rights!
The Romans were at least familiar with the concept of democracy, though they mostly disapproved of it. Few of the non-Hellenic peoples incorporated in the Empire had even that.
Some of the tribal ones had -elements- of democracy in the form of tribal assemblies at which all freemen had a voice - the Scandinavian "thing" is a descendant of a type once very common -- but that's not quite the same thing.
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