European Barbarians

The European Barbarians Even though when we hear the word barbarian, we tend to envision a people with clubs, and hatchets of enormous size that would pillage the surrounding country and all that lived therein. Some of that may be true, but there was much more to it than that. Some of the main features of the barbarian lifestyle were farming, metalworking, and warfare. The thing that surprised me the most was how the barbarian …

…the good life could be like. They learned to improvise, adapt, and overcome. They not only lived in harmony with those they conquered, they learned from them, and then eventually they too would become civilized. We can see this evident in Latin groups in Italy, the Celtic tribes of western Europe, the Germanic people of northern Europe, and the Slavic groups of the east, and even the Greeks, who later became the cornerstone of civilization.