According to the Times, Monty Python member Terry Jones has written a book painting the Celts in a positive light and downplaying Roman civilization.
Jim McCormick can’t help but cite this famous passage from Monty Python’s Life of Brian:
REG: All right, but apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, a fresh water system, and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?
XERXES: Brought peace.
REG: Oh. Peace? Shut up!
In What Have the Pythons Ever Done For Us? McCormick goes on to note just how much the Romans contributed — if only to make their own villas more livable, and defensible, on English soil:
Roman military expansion in northwest Europe had an impact very much like our own few centuries of European economic globalization. By establishing continental economic networks, the peripheral parts of the Empire (like Britain) experienced a substantial distortion of local economies (e.g. growing corn & barley to feed distant Romans rather than grains and livestock for the locals).There was also the importation of substantial technological, artistic, administrative, and military skills (think intellectual property) from Mediterranean Roman culture. Those peripheral cultures could not afford to implement huge capital developments (aka foreign direct investment).
Anyone who can look at the 70 miles of Hadrian’s Wall, complete with elaborate ditches, stone walls, mile-forts, sectional fortresses, river bridges composed of solid multi-ton stone blocks, military roads, and shipping depots (in Newcastle) — and claim that the Celts were somehow on par — is flogging an agenda not a technological argument.
The Brits spent 1500 years just poaching the cut stone, brick and tile from Roman construction — literally ‘free money’ to them. British roads weren’t built to Roman standards til after 1750 (when British military engineers responded to the Rebellion of the 1740′s by excavating Roman roads for technical details and then proceeded with a road-building frenzy — often simply on top of the old Roman roadbeds in Scotland!).