Mary Beard

You can add in plague, pandemic, whatever.

And this is what people have spent the last...

200 and something years trying to work out.

But things are different once you get to the middle of the third century.

But they don't crumble.

And look, if you go to the eastern part of the Roman Empire and you talk about Rome falling in the 5th century CE, nasty barbarian invasions, the Roman Empire, what we call Byzantium, but it's basically the Roman Empire, lasts till the 15th century.

But, and I know what you mean.

I've got colleagues who will say they'd have given a lot to keep the water supply.

I see that.

I think, however...

we do suffer from the demonization of the so-called barbarians, which we've seen through wonderful 19th century pictures of kind of real thugs pulling down Roman statues or whatever, being barbarian.

We suffer from that in a way that perhaps misrepresents what was going on.

And I think the key players here, the vandals,

in Vandal Africa.

Now, if you mention the word Vandal to anyone, we know exactly what we think.

That said, Vandal North Africa was a place of extraordinary culture.

They wrote wonderful poetry, some of which still survives in Latin.

And Vandal Africa was also partly responsible for the codification of Roman law, right?

And they're Christians, right?

So I think that as with a lot of ancient history, we're the heirs to other people's prejudices, some of which may have been right.