[hider=My response to the response]Okay, yes, I understand what you're getting at, when it comes to barbarians... And you've stumped me. All I can say is that it comes down to context. No matter how I think of it, the fear the Romans experienced, and the terrible defeats they suffered at the hands of those they called barbarians endured throughout the intervening centuries, and the word made its way into Old French and Middle English and all those other Latin-influenced languages throughout Europe because of that. Thus, the image of the vengeful, uncivilized warrior pillaging the countryside and chopping off heads with (excuse my fucking ignorance) [i]some[/i] kind of choppy weapon has remained in the popular consciousness for all of these centuries...

So, yeah, um... You're right. About barbarian, at least. Its etymology is rooted generally in fear and derision, and it is probably not the best thing to call yourself. The truth of the matter is, though, if you lived in the Empire circa 400CE, you'd see them as uncivilized as well. So, in the end, all the lingering presence of the word means is that Roman and "Classical" culture in general has had an incredibly lasting effect on European culture, including language... And not much can be done about that. Still, I will maintain that the modern, 20th century use of the word in literature (again I point to Conan) had more influence on the idea of the D&D barbarian than any actual Germanic or Celtic peoples, so I can't quite find the same disappointment in it.

Anyway, anyway, moving on to Dante... He never presented it to people as canonical material, and it wouldn't have existed anyway without the previous work of medieval Christian scholars, Thomas Aquinas and all that. He took the predominant cultural theories of the afterlife at the time... and wrote a very complex, allegorical epic poem detailing them in verse, including as characters some of the most important (to him) people in the history of Western civilization in their various circles of Heaven, Hell and Purgatory. It's literature, not scripture, and most of the ideas contained within were pre-existing (which makes it very similar to the work of the famous poets of Rome and Greece). Seriously, what kind of negative cultural effects could it have possibly caused that wouldn't have happened without it?[/hider]