I think I heard about this book. I've read one of the author's previous books on amateur astronomers, which I liked.
From Amazon.com:
What Book Are You Reading? Volume 9
- Thread starter Godwynn
- Start date
- Status
I think I heard about this book. I've read one of the author's previous books on amateur astronomers, which I liked.
From Amazon.com:
I generally have a number of books on the go, depending on my mood at any one time. Currently, the list is:
Egypt, Greece & Rome (Charles Freeman)
The Enemies of Jupiter (The Roman Mysteries, Caroline Lawrence)
Clan of the Cave Bear (Earth's Children, Jean M. Auel)
The Pillars of the Earth (Ken Follett)
I have been meaning to start the Marcus Didius Falco (Lindsey Davis) and Brother Cadfael (Ellis Peters) series too at some point. (Yes, I enjoy mostly historical and fantasy novels.)
Egypt, Greece & Rome (Charles Freeman)
The Enemies of Jupiter (The Roman Mysteries, Caroline Lawrence)
Clan of the Cave Bear (Earth's Children, Jean M. Auel)
The Pillars of the Earth (Ken Follett)
I have been meaning to start the Marcus Didius Falco (Lindsey Davis) and Brother Cadfael (Ellis Peters) series too at some point. (Yes, I enjoy mostly historical and fantasy novels.)
The Imperial Cruise: A Secret History of Empire and War by James Bradley. You will not look at Teddy Roosevelt the same again. Or Alice, for that matter. It was so shocking that I had to google up Bradley to make sure he was a legit historian and not just some commie crank with a personal ax to grind. A very shocking book.
Cynovolans
Not in my dimension.
Going to China Monday, and I plan to read two books while there.
Orphan of Creation: Roger Allen (awesome paleoanthropological science fiction.)
Archaeology of Early Egypt-Social Transformations in Northeast Africa,c.10,000 to 2,650 BC: David Wengrow
Orphan of Creation: Roger Allen (awesome paleoanthropological science fiction.)
Archaeology of Early Egypt-Social Transformations in Northeast Africa,c.10,000 to 2,650 BC: David Wengrow
That depends on which mod you're playing.
I am currently hiding from Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution. Howard Zinn's autobio and Walking Toward Walden are far more pleasant distractions...
Cheezy the Wiz
Socialist In A Hurry
By all means, no. The man hasn't been taken seriously in the historical community for two hundred years. You want me to summarize his special pleading? Its basically a thousand pages of "Christian morality makes men wimpy and it corrupted Roman Paganism that built the Republic, so the Christians are responsible for everything that went wrong between 1-500 AD."
I'll summarize the arguments for you.
Heather's book was one of the first of the current wave of general histories of the collapse of the Roman state to be published. It's quite good, and injects a good deal of recent scholarship into it. The book's not hard to follow for the non-historian and he explains a great deal of the background of late antique historical studies and the advances that have been made over the past half-century especially. Heather doesn't get bogged down in chronology, either, which is nice. His specialty is the Goths, and he does very well describing their particular history, which is so intertwined with that of the later Empire. He has also written a more recent book (Empires and Barbarians), in which he responds to criticism directed his way, and which covers the theme of migratory peoples in the first millennium AD. You may wish to check it out.
Goldsworthy's book was more or less a direct response to Heather's (and some others) and thus has the salient advantage of being able to respond directly to arguments Heather made. He takes things a bit further back than does Heather and takes more of a "long view" of events in Roman history. Goldsworthy's got great name recognition because he is already the author of many popular Roman history works (on the Roman army, mostly; his Caesar biography is quite good, as was his Punic Wars volume). He is chiefly concerned with Roman military history, and tends to analyze the situation from the point of view of warmaking.
Both have significant drawbacks, of course.
One of the annoying things about the current crop of good popular historians of late antiquity is that they seem to all be British and focus unduly on the problem of British history in the period. It certainly is an interesting tangle, but at some point you kind of have to throw up your hands and say "we have no friggin clue" and leave it at that.
Heather's main flaw is probably in connecting archaeology and material culture too closely to political history, which is really more of a matter of degree than anything. In terms of writing style, he tends to be a bit more "chummy" than most historians and ends up treating the book like a university lecture. YMMV; some people don't like the attempts to be colloquial, some people find it refreshing. In his more recent book, I think he also overstates certain parts of his opponents' arguments as compared to others (arguing against a "migration topos" when such an aversion to migration doesn't really exist to that extent, for instance).
Goldsworthy's book's main flaw is that it's basically wrong. A lot of Goldsworthy's work is in the Republican and early Imperial armies, and as such he tends to glorify the earlier Romans and their achievements and emphasize how much better they were than the later ones. He fits this into a theme of decline that doesn't quite match the actual data. As such, he magnifies the importance of events that fit his theory, minimizes or fails to mention those that don't, and generally starts to act dismissive by the later parts of the book. He also argues that archaeological evidence is less definitive than has been claimed, something that runs against the grain of basically all recent scholarship, employing arguments like "maybe the sites we have access to were anomalous ones - we just don't know" that hold little merit. He employs similar arguments against textual evidence such as the famous list of army and civilian office-holders, the Notitia Dignitatum, claiming that the list was akin to Hitler moving around phantom armies on a map. And he reintroduces the racial element into the whole thing, emphasizing the barbarian-ness of "new" recruits to the Roman army, which presumably increased in number as the empire's age did, without considering (1) that Roman armies had been at least half non-Roman from the very beginnings of Roman history, (2) that the dividing line between "Roman" and "barbarian" was, while not fluid, very confusing and difficult to draw, and probably an unnecessarily complicating distinction for the most part, (3) that there is not a shred of evidence that argues that "barbarian" soldiers were worse ones than "Roman" ones were, and a few others. It's like reading Gibbon all over again. Basically, his book is just a mess, and in the most recent round of scholarly papers and books it doesn't get seriously mentioned by anybody. The dude's a good historian, but he's kind of out of his field, and it shows.
There is a book that you haven't mentioned, which I would actually recommend more highly than either of the two that you did: Guy Halsall's Barbarian Migrations and the Roman West, 376-550. The book is a fantastic counterpart to Heather's in that reading both allows you to see both sides of the coin, the two main coherent arguments in late antique studies on the matter of the political end of the western Roman Empire. Halsall and Heather agree on many points, but the one where they differ - and it's a big one - is the notion of barbarian protagonism in Western Roman collapse. Where Heather argues that the Huns basically "pushed" other groups into the Western Roman Empire and were ultimately responsible for generating the military threat that resulted in its collapse, Halsall says that the Romans themselves, in internecine civil conflict, created the conditions by which barbarian groups could enter the Roman state.
Halsall's book has flaws too, and Heather's most recent work Empires and Barbarians points out some of the more conjectural statements he's made and leaned a bit too hard on. Halsall's work frequently responds to Heather's original Fall book in a similar vein. The three make a very nice, cohesive picture of late antique studies, and you should definitely read all three of them. If I had to pick one, I'd go with Halsall, since his narrative is better fleshed out, his tone is much more to my liking, and he employs footnotes instead of endnotes. But if you are more of a casual reader, go with Heather's first, Fall of the Roman Empire.
Die in a fire.
Seriously, the only people who should read Gibbon are historians, masochistic lit students, and douchebags who want to look smart by reading very thick, very famous old-school history books. He has very variable scholarly merit (some stuff he got right, some stuff he didn't), so if you read his book you're going to get a very weird version of late Roman history. It's not written in modern English and as such is somewhat of a chore to read, as well. If you want to learn about what actually happened, don't read Gibbon.
It's not a bad general rule to follow, but a lot of Goldsworthy's criticisms are just silly. Heather's book does have flaws, but Halsall makes a much better critic than does Goldsworthy. Notably, Amazon had a five-star rating for the Halsall book when I last checked - but it's more expensive and less frequently rated, because it's more of a "scholarly" work than either of the other two (also it is a bigger book).
This is a fine work but unless you are a classical history student and have a good idea about where Xenophon is papering over events and where he is openly lying, you probably ought to skip out on this. I recommend Buckler and Beck's history of Central Greek power politics in the fourth century and Cartledge's massive tome on Agesilaos if you want the current word on Xenophon. Then you should give him a whirl, because Xenophon's great.
This is a decent introduction, but the dude (Freeman) is the same weirdo who wrote that ridiculously out-of-touch book about the "Dark Ages" and the "closing of the Western mind", isn't he? I'd avoid anything he writes about religion and philosophy like the plague.
Yeah, this is a huge part of why Gibbon shouldn't really be read by the casual reader or undergraduate. There's other stuff, too, though. For instance, most of his character studies of emperors are based on his perceived conception of their morality. He seriously employs pejoratives such as "dissolute" and such, because for Gibbon, Roman successes are due to Rome being awesome and the emperor at the time being a good emperor, and Roman failures are due to the emperor being a "weak" character or "dissolute". And eventually he does a 180 and decides that no matter how militarily or politically successful an emperor might be, his successes and failures are due to the weaknesses of his enemies, not his (or her) personal actions.
Also, Gibbon's ability to draw on archaeological findings is virtually nil, his overview of social and economic history is laughably primitive (mostly due to the previous "archaeology" point), and his historiographical knowledge is more or less limited to his personal assessment of the value of certain sources, which is highly suspect.
This isn't to say that Gibbon's work is valueless, as it certainly isn't, but in view of all of the more recent and better works that have come out, it really oughtn't hold pride of place like it currently does. If you really must read an old-school history book on late antiquity, J. B. Bury's midcentury series was far better. In fact, most of the current crop of late antique historians have tended to update Bury (and each other). Gibbon doesn't usually enter the argument at all, save when somebody (e.g. Heather) wants to use a Gibbon quote on historiography to demonstrate the value of a given source (in this case, arguing that Ammianus Marcellinus' depiction of the Huns isn't as wildly incorrect as others, like Halsall, would argue that it is, partly (but not wholly of course) because Gibbon considers him a "most faithful guide").
Have you ever heard of Steven Saylor? He has a series of novels and short story collections about a detective of sorts in late-Republic Rome called "Roma sub Rosa". The main character is "Gordianus the Finder", and he's fairly likable. Historical characters work their way into Saylor's works: in the first novel, for instance, a young politician named Marcus Tullius Cicero hires Gordianus to do some leg-work for a trial he's involved in. The last book is titled The Triumph of Caesar to give you an idea of the scale of the series. Saylor's also written an epic historical novel called Roma that tracks a patrician family's story through a thousand years of Roman history. He's about to release Empire, which follows the family through the imperial period to the fall. Should be interesting: as far as I know, Saylor's never written an imperial novel.
I like Roman novels, too. ;-) I don't know many authors, though. Robert Harris has done a few: he's working on the third book in a trilogy of biographical novels (Imperium, Lustrum/Conspirtas) about Cicero, and wrote another book set in the Pompeii area.
Arriaga II
Warlord
Yeah I missed Halsall's work when I was looking. I wouldn't have considered purchasing it though anyways in the short term ($40 paperback vs. $13 paperback isn't really a fair contest). I can't really comment any more on these 3 books until I read them, but thanks for the overviews. Oh and I did see Empires and Barbarians on Amazon and will probably check it out in the future alongside Heather's earlier work on the Goths.
Oh and I agree, footnotes are always better than endnotes.
Yeah Amazon is a flawed resource when it comes to scholarly works that haven't received popular interest. That's why when I purchase a book I try to always use my universities database collection to look up book reviews from the relevant scholarly journals.
This is a fine work but unless you are a classical history student and have a good idea about where Xenophon is papering over events and where he is openly lying, you probably ought to skip out on this. I recommend Buckler and Beck's history of Central Greek power politics in the fourth century and Cartledge's massive tome on Agesilaos if you want the current word on Xenophon. Then you should give him a whirl, because Xenophon's great.
Too bad because I already purchased Hellinica this morning (along with Heather and 2 of the other books on my list).
I might get Buckler/Beck from the library to read alongside, however. I'm familiar with classical Greece in general and had to do some primary source research on the Pelopennesian War (although not that challenging of a research area since I could mostly lean on Thucydides). My understanding of the 404-338 period is limited to a vague understanding of political infighting and the rise and fall of Epaminondas and Theban power. It should be interesting to read more on the period.Good point on the money issue. If you can find these books in your university library, leap at the chance. Even Goldsworthy is worth a read if you're not spending money on him, because of his analysis of the third century. (After you read that, read, say, Alaric Watson's Aurelian biography, for balance, of course.
)Well, it's probably not as bad as I'm making out. IIRC the Landmark translations come with commentaries, so you'll probably be able to weed through the crap. The long and short of it is that Xenophon is basically a big fan of Sparta, especially his buddy Agesilaos, with whom he campaigned many a time. So he'll give short shrift to Thebes, the Corinthians, and to a lesser extent the Athenians. Since 1900 or so, classical scholars have been able to compare Xenophon with another historian, the author of the Oxyrhynchos Hellenika, who puts things differently (to say the least). The Landmark translation might have references to the Oxyrhynchos historian as regards Xenophon's reliability on certain events. Buckler and Beck, if you can find them at the library, will do a great job on historiographic analysis of Xenophon vs. the Oxyrhynchos Hellenika vs. (say) Diodoros vs. Ploutarchos.Arriaga II said:Too bad because I already purchased Hellinica this morning (along with Heather and 2 of the other books on my list).
Yeah, for the 404-338 period the best recent primers are probably Cartledge (for the Spartan Hegemony) and Buckler & Beck (for the Theban perspective and several illuminating case studies). You can get an overview in Hale's Lords of the Sea, but it's an Athenian view, short on dates and events, and generally reads more like a mass-market paperback history than either of the other two. I'll see if I can find other good works tomorrow.
If you're looking for primary sources, eventually you're going to run up against Diodoros, who is frequently described as a terrible historian who unfortunately serves as the chief source for several poorly illuminated periods of classical history (esp. the fourth century BC). That's probably a little harsh, but he does partly deserve his reputation of being a frustrating read. I don't think there are any full translations of him out except for the Loeb edition, which is saddening because the Loeb translations are so variable in quality. Just fair warning.
Arriaga II
Warlord
Good point on the money issue. If you can find these books in your university library, leap at the chance. Even Goldsworthy is worth a read if you're not spending money on him, because of his analysis of the third century. (After you read that, read, say, Alaric Watson's Aurelian biography, for balance, of course.
Well, it's probably not as bad as I'm making out. IIRC the Landmark translations come with commentaries, so you'll probably be able to weed through the crap. The long and short of it is that Xenophon is basically a big fan of Sparta, especially his buddy Agesilaos, with whom he campaigned many a time. So he'll give short shrift to Thebes, the Corinthians, and to a lesser extent the Athenians. Since 1900 or so, classical scholars have been able to compare Xenophon with another historian, the author of the Oxyrhynchos Hellenika, who puts things differently (to say the least). The Landmark translation might have references to the Oxyrhynchos historian as regards Xenophon's reliability on certain events. Buckler and Beck, if you can find them at the library, will do a great job on historiographic analysis of Xenophon vs. the Oxyrhynchos Hellenika vs. (say) Diodoros vs. Ploutarchos.
Yeah, for the 404-338 period the best recent primers are probably Cartledge (for the Spartan Hegemony) and Buckler & Beck (for the Theban perspective and several illuminating case studies). You can get an overview in Hale's Lords of the Sea, but it's an Athenian view, short on dates and events, and generally reads more like a mass-market paperback history than either of the other two. I'll see if I can find other good works tomorrow.
If you're looking for primary sources, eventually you're going to run up against Diodoros, who is frequently described as a terrible historian who unfortunately serves as the chief source for several poorly illuminated periods of classical history (esp. the fourth century BC). That's probably a little harsh, but he does partly deserve his reputation of being a frustrating read. I don't think there are any full translations of him out except for the Loeb edition, which is saddening because the Loeb translations are so variable in quality. Just fair warning.
Thanks for the info on the period sources. I had bought the Landmark Herodotus on a whim last year, because I was astonished at the quality and quantity of the 300 or so maps, explanatory footnotes and the 21 appendices on Greek history, as well as how cheap it was. $26 hardcover!!!!!!! (On another note, on Amazon people posters have said the paperback Landmark Thucydides edition has binding issues so I'm getting all in this series as hardcover). I decided I would get Xenophon before Thucydides since I was less familiar with Xenophon (other than his Anabasis)
According to Amazon, the Anabasis of Alexander by Arrian is due out in November. It has Cartledge listed as one of the contributors but not the primary translator.
Ulyaoth
Emperor
Uh, do you mean 1984?
Communisto
Condottiere
Just read Michael Crichton's posthumous Pirate Lattitudes. Was really swashbuckling. Lots of sex, blood and general pirate awesomeness. Also really well researched. Recommend it to anyone who wants a nice, enjoyable adventure read.
Ulyaoth
Emperor
oh. Did a quick check of wikipedia and saw no mention of books so thought you made a typo.
- Status
Similar threads
