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So Gore Vidal's Julian is pretty good.
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Feb 10, 2016 05:48
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Jerusalem posted:Saw this linked in the Political Cartoons thread of all places: Ugh, I wish I lived in Europe just for the slim chance of finds like this on my property. Maybe they'll find a copy of Suetonius' Lives of Famous Whores?
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Apr 19, 2016 11:18
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I finished reading Richard Fidler's Ghost Empire on Byzantium and now I have a hankering for more of the same. Google points me to John Julius Norwich's history of the Byzantine Empire, but I thought it best to come here for recommendations as well.
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Dec 22, 2016 00:12
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fantastic in plastic posted:"As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding; like the Roman, I seem to see the River Tiber foaming with much blood." -some guy, I guess Poor Enoch Powell. Should have stuck to teaching classics at my alma mater. But yes, I've only managed to find Norwich's single volume history which might be the way to go for now. Try it before I commit to a trilogy and all that.
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Dec 23, 2016 02:20
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JaucheCharly posted:Nice dog. I received Tim Whitmarsh's Battling the Gods: Atheism in the Ancient World for Christmas, which has turned out to be precisely the book I never knew I wanted. Its focus is on Greece but it extends to about the fourth or fifth century AD, so plenty of interaction with Rome if that's more your cup of tea.
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Dec 26, 2016 21:50
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It might have been another thread but thanks whoever recommended Colleen McCullough's Rome series. I haven't read such good historical fiction in years.
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Mar 29, 2017 09:23
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Jerusalem posted:Yeah it's an absolute blast, even if she can't help but justify everything Caesar does. I'm about to start reading the second book. I'm not all that familiar with the Marius/Sulla period, so I don't know how accurate it is, but it's been great. I love Scaurus.
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Apr 4, 2017 22:34
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Since we're on the topic of Egypt, this popped up on my Facebook just now. http://foreignpolicy.com/2016/09/02...ional-identity/quote:On a cool Sunday evening in March, a geochemist named Sun Weidong gave a public lecture to an audience of laymen, students, and professors at the University of Science and Technology in Hefei, the capital city of the landlocked province of Anhui in eastern China. But the professor didn’t just talk about geochemistry. He also cited several ancient Chinese classics, at one point quoting historian Sima Qian’s description of the topography of the Xia empire — traditionally regarded as China’s founding dynasty, dating from 2070 to 1600 B.C. “Northwards the stream is divided and becomes the nine rivers,” wrote Sima Qian in his first century historiography, the Records of the Grand Historian. “Reunited, it forms the opposing river and flows into the sea.” I don't know enough about Egyptian or Chinese history to say whether it's all just BS, but it makes for an interesting read if you have nothing else to do.
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Apr 6, 2017 23:04
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Edgar Allen Ho posted:sounds delicious. Who doesn't love a good gruel? Jokes aside, it is pretty awesome that we have an actual cookbook from all that time ago.
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Apr 14, 2017 22:13
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Teriyaki Hairpiece posted:Some flamingo brains would perk him right up. It's the Roman way! Ugh. It's the tongue you want, not the brain, you barbarian.
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Apr 18, 2017 09:22
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Grand Prize Winner posted:Hey Ancient History thread! My mom's looking for a decent pop-history book on the Punic Wars. Do y'all have any recommendations? She's particularly interested in accounts of Hannibal's march into Italy. Livy's Ab Urbe Condita is pretty good and has remained pop-history for 2,000 years. As for my own question, having read McCullough's second book: was Sulla really as bad as she makes out, i.e. an actual murderer and guy who slept with his stepmum?
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Apr 25, 2017 09:41
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Epicurius posted:They're good, but they're not as good as the people who like them think they are, if that makes sense. Her biggest problem is that she has characters she likes and characters she doesn't like. (She likes Marius, until Caesar comes along, doesn't like Sulla, likes Caesar, doesn't like Pompey or Cato, likes Octavian, doesn't like Marcus Antonius, etc), and tends to make the characters she likes pretty wonderful and the characters she doesn't like pretty horrible. You read it and you get the impression that the only reason anybody ever opposed Caesar was just out of pique, and that Octavian was a super-genius who had worked out pretty much all of Roman history in his head when he was born. The books remind me of ASOIAF. They're not very well written or edited, but she is fantastic at developing characters to the point it feels like you have actually met these people.
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Apr 26, 2017 03:54
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cheetah7071 posted:130k years ago is a really really long time ago. Checking the wiki page, it isn't even universally agreed that Homo Sapiens had left Africa by then. Assuming the dating is accurate (the article makes the claim that the marks themselves were dated, not just the tusk, but I always thought you couldn't do that and that was one of the major weaknesses of dating technology) this is really cool. And in California too, not just the relatively easier to reach Alaska. It'd certainly beat the general consensus about the Aborigines being in Australia for 40-60k years. Even the earliest estimate of their arrival is about 100k years ago.
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Apr 26, 2017 23:03
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Forbes posted:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/drsara...d/#6d47dff75ad5 Short read but interesting. I admit despite my education the imagery of white, rather than coloured statuary usually comes to mind when I think about the ancient world. But because of that same education I know there was an enormous diversity of colour in the ancient world and I've never seen the Romans as being just 'white'.
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Apr 28, 2017 21:58
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