Potentially Interesting Newsletter - Subscriber Edition.

Subscriber Edition - Number I

Welcome to the first monthly subscriber newsletter! It’s my intention here to bring you slightly different content than the norm - simply moving content from one place to another without adding any ‘value’ seems a bit lazy to me. So, rather than just another article about Roman history, I would like to use this opportunity to talk about things in the broader Roman history universe.

By far the most common question I get about Roman history is ‘what book would you recommend about ... ‘ and it’s the one question I always dread because my answer is, broadly, ‘all of them’. No, really. It’s genuinely quite hard for me to think of someone who is a published historian who is ‘bad’ at what they do. Some reach conclusions that I wouldn’t have reached, and there are others whose work goes against the commonly accepted academic consensus, but ‘bad’? I can’t think of one.

As such, if you’re interested in Roman history, read all of it. As much of it as you can. When people ask me for book recommendations of, say, Roman generals, I think it kind of misses the point because what they are asking for is a biography, and a biography is a different subject matter altogether. History, as far as I’m concerned, is not really about things like facts and figures and whether we can tell for certain that such-and-such definitely happened. Instead, history is a source for understanding the contexts, beliefs and worldviews of the people who wrote it. It almost doesn’t matter if it’s ‘true’ or not, because even stuff that is pure fantasy, like whole sections of the Historia Augusta, can tell you something about the world in which it was written and what the intentions of the author were.