Reasoning: Roman History Resources

I'm back to the land of the living!

I've just finished up my first term of teaching undergrads Roman history and just completed my first set of PhD exams (including a Roman history exam-- which I passed with very high marks!). For those of your who have read the blog at all, you know that this is not even close to my area of expertise. As such, this was quite the victory for me.

So, I thought I'd list, with some comments, the resources I used for studying. Some are from my reading list, some are my own additions.

Textbooks:

• Boatwright, Mary, Daniel J. Gargola, Noel Lenski, Richard J. A. Talbert. The Romans: From Village to Empire. 2nd edition, 2012. (The second edition has a shorter section on early Rome, which is sad, but it expands so that it has information on the end of the Western empire and a little bit on the Byzantine empire, which I think is something that was extremely necessary). Many of the sections were far too short, but it's a fairly decent overview of everything.
• Brown, Peter. The World of Late Antiquity. I think this book is mostly useless. It is far too broad an overview. However, the pictures are really fantastic and it gives some idea of the broad strokes of what Late Antiquity looks like.
• Cameron, Averil. The Later Roman Empire. This is a good introduction to Late Antiquity.
• Cornell, T.J. The Beginnings of Rome: Italy and Rome from the Bronze Age to the Punic Wars, 1000-264 BCE. This book is an absolutely fantastic resource on early Rome. However, it is heavily academic, so I would suggest another introduction first, or perhaps even ignoring it altogether if you don't have to know this pre-Punic War period thoroughly.
• Crawford, Michael. The Roman Republic. 2nd edition. 1993. I read this because it was on my reading list but I think it is absolutely terrible. It assumes that you already know this period in history with some degree of competence, so it fails to explain a lot of the important events. Beyond this, it spends the entirety of the post-Gracchi period with a seriously Marxists interpretation of history (specifically that the Gracchi excited the class tensions between the senatorial and the lower classes). Moreover, I found that the earlier half of the book completely useless and rather antiquated.
• Wells, Colin. The Roman Empire. This book was quite good. The explanation of the political system of the Roman Republic in the Introduction is quite fantastic. Also, although this book is also a short introduction to the empire, I found it was quite useful.

Popular History:

• Everett, Anthony. The Rise of Rome. I used this for information on early Rome. It had a lot of detail. I listened to the version from Audible.
• Gwynn, David. Roman Republic: A Very Short Introduction. I thought this was a really great introduction to the subject and a nice synthesis of Republican history. 
• Holland, Tom. Rubicon. This was an incredible helpful and detailed portrait of the Late Republic. I listened to the Audible edition.

Podcasts and Lectures:

• Duncan, Mike. The History of Rome. (or iTunes). There are small errors scattered throughout the history.
• Fagan, Garrett G. The History of Ancient Rome. From the Great Courses. Helpful, especially for the Republic. However, it cuts off right after the accession of Vespasian and then goes onto thematic history.
• -----------. The Emperors of Rome. From the Great Courses. This lecture series is very helpful, especially when paired with Fagan's other series. However, Fagan has a taste for the sensationalist.
• Noble, Thomas F.X. Late Antiquity: Crisis and Transformation. From the Great Courses. Most of this is rather late material-- far beyond the scope of most Classics courses. Much of it, also, is out of chronological order so it can be hard to follow at points. However, I found it really helpful when I took my Late Antique education class.

I'm considering posting some timelines and other resources as well, but I haven't gotten around to fixing my paper versions.

Reasoning/Spirited: A Grand Narrative Approach to Greek History #2

Although I criticized The Origins of Greek Thought on both specific points and general approach in my last blog post, Vernant incorporates a number of persuasive and thought-provoking claims in his narrative tale of the origins of Greek Rationality. One of the descriptions that caught my attention is his description of the bureaucratic royalty of the Mycenean palace culture:

"social life appears to have been centered on the palace, whose function was at once religious, political, military, administrative, and economic. In this palace-centered economic system, as it has been called, the king brought together and fused in his own person all aspects of power and sovereignty. Through the agency of the scribes, who formed a professional class established by tradition, and a complex hierarchy of palace dignitaries and royal inspectors, the king controlled and closely regulated all sectors of economic life and spheres of social activity" (Vernant 24).

This passage struck my attention because it reminded me of a passage in Herodotus on which I spent a lot of time and concentration. In Book I when Herodotus describes the founding of the Persian empire by Deiokes, he describes a similar bureaucratic palace structure, except of course that Deiokes becomes so paranoid that he no longer leaves the palace. Furthermore, the palace structure itself sounds somewhat like the image that Vernant describes for the Mycenean palace:

"the Mycenean manor, centered on the megaron [a great central hall] and the throne room, is a walled fortress, a chieftain's den, dominating and keeping watch over the plain at is feet. Constructed to withstand siege, this citadel sheltered the quarters of the king's intimate associates, the military leaders and the palace dignitaries, alongside the princely dwelling and its outbuildings" (Vernant 28)

Unlike the Persian palace that Herodotus describes [1], the Mycenean palaces were not built in concentric circles. Here is an example of the palace floorplan at Pylos [2]:

However, the fortified structure around the king and the treasury and the specialized circle of scribes to maintain a stranglehold on the life of the subject who build their homes around the palace directly follows the description that Herodotus provides. My guess would be that Herodotus saw (or heard about) the ruins of the old Persian palaces, heard the name Deiokes from local history and legend, and attributed aspects of the Greek past to the Persian past of a similar time period.

For anyone who reads Ancient Greek: 1.97-1.100 in Herodotus was one of my favorite passages (when I find my notes, I will do a translation of this section) in any Greek text I have read. The nested structure of the sentence that describes the concentric circles is so incredibly cool. I highly recommend it.

Endnotes

1. I believe that Herodotus does describe an actual Persian type of architecture, although I do not believe that there were ever seven concentric walls surrounding this type of palace. I would cite the source for this belief, but unfortunately I cannot find the paper that I wrote on Deiokes' palace (which is also the reason that I have not taken the time to do my own translation of the passage from the original Greek). I do believe, however, that this was the book that provided me with the information about the archaeological evidence for Persian architecture: Culican, William. The Medes and the Persians. New York: Praeger, 1965. 
2. This image comes from the Brown website. More awesome images of this type can be found at the Bryn Mawr website.

Reasoning: A Grand Narrative Approach to Greek History #1

I just finished re-reading Jean-Pierre Vernant's The Origins of Greek Thought, which entertained me during my recent jury duty.

Although I thoroughly enjoyed it, the book did not have quite the same impact as the first time I read it. I believe that this is because my most recent book before this was Early Greece, which is a much more current and detailed account of Greek History than The Origins of Greek Thought. Unfortunately, not only am I out of the loop on the current understandings of archaeology and I have no idea how to tell what is out of date and what is not. Is there some kind of community somewhere?

Apparently I have some modernist tendencies that college (and two wonderful literary theory classes) did not strangle out of me, because I still like the grand narrative approach to history. However, I think that Vernant's narrative leaves out a lot of details (from what I've gleaned from Murray) about the development of Greek politics.

One of the problems that I notice with Vernant's narrative is that he constructs a development from Mycenean kingship (which Vernant refers to as devine-kingship) to isonomia (an alternate term for democracy that is less aggressive than and predates democracy). His narrative seems to go straight from Mycenean kingship to aristocracy of the basileus (in the Homeric use of the term as a lord, opposed to wanax, the high king) class. However, Vernant seems to place too little emphasis on the age of tyrants in the city states. For example, Peisistratos's reforms in Athens (such as, among many others, the changes to the Panathenia and the invention of the Greater Dionysia (Murray 270-272)) which created some of the civic institutions that would later become a forum for dialogue and democracy. Also, some of Sparta's power, as well as the hoplite-class-lead constitutions coming about through Sparta's removal of tyrants from power (Murray 263). To be fair, Vernant does provide a chapter on the sages (Chapter Five, The Crisis of the City: The Earliest Sages) some of whom were tyrants, but it places its emphasis too early and does not account adequately for the later tyrants, like the Peisistratidai.

Furthermore, Vernant blurs the distinction between the concept of equality in the citizens as homoioi (equals) in the hoplite state and the citizen equals in isonomia that appears so radically important in Murray's assessment of the development of Athens into a democracy (Murray 265-284). Murray explains that after Kleomenes dethroned the Peisistratidai, Kleisthenes' reforms were so radically different from the eunomia (good order) that the Spartans intended to impose, Kleomenes and a small band of Spartans attacked Athens for a second time, and were repulsed by the Athenians (Murray 265).

It feels a little strange, to me, criticizing Vernant's book. Ever since, my freshman year in college when I read Feminine Figures of Death (which is available on jstor for anyone whose school/library/etc has access), I have adored Vernant and his writing. However, The Origins of Greek Thought was written in 1962, so I do have almost 50 years of scholarship and archaeology on him.

Reasoning: Greek History Review #2

, I finished the next the chapters of Early Greece, which consider the aristocracy and the community in the Dark Age and "Euboan Society and Trade." These chapters are not on the afore-mentioned Greek History Syllabus. However, I decided that I would finish the book as well as reading through the entirety of A Brief History of Ancient Greece alongside the secondary sources from the syllabus. The idea is to provide a broad base for further study. This I am sure would offend the sensibilities of my Greek History professor, given that A Brief History of Ancient Greece is written in part by one of her greatest rivals. Amusingly, I have to thank this same professor's rant against this rival which demonstrated the proper way to criticize a historical argument and served as a model for me to scrutinize the arguments of others (specifically some of the arguments in "Male Lament in Greek Tragedy") and my own arguments in my thesis.


Although most of what I'm reading is not new to me, there are a couple of things that came as a surprise to me. The first was that there was a period of pottery between the Geometric Period and the Black figure period. This was the Proto-Corninthian period of pottery, which flourished during the Orientalizing period 725-600 BCE [1]. Most of the pottery was miniature [1].

This owl is only 5cm long. It is my favorite Proto-Corinthian piece of which I have found a picture [2]. These pieces tend to employ the black, white, and terra cotta color scheme. The pieces have the influence of the eastern trading partners (Murray 32-33).

The pieces seem to me, from my mostly untrained eye, to be a mix of geometric period influences (although this vase shows the orientalist influence of the flowing curves in the painting and the pictures of animals (Murray 84-85), the animals are arranged in seemingly geometric patterns)

and the Athenian black figure that replaced it (this reminds me of the composition of the Athenian black figure, but the colors are quite obviously from the proto-Corinthian period).

Another, although slightly less vital, piece of information that I missed in my classical education was the origins of the Phoenicians. Murray says:

"the earliest Greek contacts were with the Canaanites of the Levantine coast, a people known to the Greeks as the Phoenicians, probably because of their monopoly of the only colour-fast dye in antiquity, the purple (phoinix) extract from the murex shellfish" (70).

I had no idea how the Phoenicians were named by the Greeks, and I thought that was pretty cool. I also thought they were island people, and had no ideas that they controlled the forests of Lebanon which provided timber to Egypt (Murray 70).

Endnotes:

As a Note: Project Gutenberg is now posting texts in their original language. They may have done this before, and I just did not notice. It's a fabulous resource. Although I would traditionally turn to the Perseus Project for Greek texts. However, I might put these on my kindle in order to translate without the crutch of a built in dictionary.

1. This comes from Encyclopaedia Britannica.
2. All of the pictures come from Wikimedia.