Ancient History Archives - Martin's Booklog

The Trojans and their Neighbours – Trevor Bryce

Published on February 21, 2010

The Trojans and their Neighbours

The Trojans and their Neighbours
Trevor Bryce
225 pages including index
published in 2006

The cover looks like it should belong on the course book of a not particularly interesting IT certification course, but don’t let that fool you. Behind it hides one of the more engaging and interesting history books I’ve read in the past year or so. Which came as no surprise to me, as I had already read one of Trevor Bryce’s other history books, The Kingdom of the Hittites. The cover therefore couldn’t scare me off…

The subject itself helps as well of course. The story of Troy, the city at the heart of Homer’s Iliad, thought to be no more than a myth until Schliemann actually dug it up remains endlessly fascinating to anybody interested in ancient history. As Bryce mentions, even today the question of whether or not the Troy Schliemann dug up was the “real” Troy, Homer’s Troy is still hotly debated. But as Bryce argues, this is also the least interesting question you can ask about the actually existing Troy. Troy existed for several thousand years and was a flourishing community long before and after the Trojan War supposedly happened. With an emphasis on the Bronze Ages, The Trojans and their Neighbours attempts to put straight the real history and position of Troy — was it as important a city state as you would assume from Homer, or just another smallish Bronze Age settlement, and what were its relations with its neighbours?

The Later Roman Empire — Averil Cameron

Published on July 13, 2008

Cover of The Later Roman Empire

The Later Roman Empire
Averil Cameron
238 pages including index
published in 1993

As you may have noticed if you’re a regular reader of my booklog, is that I’ve developed a mild obsession with Late Antiquity and the Roman Empire, fueled by the two excellent books I got out of the library last year, Peter Heather’s The Fall of the Roman Empire and Bryan Ward-Perkins’ The Fall of Rome. Before that I’d only read about Rome in a few history lessons at school, a couple of popular history books for kids and a shedload of Asterix comics, all of which emphasised the early days of Rome, up until Caesar and Augustus, with perhaps a bit of Nero thrown in. Everything after the first century CE was largely ignored or at best only mentioned briefly; the later centuries of the Roman Empire are seen as an afterthought, a long slide into barbarism ala Edward Gibbon.

Yet if you start reading more academic treatments of Roman history, you soon discover that this view has long been abandonded, ever since the publication of Peter Brown’s The World of Late antiquity in 1971. That was the first popular book to do away with the idea of the dark ages,
re-emphasising the continuity between the Christianised empire of the third century CE and the Early Middle Ages, as well as the continuing survival of the Eastern Empire centered around Byzantium, as opposed to the Western Empire’s breakup. Averil Cameron’s The Later Roman Empire is one product of this re-emphasis. Published in 1993 as a volume in the Fontana History of the Ancient World, it shows that the view put forth by Peter Brown has won mainstream acceptance. It is meant as a standard textbook on the late Roman Empire, because none such was yet written in English, as the preface explains.

The Assassination of Julius Caesar – Michael Parenti

Published on May 12, 2008

Cover of The Assassination of Julius Caesar

The Assassination of Julius Caesar
Michael Parenti
276 pages including index
published in 2004

All history is interpretation. That simple truth is hammered home in this book, The Assassination of Julius Caesar, offering a radical new context for the events of the fifteenth of march 44 BCE. The facts remain the same, but the assumptions with which Michael Parenti looks at the murder of Julius Caesar differ so much from the classical interpretation that almost an entirely new history is revealed. It’s a powerful antidote against so much pop history presented as if free from any social and ideological context, usually because it’s written from the safe cocoon of the dominant ideological assumptions of the day.

I picked up The Assassination of Julius Caesar when I saw it in the local library because I recognised it from a review Resolute Reader did two years ago. He described it as an antidote to the much more common interpretation of Roman history as the tales of great men. What Parenti does instead is to place the murder of Julius Caesar in the context of the class struggle going on in the late Roman Republic.