What is Veeky Forums reading right now?

What is Veeky Forums reading right now?

I'm enjoying pic related right now. It's an engaging read.

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I'm reading Meditations right now; it has a lot of good wisdom. I'm especially liking Book 7 at the moment. I also have a Rothbard collection coming soon, so I'll get to enjoy that once it shows up.

I read SPQR a couple months ago, and I thought it was pretty good. It's a great intro to Rome for beginners, although it needed more detail about the fourteen emperors. Still, I'm glad you're enjoying it OP.

nigger cuck

I'm listening to "Three Minutes to Doomsday," a book about (and written by) an FBI agent trying to catch a mole during the late cold war. He goes into a lot of detail about his investigative process which I find pretty interesting. A lot of it boils down to just putting the suspect at ease and gently nudging them make small admissions, little things which eventually add up enough to constitute a felony offense, espionage in this case. I went through the trouble of making a short recording of it:

vocaroo.com/i/s0fXW5V00uq5

The Guns of August

It's a fun read. The theory about the cyclical influence of myth and reality is very cool.

I've been reading A Distant Mirror for like a month because I've been busy but I'm finally about to finish it

Reminder that Mary Beard defended this

She said that there was most likely 'diversity' in roman britain

I'm trying to make my way through The Enneads, even with a pair of reading guides.
It is a slog that manages to be both confusing and wonderfully interesting.

I don't think it is beyond unreasonable for some Nubian's to have joined the legions and eventually end up posted to Britain.
Certainly very unlikely however.

Diversity =! Black people

It's damn good. You have to be pretty well read and know many of the Latin terms peppered in the book in order to fully grasp what his argument is, so it's not for novices of Roman history.

...

Wikipedia says it's controversial, can you explain why?

reading pic related, and holy fuck it's a lot of historical material
basically, right after ww2 ended, about 200 historical and military individuals got together to compile 999 pages worth of the history of world war 2, and it's dense as fuck
has a bunch of great photos of all fronts involving the US, Canada or GB
got it for 8 bucks at the thrift store, pretty decent

Because of World War 2 and the Nazis, which has really fucked up the classical world in terms of viewing past idols. Everything's in reference to Hitler (Alexander is a big one nowadays).
For a purely Roman answer, he is decrying the idea that the republic was a genuine form of social democracy, and argues the republic was already way past the point of an oligarchy by the time of Sulla. Even if there were no Augustus, it'd be beyond the point if no return.

Was it a popular opinion that the republic was ever actually a true democracy? Most of the power was in the senate since the beginning

Well it was generally leaning towards a form of public participation and elections. Syme argues by the Middle Republic post Carthage it was basically under the shifting control of a small number of families at any one time (Metalli, Scipii, Servilii etc). But when Sulla came about, a one man domination came to be the norm. While Pompey was not officially recognized as a dictator, he very much was a warlord-type, and dominated the political scene long before Caesar showed up. He argues citizen participation was virtually small beans

It's just surprising that that was considered controversial scholarship, it seems to me that that's the accepted view generally now

Not to bad so far.

due to it being the Armed Services Memorial Edition, makes sense that there was the intention of putting the reader's service record into the books

I got to see him speak, it was pretty cool

Well most scholarship in the Anglo American world had historically viewed Imperial Rome as degenerate, despotic and anti democracy, while the Republic was a beacon of virtus.

I tend to be careful with these drastically differing opinions/arguments in these works, because it often times is throwing the baby out with the bath water. An example would be Peter Brown, who rightly promoted the idea of a Late Roman society that was rather advanced, but basically pretends that the collapse of the WRE had never happened nor had any negative effects on the western states. It just is applying Hegelian dialects, that's all.

That's awesome. He seems like we really knows his shit.

Gonna start reading this tomorrow probably.

forgive me i'm mentally challenged

He said that one of the passes he and his team travelled had some incredibly scant evidence of some sort of settlement around the time frame of hannibals invasion, but he didn't put it in the book because he wanted to do more study on it
Also I got to learn that the Latin professor at my local university is named Gaius, which is absolutely hilarious

SPQR isnt that good as roman histories go, its aimed at a very general audience of readers. i was genuinely disappointed in it, didnt like her book on roman humour either though. currently reading Nightwalking: A Nocturnal History of London by Beaumont, pretty good and very well written so far.

Gaius was born for it. I'll have to keep Hunt's articles on my radar in case he mentions any update.

SPQR is babby's first book on Roman history

Pic related, been rereading this gem right here. Written by a scholar who specializes in the psychological and emotional life of the ancient Romans, her book is dense and filled with academic verbiage but for people with the appropriate reading comprehension, this book is a rare treat which will give an intimate view in the way that normal Romans thought and acted, specifically how the "warrior aristocracy" values that dominated the Republic era were subverted during the principate by the tamer values of the service class, and the subsequent infantilization of Roman culture that followed.

Highly recommended for anyone with more than a passing interest in Roman history.

the Ego and It's Own