Well, this is frustrating, but it does happen when you write a book. Sometimes you go down one path in your research before discovering that it’s a dead end.
Then you have a choice: You can somehow finagle it into your book and hope that it works. Journalists do that a lot, because they don’t like [...]
Entries Tagged as ‘History’
December 2, 2008
From Casanova to Cleo
November 14, 2008
Casanova, aged 11, discovers wit
I’m reading The Story of My Life by Giacomo Casanova and arrive at the following event, which took place when the boy was eleven years old.
(And yes, this is part of the bibliography for my book. If you’re trying to figure out why, I leave, for the time being, the subtlest of hints here.)
Casanova [...]
November 12, 2008
Strolling through Rome’s Forum with Scipio
A follow-up to my post earlier today:
Technically, the rendering shows the city as it was in 390AD, during the reign of Constantine. The main characters in my book–Hannibal, Fabius and Scipio–lived 600 years earlier. But who cares. Just wallow in your imagination and picture Fabius and Scipio arguing here, Scipio Triumphing [...]
November 12, 2008
Sprezzatura in writing
A line [of poetry] will take us hours maybe;
Yet if it does not seem a moment’s thought,
Our stitching and unstitching has been naught.
William Butler Yeats, Adam’s Curse
I just came across this quote from Yeats in Robert Greene’s The 48 Laws of Power. More specifically, in Law Number 30, which says (page 245):
Make your accomplishments seem [...]
November 12, 2008
Visit ANCIENT Rome!
This qualifies as breaking news, if you’re writing my kind of book. Watch:
It arose out of this great project.
This where Fabius and Scipio walked. This is where the Romans bewailed their dead after Hannibal’s victories at the Trebia, at Trasimene and at Cannae. This is where Scipio celebrated his Triumph after [...]
November 11, 2008
Hannibal, Aikido and Casanova
Bear with me, please. I’m trying, right now, to analyze Hannibal’s phenomenal skill at winning battles. And I’m trying to find parallels in other areas of life.
It occurs to me that Hannibal had some things in common with this Aikido Black Belt:
It further occurs to me that Hannibal had his way [...]
November 11, 2008
Goldsworthy on The Punic Wars
And back again to the bibliography for my book.
We’re still in the “history” section, as opposed to the “biography” section, but we’ve mostly dealth with the ancient sources (Polybius, Livy and Plutarch). So now I’ll move into the modern writers.
If I had to choose just one book to give you a fun but thorough overview [...]
November 6, 2008
More on Hannibal’s elephants
Thanks to James Allen over at Electrical Wall for helping me reframe my understanding about Hannibal and his elephants. I now see that my own take missed the more existential connections the man had with his elephants.
November 3, 2008
The father of biography
Let’s get back to the bibliography for my book.
Right now–while we’re still dealing with the ancient sources–I’m going through the texts in chronological order. And after Polybius and Livy, that brings me to Plutarch.
You recall that Herodotus was the father of history. Well, Plutarch must be the father of biography. Like Herodotus, Thucydides and Polybius, [...]
October 31, 2008
Hannibal’s Y chromosome
Click on the map above and read about the latest in this fantastic research effort called the “genographic project“. The dots show the areas of the Mediterranean with the highest frequency of the Phoenician haplotype.
They swabbed the cheeks of men from Syria and Cyprus to Malta and Morocco to have a closer look at the [...]
October 25, 2008
Livy
I left off my series on the bibliography for my book with a long post on Polybius. Polybius, as I said, was one of the greatest historians ever, but most of his books were lost. This means that for the history of Hannibal’s war against Rome we have to rely heavily on another ancient source. [...]
October 21, 2008
America as the new Rome: Polybius and us
In my previous post on Polybius, I promised to tell you why he is so important to us Americans in particular. Here is why:
His ultimate explanation for Rome’s greatness was that Rome had a constitution that was uniquely and perfectly balanced between the three types of government: monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy.
An excess of any of [...]
October 21, 2008
Polybius
First off in this series of posts about the bibliography for my book–in the category of ancient sources–is, of course, Polybius. His life is one of the most fascinating ever lived, and his importance to us–especially to us Americans, as I will explain in the follow-up post–is enormous.
Let me lead up to Polybius in three [...]
October 21, 2008
My bibliography
A while ago, I promised Baltimore Bookworm to start blogging the bibliography for my book, and I haven’t gotten around to it yet. Baltimore Bookworm, I haven’t forgotten. Starting at once, I’ll drip out the books and academic papers I’ve been reading and plan to read.
The rest of you: Please feel free to infer my [...]
October 15, 2008
Uncle Lulu
That guy with the cigar on this West German stamp from 1987 is my great-uncle, Ludwig Erhard, or “Onkel Lulu” in our family.
Why is he on this blog?
Well, I’ve been posting a lot about writing and language and style recently, all of which of course has a lot to do with the writing of my [...]
October 6, 2008
Our election, Napoleon, and that map again
Remember that famous and superb map of the impostor success that I wrote about the other day? Well, it depicted Napoleon’s invasion of Russia, and how it went from triumph to disaster, which is one of the twin themes I explore in my book. There is a famous picture of Napoleon’s retreat. And now The [...]
