Historically Thinking

Since it’s July, a month named by the Roman Senate in honor of Julius Caesar, and since last week we had a conversation with Adrian Goldsworthy on Julius Caesar as both a historian and a historical source, it seems fitting enough to pull out of the archives an interview with Barry Strauss about his novel […]

Since it's July, a month named by the Roman

Senate in honor of Julius Caesar, and since last week we had a conversation with Adrian Goldsworthy on Julius Caesar as both a historian and a historical source, it seems fitting enough to pull out of the archives an interview with Barry Strauss about his novel The Death of Caesar.

"The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there." So said L.P. Hartley, a novelist now only remembered for a line that's now a cliché. Often it's taken by its speaker as an aphorism meaning that the past is unknowable, unattainable, unreachable. Yet maybe they're not thinking hard enough about what they're saying.

After all, people travel to foreign countries all the time. When they do, they have essentially two options. One is to see the sites, but to do so from within their own comfortable cultural bubble of people from their own culture, in a modern international hotel, perhaps seeing out familiar fast-food as a comfort.

Alternatively, they could learn the language; study some maps; learn a little bit about the culture; maybe even have a guide help them take a look around. The two experiences of that foreign country will be remarkably different.

The Roman Republic in its last years is a remarkably faraway and foreign country. We might think that we know it; isn't the United States a republic; isn't our bank a neoclassical building; didn't we read Shakespeare's Julius Caesar when we were freshmen in high school? Those things that we think we know are the bubble from which we try to understand the Roman Republic. But to appreciate it in all its foreignness, to fully appreciate it as other, we need a guide like Barry Strauss.

More Books by Barry Strauss

Barry Strauss, The Death of Caesar

–, The Battle of Salamis

–, The Spartacus War

–, Rowing Against the Current: On Learning to Scull at Forty

For Further Reading

A translation of Nicholas of Damascus' Life of Augustus

A helpful review of Édith Parmentier, Francesca Prometea Barone (ed.), Nicolas de Damas. Histoires; Recueil de coutumes; Vie d'Auguste; Autobiographie. Fragments.

Anyone who has tackled Latin, even if only for a semester, knows that Gaul was divided into three parts–even if they’re still not sure why. Latin students know this because for decades they’ve been nurtured on the prose of Julius Caesar, as set down in his Commentaries on the Gallic Wars. For this reason they’ve learned […]

Anyone who has tackled Latin, even if only for a semester, knows that Gaul was divided into three parts–even if they're still not sure why.

Latin students know this because for decades they've been nurtured on the prose of Julius Caesar, as set down in his Commentaries on the Gallic Wars. For this reason they've learned to translate sentences like "the dead horse lay in the road", or master some of the terminology of Roman bridge building and military rituals. All of this because Caesar wrote in a very clear and direct prose, making him (as Latin teachers have believed) a model for students.

But was Caesar a historian? Were the commentaries a kind of "current history"? Of what use are they to ancient historians? And how might we test their reliability, or Caesar's veracity?

Our guest today on Historically Thinking is Adrian Goldsworthy, who is uniquely able to answer these questions and more. A native of South Wales, Dr. Goldsworthy's doctoral thesis was on the Roman Army as "a fighting force". Since then he has written numerous histories of the ancient world, as well as biographies that include Caesar: Life of a Colossus and most recently Augustus: First Emperor of Rome. He is also the author of six novels set in the British Army during the Peninsular Campaigns of the Napoleonic Wars, and has just completed his first novel set in the ancient world.

For Further Investigation

The website of Adrian Goldsworthy

Augustus: First Emperor of Rome

Caesar: Life of a Colossus

True Soldier Gentleman (the first of his Napoleonic novels)

Preppers, survivalists, safe rooms, gold in the backyard…Lots of people seem to be worried about the collapse of society and civilization, whether because of Financial Crisis 2.0, the arrival of aliens or asteroids, or the eclipse of all values. But chances are that few of us have experienced the collapse of a civilization, and that the real thing […]

Preppers, survivalists, safe rooms, gold in the backyard...Lots of people seem to be worried about the collapse of society and civilization, whether because of Financial Crisis 2.0, the arrival of aliens or asteroids, or the eclipse of all values. But chances are that few of us have experienced the collapse of a civilization, and that the real thing is far more frightening than we actually imagine.

Our guest today, Eric H. Cline, helps us understand what such a catastrophe means in his acclaimed book  1177 BC: The Year Civilization Collapsed (Princeton University Press, 2014). As Cline makes clear, it takes more than one calamity to ruin a civilization. And the Bronze Age ended in a whirl of calamities–droughts, famines, earthquakes, wars, invasions, and governmental collapse. All were a long chain of disasters so heavy that they dragged down an entire civilization. That is, everything familiar soon became strange and distant to those living in a subsequent "dark age," a dark age more catastrophic and grim than even that period that followed the collapse of the Western Roman Empire.

Eric H. Cline is Professor of Classics and Anthropology, and Director of the Capitol Archaeological Institute at George Washington University. He has been an active field archaeologist for over thirty years, recently retiring as co-director of the Megiddo Expedition. The author of numerous books and articles, I'm very pleased to welcome him to Historically Thinking.

As always, we hope you enjoy the conversation, and we invite you to leave a comment or a review on iTunes and let us know how we're doing.

For Further Investigation

Cline, E.H. 1177 BC: The Year Civilization Collapsed. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Cline, E.H. The Trojan War: A Very Short Introduction. New York: Oxford University Press.

Cline, E.H., ed. Oxford Handbook of the Bronze Age Aegean. New York: Oxford University Press.

Cline, E.H. Biblical Archaeology: A Very Short Introduction. New York: Oxford University Press.

Cline, E.H. From Eden to Exile: Unraveling Mysteries of the Bible. Washington, DC: National Geographic Books.

Cline, E.H., and J. Rubalcaba. The Ancient Egyptian World. New York: Oxford University Press.

Were you at Waterloo? I have been at Waterloo. ‘Tis no matter what you do, If you were at Waterloo. Thus a little ditty that appeared in the United Service Gazette, thirty years after the Battle of Waterloo was fought on June 18, 1815. It was the third day of a series of battles fought […]

Were you at Waterloo?

I have been at Waterloo.

'Tis no matter what you do,

If you were at Waterloo.

Thus a little ditty that appeared in the United Service Gazette, thirty years after the Battle of Waterloo was fought on June 18, 1815. It was the third day of a series of battles fought between the Emperor Napoleon of France, newly returned from exile, and an Allied Coalition led by Britain's Arthur Wellesley, the Duke of Wellington, and Prussia's Gebhard von Blücher, Prince von Wahlstatt.

Since yesterday was the 251st anniversary of the battle, it's appropriate that we pull from the archives a conversation of more than a year ago. In it I re-fight the Battle of Waterloo with Gareth Glover, a retired naval officer dedicated to the study of the land campaigns of the British Army in the Napoleonic Wars. Gareth is a model of lucidity, but even more a model of archival energy. Since his retirement he has specialized in finding source after source that were hiding in plain sight in public archives, as well as tracing the location of sources rather better hidden.

In his book Waterloo: Myth and Reality, he wrote a meticulous reappraisal of the momentous battle that discovers that many of the things that historians, writers, and even veterans of the battle thought they knew about Waterloo just aren't so. Many of the other books in the last year simply repeated and repeated those myths; Glover does something different.

I should add that I first learned of Gareth Glover from Adrian Goldsworthy, who lives near Glover in South Wales. Goldsworthy blogs here. Last week he and I recorded a conversation on Julius Caesar and his commentaries on the Gallic Wars that will be "broadcast" in two weeks time.

Until then, enjoy! Again!

For Further Investigation

Gareth Glover, Waterloo: Myth and Reality

The Gareth Glover Collection: Original Source Material from the Napoleonic Wars, 1793-1815

The strategic situation facing Napoleon (at Wikipedia, so caveat emptor)

The Waterloo Campaign (at Wikipedia; see above)

Trigger Warning: if the 2016 presidential election has you waking up in the middle of the night in cold sweats, you may wish to give this conversation a pass. There’s no easy way to say it: This is a very strange year in American politics. Pundits and sober-minded experts have been consistently wrong. As an exercise […]

Trigger Warning: if the 2016 presidential election has you waking up in the middle of the night in cold sweats, you may wish to give this conversation a pass.

There's no easy way to say it: This is a very strange year in American politics. Pundits and sober-minded experts have been consistently wrong. As an exercise in self-critical thinking, historical or otherwise, it's useful to remember who got things wrong and why. Few are willing to detail their faults; Nate Silver has been a refreshing exception. (And why should it only be "empirically minded journalists" who confess their mistakes?)

This week I'm taking with Historically Thinking's Official Presidential Historian® Professor Michael Connolly. We take a leisurely stroll along memory lane, starting with the election of 1860 and the "Wideawakes."

Then we move to a discussion of whether Donald Trump is anything like Andrew Jackson–something proposed by historians and NPR journalists alike. Connolly, one of the most articulate defenders of Andrew Jackson not named Sean Wilentz, thinks not.

We also explore whether American history contains an election in which two candidates are so unpopular with their own parties (spoiler alert: we're stumped). Connolly concludes with observations on the longevity of American political parties, why they survive, and why they die.

This conversation raises the question of whether most historical comparisons are worth the powder to blow them to the faculty lounge in the sky. But that's been the subject of previous podcasts (see Episode 46: History of the Future). Enjoy this one! (Management apologizes for any cold sweats it may induce.)

As always, you're welcome to join our Facebook group, let us know how we're doing, and what you'd like to hear in the future!

For Further Investigation

Andrew Burstein, The Passions of Andrew Jackson

David Feller, "Andrew Jackson's Shifting Legacy"

Steve Inskeep, "Donald Trump's Secret? Channelling Andrew Jackson"

Robert V. Remini, Andrew Jackson

Sean Wilentz, The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln

Wideawakes in Civil War Missouri