Ancient History – Page 12 – History in the Margins

Reading My Way Through Roman Britain, Part 2

By Pamela | September 11, 2015 |

Guy de la Bédoyère’s The Real Lives Of Roman Britain: A History of Roman Britain Through The Lives of Those Who Were There is not a narrative history of Roman Britain. (De la Bédoyère has already written several versions of that narrative.) It is instead an attempt to look at the 360 years of Roman…

Reading My Way Through Roman Britain, Part 1

By Pamela | September 8, 2015 |

Thanks to the luck of the book-review draw, I recently ended up reading two books on Roman Britain back-to-back.* The two books are very different. Guy de la Bédoyère’s The Real Lives of Roman Britain is an attempt to look at the period of Roman occupation in terms of individual human experience–a frustrating endeavor because…

Word With A Past: Pyrrhic Victory

By Pamela | March 31, 2015 |

Pyrrhus (319 to 272 BCE), king of the Greek city-state Epirus, was a second cousin of Alexander the Great. He earned a reputation as a successful general in the political chaos of the successor kingdoms that arose from the ruins of his famous cousin’s empire. A hundred years after Pyrrhus’s death, Hannibal, famous for crossing…