Reading Recap: The Landmark Histories

Classical History With Maps!

Happy New Year, everyone!

As I look back on 2023 I have a lot of great things to celebrate! It was a busy year for me, with my family life, my day job, and my self-imposed writing job being packed. This was the first full year where I consider myself a ‘real’ author. I’ve got some more things to share in my next post where I break down 2023 a little bit and talk about what I have planned for 2024. But for now, here are some thoughts on one of my favorite series of classical history books.

The Landmark Histories

Several years ago I discovered the Hardcore History podcast, triggering an interest in the classics of western civilization. Since then I’ve made my way through a number of ancient texts, most of which I’ve found fascinating for a number of reasons.

But one of the things I’ve always struggled with was understanding the geography of the ancient world in some of these histories. Given that place names and even the geography itself have changed in the thousands of years since most of these were written, it was confusing for me to understand where things were and what was happening.

Enter The Landmark Histories edited by Robert Strassler.

One of the selling points of these new translations are the many very clear, detailed, and useful maps included.

Page 148 of The Landmark Julius Caesar. Note the large map is also shown in context inside a map of Europe in the top left corner.

For me this makes an enormous difference in understanding what is going on.

To date the series consists of:

• The Landmark Herodotus (Histories)

• The Landmark Thucydides (History of the Peloponnesian War)

• The Landmark Hellenika (Xenophon’s history of Greece after the death of Thucydides)

• The Landmark Xenophon’s Anabasis

• The Landmark Arrian (The Campaigns of Alexander)

• The Landmark Julius Caesar

According to the website (which hasn’t been updated in a while, unfortunately), there is an upcoming version of Polybius. That would be fantastic to have, but I’ve seen no news on this in some time.

I have all of these except for Anabasis. Of them my favorite is the volume on Thucydides. The book is very well done, contains very good maps, and includes a large number of quite helpful footnotes and references to other classical works with relevant information.

I very much enjoyed the content of Julius Caesar, but my complaint about this volume was that they went more than a little nuts with the footnotes. It wasn’t unusual to have half a page taken up by footnotes.

Page 149 of The Landmark Julius Caesar. More than half this page is footnotes. While much of this is interesting, this happens a lot and makes it difficult to get into a flow of reading.

If there’s that much information to convey, it seems odd to do that in the form of a footnote. There are a large number of appendices on relevant topics, it would have been more effective to refer to those or even just have an in-line explanation in the text.

But I think that if you’re a fan of classical histories, these are absolutely worth your time. I have greatly enjoyed reading these and think they are a great addition for anyone interested in classical literature.

Something of Mine

I am very pleased to share that my novel, To Have and To Hold, is now available in German through CKP International! If you know any German readers who might like a great sci-fi novel for the new year, pass this along (German Link). I’d greatly appreciate it!

That’s it for this time. Thanks for reading and I’ll see you next time!