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the_lady_lily) wrote2010-07-01 07:28 pm
the_lady_lily) wrote2010-07-01 07:28 pm
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Bibliography
The Poison King - Adrienne Mayor
This is the latest bit of professional development reading, mainly because my historical knowledge is - well, shall we say, severely limited. I am pretty darn good on the Julio-Claudians, starting from about the assassination of Caesar, but the Flavians are stretching it and the Republic is... well, very patchy. So I'm trying to absorb a bit more of what on earth is going on, and Mayor's book did well enough to turn up on BMCR and the THE, so I figured, what the hell. I'd also read her earlier book on poisons and chemical warfare in the ancient world, which was jolly good, so I knew I'd probably get along with the style.
The book is the first full modern biography of the Poison King, Mithradates of Pontus, he who managed not one, not two, but three wars named after him (the Mithradatic Wars), which I mainly know about because Cicero's Pro Archia refers to them in passing and I had to learn about them at the same time as trying to teach intermediate Latin for the first time. Ah, memories. Anyway, this book provides a thorough biographical background into the enemy of Rome whom modern historians do seem to have a bit of amnesia about; I had not, for instance, knowingly come across the massacre of 88BC before, when cities across Anatolia and the Aegean islands came together to slaughter their Roman and Italian residents. Which is a pretty momentous thing, and you'd have thought someone would have mentioned it.
Mayor has done a great job of reconstructing the historical timeline of Mithradates, explaining the political developments of the wars, looking at things from the Persian rather than the Roman side (which helps make sense of some odd comments in Roman historians). That's not to say the book is perfect. Mayor occasionally goes off into controlled hypothesis, or as we might also call it, making it up in a way that fits the known facts and isn't completely improbable. She's totally honest about when she's doing this, and prefaces it with plenty of caveat, but sometimes the tone does become a bit historical novel. The most notable instances are her description of the missing years of Mithradates' youth, when he left court and presumably lived out in the country with a band of young men for half a dozen years, and her suggestion that Mithradates may have escaped in secret rather than died as our historians record.
There are a couple of other issues too. There's a lot of repetitiveness about who people are, which I am guessing comes from aiming at a broad audience who might get lost among the strange names. There are also a couple of passages that made me wince, most egregiously the one dealing with temple prostitution (Stephanie Budin does not appear in the bibliography). But that aside, this book does a good job of giving the clueless a bit of a clue in a readable and accessible fashion. I'm sure content experts would find far more things to get irritated about, but as a classical biography with its eye set on the general market, it could have been a lot worse. Plus I now actually know more about Mithradates than I did when I started and how he fits into Marius/Sulla/Pompey, and that can't possibly be a bad thing.
This is the latest bit of professional development reading, mainly because my historical knowledge is - well, shall we say, severely limited. I am pretty darn good on the Julio-Claudians, starting from about the assassination of Caesar, but the Flavians are stretching it and the Republic is... well, very patchy. So I'm trying to absorb a bit more of what on earth is going on, and Mayor's book did well enough to turn up on BMCR and the THE, so I figured, what the hell. I'd also read her earlier book on poisons and chemical warfare in the ancient world, which was jolly good, so I knew I'd probably get along with the style.
The book is the first full modern biography of the Poison King, Mithradates of Pontus, he who managed not one, not two, but three wars named after him (the Mithradatic Wars), which I mainly know about because Cicero's Pro Archia refers to them in passing and I had to learn about them at the same time as trying to teach intermediate Latin for the first time. Ah, memories. Anyway, this book provides a thorough biographical background into the enemy of Rome whom modern historians do seem to have a bit of amnesia about; I had not, for instance, knowingly come across the massacre of 88BC before, when cities across Anatolia and the Aegean islands came together to slaughter their Roman and Italian residents. Which is a pretty momentous thing, and you'd have thought someone would have mentioned it.
Mayor has done a great job of reconstructing the historical timeline of Mithradates, explaining the political developments of the wars, looking at things from the Persian rather than the Roman side (which helps make sense of some odd comments in Roman historians). That's not to say the book is perfect. Mayor occasionally goes off into controlled hypothesis, or as we might also call it, making it up in a way that fits the known facts and isn't completely improbable. She's totally honest about when she's doing this, and prefaces it with plenty of caveat, but sometimes the tone does become a bit historical novel. The most notable instances are her description of the missing years of Mithradates' youth, when he left court and presumably lived out in the country with a band of young men for half a dozen years, and her suggestion that Mithradates may have escaped in secret rather than died as our historians record.
There are a couple of other issues too. There's a lot of repetitiveness about who people are, which I am guessing comes from aiming at a broad audience who might get lost among the strange names. There are also a couple of passages that made me wince, most egregiously the one dealing with temple prostitution (Stephanie Budin does not appear in the bibliography). But that aside, this book does a good job of giving the clueless a bit of a clue in a readable and accessible fashion. I'm sure content experts would find far more things to get irritated about, but as a classical biography with its eye set on the general market, it could have been a lot worse. Plus I now actually know more about Mithradates than I did when I started and how he fits into Marius/Sulla/Pompey, and that can't possibly be a bad thing.