Do you read primary sources?
If not, why are you browsing both Reddit and 4chan?
Who are the best Roman historians? Loved Herodotus, digging Thucydides, plan on checking out Adrian and Tacitus and now Polybius. Am I missing anyone
>>590506
Check out Plutarch, Caesar, Suetonius, Livy, Josephus, Xenophon, Sallust, Xenophon
>>590912
Thank you.
>>590938
Also read Ammianus Marcellinus, he's underrated as hell by people obsessed with muh early empire and muh eagle. Historians consider him one of the best writers apart from Tacitus.
>>590506
Vegetius, wrote exclusively about the military of Rome, and read by super important people like Maurice of Nassau and a few others.
Based thanks bros
Fuck, I don't even read enough secondary sources. I get most of my 'knowledge' from this board. I feel like if I hang around here long enough I'll eventually develop a coherent understanding of certain subjects.
>>590991
I would start, theyre actually pretty interesting if youre willing to work through them.
If you don't think you can make it through a primary, go for something where you can learn history but it wont be dry as fuck. Robert Oconell and Roger Crowley are both great examples for this.
>he thinks translated shit is primary source
>>590991
To be quite honest if you are just looking for something to browse to get a shallow understanding of history then Wikipedia is your best bet.
>>591007
I think my biggest barrier to reading primary sources by myself is the same feeling a child gets from swimming without armbands for the first time. I absolutely NEED to have a commentary or exegesis on hand otherwise I just can't approach it mentally. I'm working to overcome this though.
>>591014
This is a fair point, but unless you are going to learn the ancient languages of every time period you want to get aquainted with you don't really have much choice.
>>591014
As long as you don't read shit from the 19th century where they replace words like "fucking" with "making love to" in order to portray a historical culture as lofty and cultured, you're fine.
>>591044
There's a bajillion of Bible translations with severely altered meanings, and that's just the Bible where the guys who assembled the canon were some of the biggest autists on the planet.
>>590460
Not as much as I'd like. I've mostly started reading history shit in the past two years though. So I'm doing a lot of broad comparative surveys. Also I'm not much into narrative, war, and Rome. Which rules out a lot of the better known stuff, apparently.
>>590460
because I can rarely contextualize primary sources from outside my field of study.
I also don't like having to use google after every page to discover the meaning of some abstruse word.
>>591073
Thanks anon.
>>591085
> I also don't like having to use google after every page to discover the meaning of some abstruse word.
Aren't primary sources usually heavily annotated? Half of that I know from reading Livy I got from annotations.
>>590949
lmao you do your dates backwards. Its 01/22/16
>>591266
>month / day / year
Could anything be more retarded or non-sequential?
>>591026
A lot of college history text books will have an accompanying primary source book that usually have some contextual commentary and good questions to lead you toward better interpretive abilities. They're a good place to start.
>>590460
Yes, because I'm a phd student.
>>590949
>reading pengupleb
>reading oxpleb
>not reading Loeb (which is patrician level)
fag.
>he hasn't read read pic related
>>591014
>he thinks /lit/ memes work here
>>590912
Plutarch says himself that he was not writing history.
