Still doing Latin for money...

[yakalskovich]

I don't think Hannibal was all that clever; I think he was f*cking paranoid! Some of his actions as described by Cornelius Nepos are utterly irrational and only show that he messed up his own life ultimately because he was full of conspiracy theories about the Romans.-


This random post was brought to you by the fact that the biographer's constant fanboying of his subject is starting to get on my nerves.

Comments

[xanath.livejournal.com]

Cornelius Nepos and Polybius, Scipio's biographer, suffered from the same ailment; they both fell in love with their subjects and ascribed higher motivations and impulses to them than they might have actually had. It's a shame, really. Too many historians relied on both, and so the Second Punic War is rendered down to a Battle of Superheroes, and not the clash of empires (rising and falling) that it was.

[yakalskovich]

I sometimes do feel that the Latin literature that's still extant is not exactly the most brilliant of literature.-

And I'm done with Nepos now. Next, I am getting some Eutropius.