Hello, Peabody

Thank you for asking me to read your historical writing.

Before I start, I want to make it clear that this is not the kind of thing I normally review or read for pleasure, and I've never written anything like this. So, please be cautious about accepting any of my suggestions and how you react to my comments in general. However, I didn't want to turn down your request, and I've already read through your piece once, so these are second read thoughts.

What I liked

I like that every paragraph is clear, using language I can understand and never losing me with obscure technical jargon. Your everyman approach to prose is engaging and easy to read.

I like the few connections you make to historical figures or places we may have heard about, such as the mention of wine for the emperor or cities like Roma, Sparta and Carthage, which helps me understand the time and geographical setting.

What might need work

For me, your history jumped around a bit too much geographically. I need to explain what I mean here, so please bear with me. When I read something, whether it's a story a poem or an essay, I like to feel a natural and logical flow through the argument. In order for that to occur, the writer will often adopt a certain, specific viewpoint, taking the side, you might say, of one of the characters, or adopting a particular argument for an essay to begin with before flipping to show the other side of the argument to refute the original propositions.

When I read your history, one moment I was in the dying days of the Ancient Greek world, then I was in early Rome, then I was in Carthage, then I was in Sicily, then I was on the heel of Italy, then back to Sicily… etc etc. You have me darting around the Ancient world like a hungry locust, devouring facts about each place, then moving on to the next before digesting what I've already eaten. In fact, when you moved from 'prologue' to 'the story starts here', I couldn't detect any change in the subject material or pace at all.

My feeling is that if you adopted a particular viewpoint for a chapter, ie. if you showed everything from the point of view of, say, the people in Rome for a chapter, then the people of Scicily for the next, then you will better succeed in communicating this history, in helping the reader to understand what it was like for the people there.

For me, the narration was too fast. I would have preferred a slower pace and more grounding, more detail, more description of what was around, of the technology level and etc. I'd love to know how the differences between Greece and Rome came about. How is it, for example, that the Romans took on board all the Greek gods under differnt names and their phlosophy and architecture, and yet only used a handful of their letters, making up many of their own letters. Are their myths about this? In Japan there's a myth to explain why the Japanese language uses unique characters for the most common words but Chinese characters for more complex words and names. They say someone was carrying the first dictionary over from China on a boat and dropped it into the sea, so many of the words became blurred squiggles, hence explaining both the similarities and differences between Chinese and Japanese written language. Did the Romans have a similar myth?

What about other myths and stories? The Seven Hills? What about Romulus and Remus? Maybe you wish to move away from myth and legend, but I just felt that there were a few foundation myths that I'd expect any author to mention in passing simply because while they may not be important to history, they were of vital importance and interest to the people your history describes, and to their notion of self and society. To be honest, you really skip anything about the society and culture of the time. I mean, I was riveted at the point a matriarchy was mentioned and really wanted to know how that worked, but then you just moved on to letters to senators and contracts and treaties etc without going into that at all. I'd love to know how a matriarchy came about and worked. It's like Lysistrata, but for real. Potentially really cool stuff! Why wouldn't you want to tell us all about that?

There were many opportunities in the history presented to really grip the reader in, to make them feel for the people involved rather than just present a dry set of facts. For example, the two occasions when townspeople invited in guests who turned on them and murdered their prominent citizens. It's events like that, where 'sympathetic characters' are treated badly by 'antagonists' that a reader can really get to feel the history. I feel you should go into more detail at those points, but not facts and figures, but rather focusing on an individual from the historical record who you can present as a wonderful person, then kill/torture/maim. That really catches the reader's imagination, and they'll remember that scene long after they've forgotten everything else about your history.

I'd also like more connections made between history and now. For example, you mention the General Pyrrhus, but don't mention the connection between his campaign and the modern expression "a Pyrric victory". And maybe help people connect better by mentioning more famous people they may actually have heard of and giving their relationship to this moment in history. For example, "Carthage, soon to be the birthplace of the famous general Hannibal".

Something else that occurred to me was that there were great opportunities in your history to draw parallels with the modern age that might help people understand both the history and our own lives. For example, in the begining you show how the colonies sent out from Ancient Greece to the west became the civilisations that rose, formed a federation, then eventually came to dominate their old homeland, ie. Rome became Greece's master. However, you don't really explore the extent to which Rome borrowed culture from Greece, retaining almost the same religion, elements of the language like the alphabet, the architecture etc. I want to see how we got from Aristotle to Seneca.

There's an obvious parallel here to the modern age where Europe sent out colonists, often criminals or debtors or religious outcasts, starving peasants from Ireland, crofters cleared out in the Highland Clearance etc to form colonies in America, only for them to form a strong federation and then rise to become more powerful and dominant than any of the old countries. And the way in which America has continued on and yet subtly altered the language and culture from Europe is similar to the Roman adaptation of Greek culture.

Interestingly, Rick Riordan in his Percy Jackson books does go into this notion a bit when he notes that the gods from Olympus moved to ?Vesuvius? then London, but now live in New York because that's the current center of the western world. His idea is that western civilization began in Greece but its focal point shifted through time, and may in the future shift again. His gods choose to live at the center of their 'empire/influence'.

My concluding thought is that you should show confidence in your prose. Don't be afraid that by giving us details you'll bore us. Instead, be a shrewd judge of what facts we might find interesting and what would just go in one eye and out the other. Your narrative is a jump from one high point of action to another. Readers need a lull somewhere in the action, and that's where comedy or really interesting cultural insights would engage your reader. You've chosen a rich period of history to describe, so please show us some of that wealth of culture and literature that made the Classical Period so interesting to modern Europe that it became a common course of study at most major universities in the western world.

Thank you for sharing!

Best wishes,

Bob




My review has been submitted for consideration in "Good Deeds Get CASH!" .