#ergo the judge/court themeing

[wardinespurrit]

redid my hms designs. i go on a ramble in the tags beware

[jeannereames]

Should we (not) read old history books?

And by old I mean academic works from maybe the 1960s onwards. Of course I understand what you always say about dated opinions, advances on historiography & archeology. And I don't dispute in any way, shape or form that we should always read the most recent work.

But is the old academic work really that disposable? Don't we have anything to learn with history books from the 80s, 90s, 2000s? Thanks for your attention.

Should We Trust Older History Books?

The problem isn’t so much that they’re old, but that—if you’re entering an area of history about which you might not know much—older books can have pitfalls that newer ones don’t. This is hardly to say, just because something is recent, it’s good. Far from it. But my caution on older books was specifically in response to the query about reading pop history, and how to know what to trust.

So that’s the caveat. In that same post, I mentioned that I still regularly recommend Brian Bosworth’s Conquest and Empire from 1988. It’s a great fast summary and he tackles several important themes in part II. I also often recommend Gene Borza’s In the Shadow of Olympus (1991). Until Sabine published her book on Perdikkas, his chapter on Perdikkas there was the best thing in print (and still is in English).

Of course, to me, the 80s aren’t old books. Ha. When I think “old” books, I’m thinking 1950s and earlier. Part of that owes to the fact some very important ideological changes happened in history as a discipline in the 1960s and 1970s.

Yet one issue with older books—even good ones—involves new evidence. The asker alludes to that. Unfortunately, one must already know something about a field to discern what information in an older book is outdated. So, let’s take Gene’s In the Shadow as an example. Two very important changes in evidence have happened since that book came out. First, the matter of language (and thus ethnicity) of the ancient Macedonians. Gene argues that we don’t know what language the ancient Macedonians spoke, in large part because we just don’t have enough of it to judge. He suggests it might not be Greek (which was how he leaned at the time). That was all true…in 1990. But we do now have enough epigraphical evidence to say the ancient Macedonians spoke a form of Doric Greek (and Attic for court business). That means they were Greeks, however “backwards” politically/culturally, to the Greek mind.*

Similarly, none of us knew then what was about to come out of the ground at Archontiko in the early 2000s. Even what we’d seen at Aigai and Sindos didn’t make it clear how astonishing the Archaic Age was, up there. All these recent discoveries have changed what we think we know about Argead Macedonia before Philip and Alexander. Gene hinted at some of it in his assertion that, from Archelaos to Philip, Macedon went through a slump, and Philip brought it back. It didn’t just emerge from the swamps with Philip (as Demosthenes and other ancient writers would have one believe). So, Gene was already on the leading curve, but in 1990, none of us had seen enough yet. I remember sending him pictures from Archontiko near the end of his life, and he was very excited, commenting how it would change our ideas about Archaic Era Macedon.

So, if you read his book (and I hope you do), a lot of what’s in there is still solid material, 30 years later. But a few things are dated. And now you know two things that are…because I told you.

But if you didn’t have me to tell you, how would you know?

Ergo my caution. If you’re entering a field that’s new to you, start with later articles and work your way backwards. Ironically, that’s how I got into Macedonian history…reading arguments in the footnotes of articles, especially between the “Three Bs” (Badian, Borza, and Bosworth), plus Green, Heckel, Carney, Anson, Adams, and Greenwalt. Before I ever knew those guys, I was reading their citations of—and commentary about—each other. From that, I was able to render my own ideas of what I trusted, and didn’t trust, about Alexander, Philip, and Macedonia.

And that brings me to my final point. YES, reading earlier articles and books is very important when you really get into a field, precisely for the HISTORIOGRAPHY. In this case, not ancient, but modern. How did a field develop over time? To grok where Alexander studies are today, one must know a bit about where they began, with the heroizing of Droysen, Tarn, et al. in the late 1800s and pre-war era, down to Badian blowing it all up post-war in the late 1950s and the revolution of the ‘60s and ‘70s with Badian, Green, Bosworth, and Schachermeyer and their revisionist view of ATG. About the same time, we get the rise of Macedonian Studies apart from Alexander and Philip, under Edson, Dell, Hammond, and their students. And it all peaked really with the discovery of the Royal Tombs at Vergina when Macedonian archaeology both married and divorced (at the same time) Macedonian history. It’s really hard to express how radically ATG and Macedonian studies changed in the 1980s and ‘90s. Then is changed again in the early 2000s when everybody got tired of debating Who’s Buried in Philip’s Tomb and Macedonian ethnicty. Archaeology turned up new treasures but passed mostly into Greek hands (and was written in modern Greek) while historians started looking more closely at literary trends and Romanization overlay. More recently yet, (some) archaeology is coming back into English, and a wider awareness, welding to new literary approaches to ATG and Macedonian history. And don’t forget the important publication of Brill’s New Jacoby, making a huge contribution to source criticism! Where are we headed next? Time will tell!

So yes, reading older texts helps one situate where we are now relative to where we were then, and back then, and even before back then.

That said, if you’re brand new to reading about Alexander the Great, PLEASE please don’t pick up either Droysen or Tarn’s history of Alexander and think it’s anything close to accurate.

We’ve come a long way, baby.

———————-

* If you’ve read my Dancing with the Lion, you know that I tried to flip that, looking at Greece from the north and giving the Macedonian view of Greeks. So I want to emphasize that each side viewed the other was “lesser.” I’m not advocating, above, the Greek view as correct.

[blue-dream-rhapsody]

more cfyow screaming because it owns my soul

Narita I love you so much right now you keep giving me things I didn’t know I wanted

pgs 244-255 spoilers and tonal whiplash below

Kugo acted!!! Believably!!!! Hell I sure believed it and was this close to clawing out my own organs!!!!! I know it was only for approximately 8.7 seconds but hey man baby steps

Though listen I love my man he is strong and beautiful but “dancer” is not the comparison I would’ve made to anything he does ever (and that’s @ narita’s word choice, not the translation)

Nonetheless I can SEE how he moved in that moment and hot damn if his utter mastery of that sword isn’t actually making me sweat a lil

And wow that momentary panic that Shu had actually betrayed him (even if it wasn’t by his own will) man my stomach dro p p e d

Yukio did plant a virus in his past tho AND IT’S CALLED THE FACTS

(I’m guessing Shu and Giriko are helping out Kisuke in one of Yukio’s pocket dimensions, and will be showing up again at some point and probably with some time-fucky shit)

Callback: Zangetsu shattered Cross of Scaffold, now Cross has shattered Zangetsu although a fake one but shhh let him have this

Lots of redditors evidently forgot Kugo was actively training during the war at the Shibas’ and ergo would be stronger than he was when he and Ichigo fought (plus a little more right in the head and so probably with more stable powers too) But they only care about arbitrary power level bullshit anyway so no helping that ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Although speaking of redditors, Animamask’s summary ends with:

“I guess that is the main message of the novel. You can't let people stay ignorant of the world, how it works. You have to tell them the truth. Even it is horrible and will scare them. People have the right to know the truth about their world. They have the right of free will and one should not just decide for them.”

Kugo was the one who told Ichigo about what Deputies mean to the Soul Society. The Court Guards chose all this time not to tell him. His own father thought they shouldn’t let him find out. Kisuke chose not to, either, but for him at least it seemed to be from an understanding that the story from anyone in the Court Guards would be biased (something he, as a former fellow exile, should certainly be aware of). 

Only Ukitake, perhaps haunted by what role he played in Kugo’s current situation, at least gave Ichigo something to think about. But not nearly enough that he could see the whole truth of things. And he never met with Ichigo after the fact, either, at least not when there weren’t more pressing matters at hand. After all, until his dying day, the Court Guards still needed Ichigo, and apart from Rukia and Renji (and perhaps Byakuya), who knew him better than that, they couldn’t take the risk that he’d choose anything other than to help them.

But Ichigo still deserved to know the truth, and to make his choices based on it. He had the right to, and Kugo alone saw to it that he had that much.

(Though what he told him was ultimately a half-truth, so perhaps part of Kugo’s own growth here will be accounting for the rest. Or, maybe it was only the Pass component he was certain of and he ultimately chose to omit what he didn’t understand himself.)

Kugo questions if knowing really gave Ichigo any choice at all, because it certainly didn’t help him to know he was being monitored. But that in itself is probably because he didn’t know his whole truth either—namely the reasons behind what happened to him—and so his own comprehension of his world was incomplete. He knows this now. He went to try to speak to Ukitake (but was too late), came right out and said he expected the truth out of Kyoraku, and even put a little faith in a complete stranger of a journalist to lead him to something. He’s looking for the thing he’s been denied for years—the truth of his world. From there, he can make his choice of how to move forward —but judging by the way he rejected Tokinada’s plans even though they’d supposedly create the world he and Xcution had wanted, where they’d have their turn as “predators,” I think he’s going to choose along the same lines Ichigo would.

If this really ends up being a major theme of the novels, it would elevate Kugo’s purpose as a major character here. Rather than just being involved because they threw a dart at a wall to pick a place to give him an arc conclusion, or throwing him in to serve as another world-building cog spun around by the plot going on—he’s here, specifically present in Can’t Fear Your Own World and not just any other supplemental material, because he embodies this novel’s theme so strongly. That’s the difference between good use of a character and great use of a character, and I’m so glad it got to be for him.

[pumpkincryptid]

I LOVE THEM, I LOVE THEM, I'M GONNA BE PICKING THEIR DESIGNS INTO ATOMS

redid my hms designs. i go on a ramble in the tags beware