A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry
A look at history and popular culture
Fireside this week! I have just finished up a draft of a chapter (to be in one of those multi-multi-author companion volumes) on how video games (particularly more abstract simulation games) depict the ancient world. Writing that chapter led me to reengage with ancient city builders, particularly Caesar IV, Children of the Nile, Pharaoh: A New Era … Continue reading Fireside Friday, February 2, 2024 (On City Building Games)
This is the first of a planned five-part series looking at the structure of the Roman Republic as another example of civic governance structures in antiquity, to match our series on the Greek polis. As with that series, we're going to start by defining our community and its constituent parts in this part, before moving … Continue reading Collections: How to Roman Republic 101, Part I: SPQR
This is the second of a three part (I, II, III) series tackling the complicated and still very much debated question of 'how bad was the fall of Rome (in the West)?' In the last part, we looked at 'words' - culture, literature, language and religion. What we found is that in these aspects, signs … Continue reading Collections: Rome: Decline and Fall? Part II: Institutions
This is the first part of a planned five-part series covering some of the basics of fortifications, from city walls to castles and field fortifications! We are going to discuss what fortifications were for and how their design changed in response both to different strategic and operational conditions and also to changing technology. Throughout this, … Continue reading Collections: Fortification, Part I: The Besieger’s Playbook
This week's post is the first in a four part series (II, IIIa, IIIb, interlude, IV) looking at what I'm going to term the Fremen Mirage (a play on Le Mirage Spartiate, which we've already discussed in some detail), a term I'm creating to encompass a set of related pop-history theories which are flourish, evergreen … Continue reading Collections: The Fremen Mirage, Part I: War at the Dawn of Civilization
This short essay is responding to a (mis)characterization made - in passing, perhaps, but unchallenged - about the sort of people in the early Christian Church in the context of a high profile political discussion between two notable thinkers on the right, David French (writes for NRO) and Sohrab Ahmari (writes for Catholic Herald/NYPost) (moderated … Continue reading New Acquisitions: Class, Status and the Early Church
Last week, we looked at a model for what the countryside around an 'ideal city' might look like. Today we're going to introduce some complications to that model (you will recall, our ideal city existed in a perfectly flat plain of uniform fertility) and see how they change the patterns of land use which in … Continue reading Collections: The Lonely City, Part II: Real Cities Have Curves
This week and next, we're going to look at an issue not of battles, but of settings: pre-modern cities - particularly the trope of the city, town or castle set out all alone in the middle of empty spaces. Why does the city or castle-town set amidst a sea of grass feel so off? And … Continue reading Collections: The Lonely City, Part I: The Ideal City
This series is now available in an audio format; the entire playlist can be listened to here. The following is the third part of a three part series where we look at the question "how medieval is Game of Thrones?" and - if not the Middle Ages - what period of European history does Game … Continue reading New Acquisitions: How It Wasn’t: Game of Thrones and the Middle Ages, Part III