I consider myself yelled at, thank you! And yes, one day I want to tell you about the Greeks (and hope for Selena to tell us both about the Romans)!
But for now, I want to tell you about all the things on my German reading list, which means I need to be able to read my German reading list!
Thank you. :) I did meet quota yesterday, though I only partly made up for Friday's deficit due to financial reforms.
ETA: Though I should warn you, if we ever have a Classics salon, the evidence is infinitesimal compared to what we have for Fritz, so it will be a rather different experience. There will be no finding out if Lehndorff's wife ever had to see the phosphor inscription on his wallpaper. ;)
When I was reading histories of Alexander the Great two years ago, right before Fritz salon, I was frustrated that people would cite Plutarch uncritically even when contrary evidence existed. Plutarch, I might add, is one of our main sources for AtG...writing 400 years after Alexander died, and drawing heavily on the now lost memoirs of Ptolemy. Who was a friend and general of Alexander, which sounds promising, until you realize that he was Pharoah of Egypt by right of conquest, and was writing his memoirs to justify his rule with reference to the late Alexander.
Documentary evidence from the archives? Alexander's correspondence? What's that?
And yet historians will not only assert facts without mentioning caveats about their sources, they'll draw conclusions about individual people's *personalities* from the most minute details of these works, when, if you consider how few witnesses there must have been and how many mouths a detail must have had to go through to get to Ptolemy in the first place, and the biases inherent in the nature of the evidence...
One historian rather defensively said that if we can't trust our sources, we have no business doing Athenian history at all, to which my reaction is, "Well, you certainly have no business doing Athenian history the way you're doing it."
selenak, I may have said this, but one of the things I appreciate most about salon with you (and now you too, felis! and gambitten, whenever you come back) is that you share my priorities about the quality of our evidence and largely my opinions about how one determines the quality of evidence). I'm pretty sure I wouldn't have stayed in salon this long if you weren't such a rigorously critical thinker. :)
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Re: Martin Sabrow's Gundling Biography: II
Date: 2021-03-21 01:12 pm (UTC)But for now, I want to tell you about all the things on my German reading list, which means I need to be able to read my German reading list!
Thank you. :) I did meet quota yesterday, though I only partly made up for Friday's deficit due to financial reforms.
ETA: Though I should warn you, if we ever have a Classics salon, the evidence is infinitesimal compared to what we have for Fritz, so it will be a rather different experience. There will be no finding out if Lehndorff's wife ever had to see the phosphor inscription on his wallpaper. ;)
When I was reading histories of Alexander the Great two years ago, right before Fritz salon, I was frustrated that people would cite Plutarch uncritically even when contrary evidence existed. Plutarch, I might add, is one of our main sources for AtG...writing 400 years after Alexander died, and drawing heavily on the now lost memoirs of Ptolemy. Who was a friend and general of Alexander, which sounds promising, until you realize that he was Pharoah of Egypt by right of conquest, and was writing his memoirs to justify his rule with reference to the late Alexander.
Documentary evidence from the archives? Alexander's correspondence? What's that?
And yet historians will not only assert facts without mentioning caveats about their sources, they'll draw conclusions about individual people's *personalities* from the most minute details of these works, when, if you consider how few witnesses there must have been and how many mouths a detail must have had to go through to get to Ptolemy in the first place, and the biases inherent in the nature of the evidence...
One historian rather defensively said that if we can't trust our sources, we have no business doing Athenian history at all, to which my reaction is, "Well, you certainly have no business doing Athenian history the way you're doing it."