Gap Week, July 25, 2025

Hey folks! I am on vacation this week, so you’ll have to wait till next week to get the next installment of “Life, Work, Death and the Peasant.”

However, if you are looking for some ACOUP content to fill your Friday, I have a few suggestions! First, if you want some of my writing in particular, check out this piece I wrote recently for War on the Rocks on “The Importance of the Battle of Cannae,” a 3,000 word look at the battle, its context and significance, free to read and available to the public (so far as I know):

The virtual annihilation of a massive Roman force at Cannae constituted Hannibal’s greatest victory. Polybius reports 70,000 Roman dead and only 3,000 survivors but, as Lazenby notes, Polybius has left out a substantial camp guard, prisoners, and quite a few escaping soldiers from his tally of survivors. Livy’s casualty figures for the Romans are more reliable: 47,700 Roman soldiers killed, another 19,300 taken prisoner, and 14,550 escaped. But given the scale of the slaughter and completeness of Hannibal’s victory, the most shocking thing about the battle is that it wasn’t enough.

Alternately, if you want a deep dive on ancient culture similar to what we do here, let me suggest Spencer McDaniel’s 2019 “What Did Ancient Greek Music Sound Like?” at A Tale of Times Forgotten. The title is fairly self-explanatory and the article goes through what we think ancient Greek music sounded like and how we know that – a few of the links to actual performances are dead, but most of them seem to still be live.

Finally for more general Classics interest, there was a new Pasts Imperfect newsletter this month, which includes, among other things, a neat short essay by ancient historian and Thucydides expert Jennifer T. Roberts on how the ‘Thucydides trap’ is a misconception. That’s a topic I’ve been meaning to write about as well – you can tell reading the Fireside on realism and the older “A Trip Through Thucydides” that I think many of the common IR readings of Thucydides fail to fully embrace the complexity and sophistication of his narrative.

And hopefully that is enough to keep you until I am back next week!