Looks like I'd better get somewhat serious in this venture. Step 1, include Dennis' logo, hmm?
Step 2 is to port my general impressions from Fireside. (On first looking into Mommsen's Rome...)
Ah, OK. I'm not sure whether there is a need for a common place to post? Anyway, I've also leapt into Mommsen. In brief - it's such a relief to read some continuous text, with little need to pay homage tot he secondary literature. It's also a relief to find a writer with sufficient leisure and integrity to write expansively and well. It's a third relief to see the intention of the translator, and it would seem its apparent working out in terms of producing a smooth English style without doing too much violence to the German original.
I've never struck the use of philological parallels to identify common cultural interests and practices, so seeing how Mommsen uses parallel vocabulary in Sanscrit, Greek etc was both fascinating and instructive. So, to see a shared world of animals, houses and gods, but different or no agricultural and ship design practice was very instructive.
So too his comments on the different thought-worlds of Roman and Greek illustrated by personal naming conventions - one being centred on conformity, one on the flourishing of individuality.
And as for a snippet, I was intrigued to see in land demarcation, the Roman concentration on the square as a boundary pattern. No matter if there was a natural edge - ridge, shoreline, river, the Roman land division ignored those and took instead the largest possible square boundary.
More to come, even though Ipadless, the Mac with Skim seems to hold some promise!
I've never struck the use of philological parallels to identify common cultural interests and practices, so seeing how Mommsen uses parallel vocabulary in Sanscrit, Greek etc was both fascinating and instructive. So, to see a shared world of animals, houses and gods, but different or no agricultural and ship design practice was very instructive.
So too his comments on the different thought-worlds of Roman and Greek illustrated by personal naming conventions - one being centred on conformity, one on the flourishing of individuality.
And as for a snippet, I was intrigued to see in land demarcation, the Roman concentration on the square as a boundary pattern. No matter if there was a natural edge - ridge, shoreline, river, the Roman land division ignored those and took instead the largest possible square boundary.
More to come, even though Ipadless, the Mac with Skim seems to hold some promise!
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