must get more Rome icons

J.H. Thiel, author of History of Roman Naval Warfare Before the Second Punic War (which is bizarrely not on Amazon), totally agrees with my thesis statement that Rome is freakishly stubborn, a statement with which my seminar professor was bizarrely fascinated by last weak. He kept saying, "I don't usually approve of adjectives! But this one really works!"

But the terrible miscalculation [of the Carthaginians] lay in the very fact that now they had not to fight quarrelling Greeks, but solid (and stolid) Romans who never knew when they were beaten and therefore were not beaten at all, bulldogs who clung to their aims in spite of the most dreadful reverses, whose reserve strength, though severely sapped, was far from exhausted and who would certainly return to the sea in the end, unless they were knocked out while they were still shaking as a result of the terrible blows dealt them in 249.

See? Freakishly stubborn. Nine out of ten Roman historians agree; the tenth is obsessed with the fall of the Western Roman Empire.

Also, I really like the prose that a lot of the historians I'm reading for this class are using. My seminar professor is using a lot of older works -- Party Politics in the Age of Caesar was published in 1949, this one was published in 1954 -- and there's a slightly different writing style to these books than there is for the more recent ones. Although Adrian Goldsworthy is also absolutely lovely, and I would totally be reading Caesar: Life of a Colossus right now if I had the free time. Donald Kagan doesn't do much for me, though, but I'm less into Greek history anyway.