'All Things Under the Sun'

1:9 The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.
KJV Ecclesiastes 1.9

Talking about the sun.... With the intense North American summer heatwave it's hard to do heavy-duty, serious research. The necessary air-conditioning makes it comfortable for about a half hour before chill takes over. (Try using the keyboard with frozen fingers.) Turned off, the super-saturated heat leads to dripping lethargy. This makes it the perfect time for some light ancient history-related reading. My current recommendation? The 145-page: All Things Under the Sun: How Modern Ideas Are Really Ancient, by (and published by) Lindsay Powell.

Military historian and blogger Lindsay Powell's new book is based on his blog about the ancient world. This makes it informal, with each chapter only remotely connected with the next. In each chapter, he introduces his concerns about the modern world and relates them to antiquity -- not necessarily in that order. The ancient world doesn't hold all the answers, but more times than you might imagine, it comes out ahead. Fires during the Roman Principate led them to build safer structures. Had American builders of the 19th and 20th centuries looked to the past, some of the great fires might have been avoided. While we might be concerned about how everything private is now broadcast on the Internet, Lindsay Powell says that we're actually going to be less well-remembered than the ancient Greeks and Romans who copied all their valued manuscripts by hand.

The blog posts span several years. This makes an interesting contrast: Description of new technology in early chapters may be old-ish hat to us today, but the ancient references are not even remotely out-dated.

In two of the chapters/blog posts, Powell talks with renowned ancient historical fiction writers. As is appropriate for a blog-based book, the first talk is via Twitter, with Steven Pressfield. The second is with Powell's Facebook friend, Steven Saylor, whom Powell met at an Austin-area restaurant where the second Bush president's two daughters once made the news for underage drinking. Saylor didn't respond to Powell's question about whether they might collaborate on a future book, but the creator of the Gordianus the Finder series says there is supposed to be a third book coming in the Roma, Empire series.

Reading a person's blog provides you with an opportunity to learn about the person. Welsh-born, UK and Texas-resident Lindsay Powell is not only easy to read, and interested in both military history and the Roman world, but he loves the theater enough to stand for hours watching a performance.

Although different because of the op-ed/blog format and purpose, All Things Under the Sun bears comparison with some of the other recent works written for modern readers rather than classical historians, like Adrienne Mayor's Scorpion Bombs and How to Mellify a Corpse, that offer you a fast-paced, almost breathless tour of the ancient world. While All Things Under the Sun has footnotes, references to classical historians and lots of facts to dwell on, it is not filled with citations other than a copious number of Wikipedia references. Powell knows his history, though. You can look at his bibliography and other articles for evidence. See his site: [Lindsay Powell].

For the purposes of complete disclosure, this site is listed in the section on "further reading" and Lindsay Powell sent me a copy of his book.