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Most years around Easter as a kid I'd see at least a chunk of the 1956 epic The Ten Commandments, as it was always on TV. I had assumed this longtime tradition must've ceased at some point, but apparently even in the year of our Lord 2026 it was on ABC, as it has every year going back to 1973, the night before Easter Sunday. The long and the short of why we, as Christians, are a fan of this timing is the connection between Passover (portrayed in the film during the Exodus) an

After getting a tip I'm now reading The Roman Revolution , by Ronald Syme, a book about Rome's transition from Republic to Empire and features such figures as Pompey the Great , Julius Caesar , Mark Antony , Cicero and Augustus . This is also the subject matter from HBO's Rome , tremendously good TV which, in all honesty, is helping me read this book. This is not a beginners book on Rome, so I do need the help. It's very dense and blunt and I would not have been able to ge

Comparisons between America and ancient Rome are inevitable, they're the most culturally and militarily dominant empires the world has...

I started reading the Iliad (Fitzgerald translation) last year, well before learning about Nolan and the Odyssey , part of a prolonged...

As you likely know, I love Dune . As a much younger person I read all the books that were then out, I still have a bunch of them, and...

I've been reading Polybius, 'The Histories' (or according to Penguin Classics, 'The Rise of the Roman Empire'). A second century BC Greek...

Recently I (re)watched s1 of HBO's Rome and mostly decided against writing about it. Then, for a few days at least, the online discourse...

When talking about ancient Greece it's easy to make generalizations. Most of our hard evidence from that era comes from Athens, home to...

In the third and second centuries BC the powers of the Mediterranean were the Roman Republic and Carthage in the west and the Hellenistic...

In case you couldn't tell, I've really been into ancient Greece lately. After hearing about it a couple times in other books, I decided...

I think most Americans know the broader definition of western civilization goes back through medieval Europe to Rome and, ultimately, to...

We spent our Thanksgiving down in Arizona. Much of my family is down there, including my parents, and we split our time between the 'East...

The book I'm reading now was given to me by a friend, and it's called Carnage and Culture. It looks at nine battles where 'western'...