Now
for my second book review for this blog.
Perhaps I have been spoiled by most of the historical monographs that I read
for class but most seem to just tell they their thesis and or argument within
it. The books I have been reading for this project have not been that nice. Hannibal: Makers of History by Jacob
Abbott does not appear to have a thesis or perhaps I missed something. In the preface Abbott basically says that he
is attempting to just to give the truth about the subject (Hannibal Barca)
without embellishment of deviations. This felt weird because most history books
are attempting to do that. Most history
books are simply trying to separate history from folklore and legend. So his
purpose is that he is just telling what really happened and it’s only truth. I
may be just a sophomore history major but I think that saying that my
interpretation is strictly the truth seems presumptuous. History has a lot of interpretation so
claiming that yours is correct is just something that bothers me. History is our best guess of the past with
some of your own logic and reasoning added to it. We try to be scientific with our evidence and
understand but that is almost impossible. So the claim that a book is exactly
what happened is not right to this history major. Finding absolute truth of
what happened in history is probably impossible.
Further
proving my previous point, Abbott described both Flaminus and Sempronius
ardent, self-confident and vain[1]. As with most of the info
coming from this time period, this description comes from Polybius and Livy.
Polybius, as I have mentioned many times before, was in the employment of the
household of Scipio. He most likely made everyone that’s related to Scipio look
good and everyone that wasn’t vain and incompetent. So for a book claiming that it is objective
truth on the subject I find it a bit suspect to not bring that up at all.
Abbott also claimed that he wasn’t making this history based on narratives of
the past but he is going with Polybius’s story here. In fairness that’s pretty much all we have
but this is upsetting. Perhaps I am being too critical here but the claim that a
book is objective truth and I find something subjective within it makes me
distrust it. However, when it came to Varro he still bought into the Polybius
story but also had dialogue of people talking about him making it more
believable.[2] So in that regard, he is still not addressing
the issue but arguing that it’s true using other evidence which is great and a
good thing to do. Also I heavily used Polybius for my blog which sort of makes
me a hypocrite. However I brought up that some things that Polybius says may be
inaccurate or historical white washing. I have adopted Goldsworthy’s
perspective that most Roman commanders would have made the same decisions as
Varro Flaminus and Sempronius because that’s how the Romans fought. They were
used to direct confrontations and not these clever tactics. Sure all these
commanders failed but they also are conveniently not related to the household
of Scipio which is too much of coincidence to not address. Overall this book is
not bad even though I am criticizing it a lot in the review. It’s well written
and researched and in that regard it’s pretty good. But it just has a few
things that bothered me.
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