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I LOVE ARABIAN HORSES, ESPECIALLY OUR BLACK MARE
Reviews (27)
06 December 2012
A HANDY AND USEFUL VOLUME
This excellent work can not of course compete with Oskar Seyffert's 1891 "Dictionary of Classical Antiquities" (originally published in German). That is, it contains MUCH less information and is not a "scholarly" work of the same order. HOWEVER - that being said - it is indeed handy and informative. MOREOVER - and perhaps more important - this work DOES offer an etymology or original source for each of the names presented, which is mostly lacking in Seyffert. Well-written, informative and more ACCESSIBLE to the modern reader.
15 July 2011
CAN NOT GET ENOUGH OF THE WRITER AND THE TOPIC
This is one of a series on Julius Caesar and his times, and I am regularly afraid that Colleen McCullough will someday finish her work on this topic.
My first encounter with the author was The Thorn Birds. And that was a long time ago. I loved it so much that I wanted to read another of her novels. But the ones I found at that time were uninteresting to me, let alone capable of generating my enthusiasm.
Then more than 10 years later I found - I was regularly searching for her in book stores - The First Man in Rome. I thought I knew just about everything I needed to know about Caesar, having studied him off and on from eighth grade Latin through Graduate School. I had then spent 23 years teaching History and Culture at the university level.
Now, I do not want to mislead you. Reading - carefully - any of her books about Caesar is at least a bit of a challenge. And I never read any of them cover-to-cover in one day. A month or two is more like it, because I often put the book aside to let it rest and to reflect upon it.
Yet the experience was unlike most any I had in reading history or historical fiction. And these books are a wonderful combination of both. Very little is known first-hand about Caesar. We have absolutely NO contemporary accounts of him. Only his own writings - like The Conquest of Gaul - now exist. Everything else written about him was and is more or less hearsay and speculation.
McCullough manages to stick to the historical record and combine it with her wonderful gift for looking into the hearts and minds of people. The October Horse finally - she started way back before Caesar became a man - portrays his death and the rise of his nephew Octavian, known to us as Caesar Augustus.
26 May 2011
NICE BOOK BUT IT'S NOT CHRISTIAN
Some of the ideas are really good, like the Magi might have originally come from China. I've been studying the history of astronomy for decades and it does appear we've tended to ignore the Chinese in favor of the Sumerians, Persians, Arabs and even the South American tribes. I also like their description of the baby as the "Star Child". These things aside, some observations on the authenticity. It is definitely a Medieval creation. Medieval means from the beginning of the Carolingian Renaissance under Charlemagne (about 800 AD) to about 1300 AD, when the new Humanism and the Italian Renaissance were beginning. This is obvious from the language. As much as it pretends to repeat conversations with Adam, the words and concepts used are impossible. They didn't exist at that time so at best they must be an elaboration (around 800 AD) of some simpler ideas and statements. And that of course puts them outside of authentic texts. Adam's conversation with Seth - the son we always forget because we think only of Cain and Abel - point to its origins. They are Gnostic and specifically Sethian. A Google search for these two words will yield a lot more information. The Gnostic movement predates the Birth of Christ - the Gnostics also wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls - and can be identified with the study of Kabbalah (another Google search). The essence of Kabbalah - which has turned into a study of the comparative values of words and letters - is that there is secret knowledge about Creation and Humanity that is available only to a few Chosen. This tradition, which is admirable and interesting, has unfortunately distorted the message of the Gospels, which is simple: "Believe and you will be saved." Faith to the Gnostics is not as important as Knowledge. That's what the word means. Its root in Greek (gnosis) has the same GN = KN transformation that we retain in English with our word "know". It's more hidden in Germanic and Romance languages which put a vowel in between that K sound and the N sound. We instead just pretended the K in "know" isn't there. "Modern" versions of this old belief in Knowledge are still found in Mystic Judaism, Freemasons, the New Age, etc. They trace back in significant form to the Pharisees, who believed that because of their superior knowledge of the Law (Torah), they deserved special treatment from other Jews and probably even from God himself. They were "more likely" to gain Paradise than the common people. And we know what Jesus thought of the Pharisees. So this was written at the earliest around 800 AD. It is one of the many (mostly earlier) Apocrypha (Google search) that were not seen - valuable as they may be - to belong to the Bible itself because of some inherent shortcomings. I'm very glad the author found it in the Vatican archives and had it translated. It's a valuable work and an interesting one, but it has very little to do with Christianity.