When I was 14, I borrowed a book on everyday life in Ancient Rome. In the book was a list of most of the Roman authors who played a significant role in the development of Roman literature. Shortly after borrowing the book, I caught a flu, becoming severely sick. There wasn't much I could do then, very few new books to read, very few computer games to play etc. Life was considerably dreary then. However, no matter how dreary life got, it was still better than going to school then. If there's nothing I could do with the limited amount of things I had on my hands at home, I created things for myself to do. One of them was a compilation of all the works mentioned in this book.
I spent quite a lot of time on making this compendium back then, waking up very early in the morning to begin copying historical texts on my mother's computer and pasting them on word documents. The process would go on for some time until relatively late at night. And so in this way, time flew. Eventually, I was able to finish my compendium just as my long sick leave was about to end. However, when I took a good look at what I've compiled, I had a tremendous shock.
Greek and Roman classics are split up into volumes. The thickness of each volume varies. In the case of most classics, each volume has an average of about 10 - 20 pages. The thickest I saw was 40 pages. Imagine cramming 2 or 3 of these 40 page volumes into 1 document, that would be quite a frustrating experience. A wall of words thrown up in front of you when you open the document in English that requires more than one reading for one to comprehend.
You can imagine the difficulty in reading such stuff. Besides, I did not copy the footnotes to these classics. From my later experience in reading such books, the footnotes to the works are just as important as the works themselves.
Let me give an example of this, the Romans tended to compare friendship to the friendship which Scipio Africanus and Laelius had. The Romans would know who these two historical figures were but we wouldn't. These footnotes explain references to anecdotes or historical figures, literary sayings or philosophical or religious concepts and technical or scientific terms. The Greeks and Romans would have known what they meant the moment they encountered such references, quotes, terms etc. but we wouldn't, unless we have read so many Greek and Roman classics that we are as good as one of them. It's possible to infer what these things meant but can you imagine, reading something in which you've to infer one-quarter of the words. How long can you possibly sustain yourself in reading such stuff? Not very long, I suppose.
Despite these flaws, I felt that the compilation I made then was passable so I never went back to it again for quite some time till recently. Recently, I put together a library of classical music in the time I had left from fulfilling my military obligations. I decided to go back to this compilation and improve it with the skills and techniques I had learned and acquired in the course of putting together this library.
I was able to improve the compilation tremendously. I've supplemented it with twice the number of works I found back then, adding historical and literary works that were not available when I made by initial compilation. I also found some philosophical and legal thoughts I never knew about earlier. I re-copied the classics I copied back then, adding the footnotes and copying them in a way that the end product would look more readable than the initial product. I initially expected to take 1 week to complete this but in the end, the whole thing took me 6 weeks to finish.
Fresh on completing this compilation of Greek and Roman classics, I decided to embark on this blog as a means of making my compilation available to others. However, the more I thought about it, the more possibilities I realized that this blog could have.
I like reading history a lot but as time goes by, sometimes, I get disillusioned. There's nobody I can talk to about what I read. I'm not planning to take a history-related job so this knowledge isn't of much use to me. True, stashing a hoard of knowledge does make me feel some good but so what if I've a stash of knowledge hidden up there in my skull? It wouldn't do much good, would it?
On top of making this blog a place for me to make the work I've done over the past few months available to others, why not make this blog a place for me to share my knowledge with others. This way, all the knowledge I'm acquiring won't stay in my skull as dead matter.
I don't think I'm not the only one who has such thoughts and feelings so I'm hoping to make this a blog a place for history lovers to share their knowledge with each other and talk shop.There are lots of people I know who read about history in their free time but wouldn't they get disillusioned if they don't put what they read to any use? Of course, there's the possibility of putting this knowledge to use if they're studying history in the university. However, one can't be studying history in the university for one's entire life. What happens after that?
Now that I've started the blog,it's time to get the ball rolling.
My first few posts will be to introduce this compilation I had made.
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