Review: Southon, A Fatal Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (2020)

A Fatal Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum: Murder in Ancient Rome by Emma Southon

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


This is a smart, funny, angry book about murder in ancient Rome, and about what counted as "murder" and what didn't. (Most of the anger comes from the fact that killing an enslaved person didn't count as murder.) It's "popular" history, but history that doesn't cut any corners on that account. Southon does a great job of explaining the ins and outs of Roman history quickly and entertainingly. She does, of course, spend a great deal of time with the Julio-Claudians, both as murderers and murderees, but she also spends a lot of time talking about less visible murders, and she paints a vividly three-dimensional picture of life in late-Republican and early-Imperial Rome.



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Review: Lankford, Cry Havoc! (2007)

Cry Havoc!: The Crooked Road to Civil War, 1861 by Nelson D. Lankford

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


This book is about the first half of 1861. Lankford is interested in how the Civil War came to happen, and particularly interested in dismantling the idea that it was inevitable, or that it had to happen the way it did. It DIDN'T have to happen the way it did, and he digs into the decisions made by individuals (Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis, of course, but also the mayor of Baltimore, the commander of the Gosport Navy Yard, William Seward and Gideon Welles, random telegraphers, captains of regiments of volunteers...) to think about other choices they could have made. As with the other book of Lankford's I've read, Richmond Burning: The Last Days of the Confederate Capital, he draws on a wide variety of sources and considers everything carefully and critically. And he does a good job of conveying how far from consensus reality the North and South had drifted (his prologue is Harper's Ferry 1859 and the widely differing interpretations of John Brown) and how different a single event, like Lincoln's call for volunteers after Fort Sumter, could look depending on where you were standing.

Four and a half stars, round up to five.



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