Reading Greek and Roman Historical Sources

Abstract

Today we are so far removed from a world where servitude in manual labor was the norm that empathy alone is often our faulty guide to historical understanding. For instance, in Spartacus’s day, Enna was a center of the slave economy on the island of Sicily and of the slave wars against the Roman state; now it is the home of Marina Taglialavore, the inventor of a new computer chip that has revolutionized the reading of images. Any hope of crossing this chasm to better historical understanding must begin with the fundamentals of reading the original documents that have been translated into English in this book.