Our book chats about The Beginnings of Rome: Italy From the Bronze Age to the Punic Wars (Circa 1,000 to 264 B.C.) by T.J. Cornell are coming up, the first one next week, September 3, followed by September 17 and October 1.
On Wednesday we plan to cover up to and including Chapter 5, TRADITIONAL HISTORY.
Not to be missed is reading Chapter 1: INTRODUCTION: THE EVIDENCE, which discusses the evidence available to the modern historian, laid out as
- Historical accounts
- The sources of our sources: lost historical accounts
- The sources of our sources: Greek accounts
- The sources of our sources: family tradition
- The sources of our sources: oral tradition
- The sources of our sources: documents and archives
- The reliability of the annalistic tradition
- The antiquarians
- The sources and methods of the antiquarians
- Archaeological evidence
and where the author discusses the respective merits and pitfalls of assessing and using this evidence, and gives a warning as to how to properly interpret related archaeology. Of special interest, at least to me, are the two sections on antiquarians.