Reading

Hi,

Didn't get a game in as I'd hoped Wednesday, as some family stuff came up, so thought I'd do a reading post  instead.  One of the advantages of my job, and of the city in which I live, is I have access to excellent library resources.  Of late, this has meant a bit of a reading binge, most recently dealing with successors issues.  Two books of note have been "Ghost on the Throne", by James Romm:

and "Dividing the Spoils" by Robin Waterfield:

Both are excellent resources (at least for an amateur enthusiast like myself), and together make for a comprehensive study of the period.  Romm's book tends to focus on the early stages of the conflict, going about as far as the Battle of Ipsus, and is primarily a character stuff of the diadochi themselves.  He also follows a rigourous chronological pattern that makes the evolution of the wars fairly easy to follow.

Waterfield's book is a little more broad-ranging, touching on cultural and political issues as well as covering the conflicts of the successors as far as their stabilization into the Ptolemeic, Seleucid, and Angigonid realms (with the rise of Gonatus in Macedon).  Together, they give good detail on the early wars, a clear sense of what the main characters were like, and a context for their conflicts.

I think I'll be asking Santa for a copy of these - they're the kind of thing I'd read again, and would be handy to have on the shelf.  If anyone's interested in the period, or learning about it, these would be a solid place to start.

FMB