Appian

Legionary eagle

To fill up the slight lull — Jona must be busy these days — and taking the title of this blog literally: a note is in order that I’m finally getting around to proofreading Appian’s Civil Wars, with two of the five Books now in theory made ‘perfect’ in the last coupla weeks. Dull as ditchwater (I’m not interested in warfare and even less in the interminable treacheries of the Roman civil wars), but it’s getting done; things eventually do, although it may take several years, as here. The good news, though, is that there were very few typos: about one every twenty printed pages; only two changed the sense, and of those, only one could not be rectified by the reader on their own (a number).

Diodorus Siculus

Welcome back, Jona; I hope the end of your trip went as well as the rest of it seems to have gone.

I’ve just completed putting the first 17 Books of Diodorus’ Library of History online at Lacus; English translation only, no Greek, about 2000 pages of print. Non-Jonas out there should know that he did a fair chunk of the work himself: the quasi-endless proofreading of I don’t know how many Books  (for which my warm thanks, and maybe yours as well, gentle reader, because otherwise we may never have got this monster online) — so that this is an appropriate welcome-back item, I guess.

The remaining Books, 18-40, will find their way onsite in the fullness of time. It’s in fact not as bad as it sounds, since these Books are for the most part fragmentary or even very fragmentary, and thus what’s still missing onsite accounts for only 30% of what we have of him.