the CAMPVS

What happened to the Year of Reading Rome?

Well, the short answer is life. We can chalk this up to another of those very ambitiously colossal failures among so many other New Year’s resolutions. It seemed simple enough in the beginning, and I stole every chance I could to read and to blog about Mommsen in the beginning, but at some point you have to admit to yourself that you’ve bitten off more than you can chew, and that as nice as it would have been to say that you had done it, it’s much nicer to spend that time with a growing baby boy and to ensure that all the little details of your daily life don’t go neglected.

I did hope to get back on track, and would plot where I could fit the time in my calendar, but work and family always trumped reading Mommsen.

Mommsen was also threatening to choke the blog, and slogging through his highly conjectural, largely reference-free, and frankly boring text left me feeling burned out, hence the lack of posts here. I even disappeared from twitter.

The lessons learned are that writing daily critiques of Roman history isn’t my job, that I like my son too much to spend my evenings with dead German scholars, and that resolutions are not the way to get anything done.

Now that that’s off my chest I hope I can return to what this blog is really about: occasional observations and commentary on matters classical and pedagogical. Without the pressure.