Onward goes the banner of historical debate

So I've got through the first salvo of primary source material and I'm on to the secondary. And I'm expanding a bit.

Just finished Goldsworthy's The Fall of Carthage and now on The Spartans. Also finished Anabasis which was brilliant - the Xenophonic speeches are brilliant constructions. No wonder the public school system taught it for so long. In fact I'm pretty sure we got Xenophon as an unseen in our GCSE Greek exam.

It has now been suggested to me that I read Livy. If I'm serious about the Carthage angle then I ought to, and probably Polybius as well. And a whole bunch of other s*it. And I think it would be foolish to stop now. However I am thinking increasingly about doing a WOTR style game on the Ionian revolt, with expansion packs to take in the Persian wars proper and the Peloponnesian war and so on. I think it lends itself more to a game than pre Punic wars Carthage.

Had a flash of inspiration whilst reading about Sparta today - Pindar was Theban. Maybe I can get something out of him...

The Nicias-Alcibiades debate also goes on in my head. Who was more responsible for the fall of the Athenian Empire? The debate is odd - things that A did were more indirect than those that N did, but may have had wider implications. Either way it the Athenian view of their leaders seems to have been pretty damn odd.

Another interesting area is one that has come up in various e-conversations with Yale. The comparison of Empires. What is an Empire? How can we identify, measure and contrast different systems and structures? And aren't (or weren't) there a lot more empires than we usually assume? A good example would be the Leges Inter Brettos et Scottos from late C11 or early C12 Scotland. This was an empire - the Gaelic speaking Scots were ruling over subject Welsh peoples who preserved some of their own structures in Strathclyde - but is not considered so because of the presence of the more powerful emerging English empire. 'Empire' is not a relative term.