01-20-2009, 12:34 AM
Quote:Out of curiosity, what are some of the other errors he commits? He seems to have incurred the ire of quite a few people.Quite simply: he ignores Tacitus and Cassius Dio, because they wrote one and two centuries after the events. Which is nonsense, because Tacitus has, through Pliny's (lost) History of the Germanic Wars, access to eye witnesses; and something similar can be said about the source of Dio, which may have been Pliny as well. But what is really strange, is that he does accept topographical descriptions by these authors. But you can not have it both ways: either you accept the historical account and can also use the topography, or you ignore the historical account and can not use the topography.
