RAT\'s knowledge of military history rivals Oxford

[Epictetus]

I was searching for something or other about ancient Athens and stumbled across an Australian writer's blog. I was surprised to read:

Despite its name, the Roman Army Talk forum has a substantial Greek section. These guys are awesome for minute details about how people used to slaughter each other. If you want the pros and cons of holding your spear overhand vs underhand, then this is the place to be. Their knowledge of military history would rival that of any Oxford don.

High praise. But I wonder if this is because we have so many academics posting?

[Caballo]

Or people who would prefer to be academics rather than working in business?

[M. Demetrius]

Or people who borrow the ideas of the academics and actually disseminate them to a broad, non-campus audience?

[Epictetus]

Or a combination of all of the above. But there is an impressive amount of knowledge here.

[Robert]

I suppose the old proverb of "Sharing knowledge multiplies it" comes into play when there is a large community of contributors. I think the main effect is bringing a lot of bits and pieces together in trying to solve the puzzle, as well as a good number of people experimenting with different ways of doing things and adding that to the pool.

[Marja]

I came here with a lot of wrongheaded ideas. I have learned a lot here. Good discussion does help with that.

[Sean Manning]

We do have at least one Oxford student here, so I suppose that we get the best of both worlds! There are only a few places in the world where one can often talk about war in the ancient world, and scholarly forums like RAT are a good substitute for those of us not so lucky as to be in one of them.

I am not an expert on the Roman army, so I can learn from the Roman experts here while suggesting Classical Greek, Achaemenid Persian, or medieval parallels.

[Flavivs Aetivs]

Where I live, I'm not socially compatible and can't talk about anything, let alone the Roman World. This is the only place I have that I can talk to other scholars of Roman History, and I've learned almost everything I know from discussion (first on TWC) on here.

[Gary Corby]

It's because you reference original sources, and then you apply your combined intelligence and broad period knowledge to make sensible, practical conclusions. That's valuable and rare if you happen to be an author of classical Greek murder mysteries. So your contribution to my ancient military knowledge is appreciated; information from RMT has made its way into my books.

I created an account here just to answer that question! I'm the author mentioned by David Cord in the first post. Not stalking, but I noticed an uptick in my blog stats from this page and curiousity brought me over. I couldn't resist the chance to say hi.

[Michael Kerr]

Welcome Gary, Its good to see a fellow Aussie join.

Regards
Michael Kerr