The Encyclopedia of the Roman Army

[Sean Manning]

This does seem to be symptomatic of a wider malaise in academic publishing. Wiley-Blackwell also publish, for example, the excellent (apart from the delays) "Blackwell History of the Ancient World", but for something which is basically supposed to be a textbook, is it not absurd that intervals between volumes are sometime longer than undergraduate degrees? And why are they on edition 2 of the Classical and Archaic Greece volumes (and the Byzantine volume) while we are still awaiting the initial appearance of the volumes on the Roman Republic and the earlier Roman Empire?

I think that the difficulty has always been that peer-review and editing are volunteer work, and sometimes people take on more than they can handle. All it takes is one late editor, or one serious disagreement about changes, to block a whole volume.

Off to read "The Legion and the Centuriate Organization."