Thomas L. Dynneson

In the future look for my posts on the Ancient History Encyclopedia site. In the meantime I am working on a new manuscript entitled: The Making of the Roman Empire.

An audaciously daring narrative in which the most important feature of this work is that it presents the reader with an overview of the early history of Rome, but more than that, it focuses the reader’s attention to those unique and often hidden cultural features that contributed to create a unique ancient Roman  Read More 

At this point in time I am drafting a chapter on the rape of Lucretia. This is a well known legend related to the revolution that established the Roman Repubic and destroyed the Roman monarchy. For me, an interesting aspect of this story is the idea that a crime that dishonored an aristocratic noble  Read More 

Livy, the most complete ancient source, wrote his history of Rome centuries after the city of Rome was established. His records from the ninth century to the fourth century BCE were unreliable and corrupted. Consequently, he simply invented a narrative to fill in the gaps. As a part of this narrative he produced a " Read More 

Recently I was searching for a source on a chapter that I was working over. In the process I came across a 1920 volume related to the most powerful aristocratic families of Rome. In particular I was interested in process that the aristocracy used to incorporate wealthy families outside of Rome into the aristocracy. Such  Read More 

Rome was not your typical ancient city, it was unique because of its geographical setting. Rome, like many cities was located on a river, the Tiber River. It was inland from the west coast by several miles an therefore was somewhat protected from sea raiders. Many cities were being developed in the seventh and  Read More 

Writing is an art that is based on certain rules and standards such as punctuation and grammatical systems. Originally, grammatical rule had to be developed over time, as the first writing systems existed without the benefit of such rules. For example writing was letters in a line, and while words existed they were not  Read More 

In my study of the long history of the formation of the Roman Republic, there is an event that respected historians claim as a turning point in Western history and in the advancement of human civilization. They cite the year 338 BCE. Rome had just fought a series of wars with various cities including cities  Read More 

Today, I completed drafting Chapter 28 of my manuscript dealing with the history of the Roman Republic. What has amazed me more and more about this work is the extent that historical events and persons were used in the creation of an inventive mind, mainly the mind of Livy, but also the gullibility of Plutarch in  Read More 

As a student of cultures past and present, I have especially been interested in a couple of ideas - one is urbanization another is political systems, which includes attempt at the assimilation of people's of diverse cultures. These ideas are connected and are difficult to study predictively. Most societies change over time and end  Read More