I was watching this TV show last night on the history channel. It had something to do with ancient Rome, although I’m not sure of the exact topic, as I was just flipping around. You how you do that, right? When you know there is a lot of stuff on TV, but you don’t really want to watch anything specific, so you just kind of aimlessly click through the channels? Sometimes you might find something interesting, other times you just keep on surfing without any real idea of what kind of show you even want to watch.
That’s what I was doing. In retrospect, I wish I’d have known about the show on Rome earlier. It was about the Roman Military,and their military strategy, but it wasn’t only about Rome. It was kind of a overview of history of countries or empires that had world dominance from a military standpoint. And the angle of the show was how whoever had the most technology, had the edge. It didn’t matter exactly how high or low the technology was, so long as you are better than your competitor.
Like for example the Egyptians were pretty much top dog, until the Romans came alone with their slightly superior fighting style. And that’s one of the interesting things about Rome’s military advantage. They didn’t really have a lot of sophisticated weaponry that other countries didn’t have. The one thing they did was develop incredible discipline. Their soldiers were extremely well trained, and together they fought like a well oiled machine.
It reminded me of a book I read a few years ago. It was a novel of historical fiction, of which type I hadn’t ever really read up until that point. That novel was a kind of a power struggle/drama/ love story based in ancient Phoenicia. It was really interesting once I was able to naturally get into it. Reading books have always been a great pleasure of mine. One of the great things about books is that you can take them anywhere you want to escape from the boredom of everyday life just for a little bit and lose yourself in something.
I didn’t use to like books, because I thought they were kind of boring. It isn’t until you really take the time to get into this that you can really appreciate what’s here. And when you read with that kind of mindset, a whole world opens up for you. It’s like you see something that was there all along, just waiting for you to realize this. You can really find new ways to enjoy this, you know?
The book itself was pretty interesting, and I was able to dive into it so deep that I had to keep checking wikipedia to make sure that this was factually correct, because it was so incredibly interesting. It was about a couple of brothers, one younger and one older. And the older was going to inherit the fathers kingdom when he died, but the younger one was better suited to rule the throne. And they both happened to fall in love with the same woman. So it was kind of a love story, power struggle for the throne kind of story. At least the power struggle part was fairly accurate. I don’t know about the love story part. I guess authors need to embellish a little bit to make history come alive enough to make this interesting, you know?
So anyways, it turns out that particular show was a series in military strategy or something. Each week they would highlight a different empire or country, and focus on their particular talent which made them stand out. Which I’ll definitely make the decision to come back to and watch it again and again, because naturally, I find this incredibly fascinating.