Caer Australis Blog

One of the niggling questions that has always been at the back of my mind when writing entries onto the Caer Australis website was ‘Is this being presented in an appropriate way’. The reason for this is that having only ever written formal scientific papers, the very nature of historical essay writing and the way information is presented may vary considerably. And indeed that is the case; and moreover, writing for the web has its own set of necessities.

So a way to check this out was to have an historical essay peer reviewed. To this end, I enrolled in the very interesting subject offered by Macquarie University, ‘The Decline and Fall of the Roman Republic’. From that, the use of (sometimes extensive) footnotes was encountered, assisting in he presentation of otherwise convoluted explanations. And also the Perseus ancient source database and the documents presented by Bill Thayer were found. There is absolutely nothing worse than not being able to access important information, and here these two databases have an amazing collection – that if you get frazzed can take days to escape !