Opening up Pandora's Box - Meet the Editors of AW and AH

The texts in Ancient History and Ancient Warfare magazine are coordinated and edited by Murray Dahm, Jasper Oorthuys, and Owain Williams. We thought we’d ask them a few more questions for this instalment of the advent calendar!

Murray Dahm - Assistant editor of Ancient Warfare magazine

Where and what did you study?

I studied at the University of Auckland, New Zealand 1990-1998, and earned my BA and MA (hons) in Ancient History and an MLitt, also in Ancient History.

My theses were on "The Genre of Military Tacital Writing and the Strategemata of Polyaenus of Macedon"; and "The Career and Writings of Sextus Julius Frontinus".

What period or culture of history are you most interested in?

I fell in love with Ancient History specifically in 1990 because of the way all the pieces of history (the how, the why, the who, the mysteries) all connected together. Ever since, I have been enthralled by Ancient History. I had always been interested in military history, and my penchant for the more obscure aspects which not everyone is interested in.

This led me to explore the Strategemata of Polyaenus of Macedon (at the time the only translation was made in 1793) and then the Strategemata of Frontinus (the only other example of the genre to survive from antiquity). Ever since, I have specialised in the genre of didactic military literature which is on the periphery of usual military history. 


Jasper Oorthuys - Editor of Ancient Warfare magazine

Jasper Oorthuys

Where and what did you study?

I studied history at Nijmegen University, here in the Netherlands, specialising in ancient history. I wrote my MA thesis on the Roman Imperial Navy. After graduation, I started on a PhD thesis on the same topic while I also began working as a business magazine editor. Several years later, an opportunity presented itself to combine ancient military history and my editing experience, and Ancient Warfare was gone. The PhD project sort of disappeared in the rear-view mirror…

 

What period or culture of history are you most interested in?

I’m the type of person who finds that every new era you look into, becomes more and more interesting the more you learn about it. The better the yarn is spun, the more human people in our past become, and the more fascinating it gets. So you might say I have broad interests in history, except it all narrowly tends to focus on military history. Go figure. ;-) In our editorial (and the podcast too, actually) team, Lindsay Powell and I seem to be the ones holding up the honour of Rome, the late Republic and early Imperial era specifically.



Owain Williams - Editor of Ancient History magazine 

What period or culture of history are you most interested in?

I am a Hellenist at heart - I love ancient Greece. During my undergraduate studies, I studied ancient Greek ethnicity, how the Greeks thought about themselves and what made someone 'Greek'. I also love exploring the world of Archaic Greece, a time when the Greeks were a minor periphery of the wider ancient world, and Greek culture was developing in the cultural soup of the Mediterranean.

What book are you currently reading?

I am currently reading James Davidson's "The Greeks and Greek Love, a comprehensive discussion of the evidence for homosexuality in Classical Greece", a topic that has proven somewhat controversial in scholarship. Davidson looks at the subject holistically, using art, history, and philology to gain a better understanding of what same-sex love was for the ancient Greeks, and how there is no one definition of 'Greek' love, or, as the Romans said, mos Graecorum.

P.S. Murray and Jasper you can hear on the Ancient Warfare podcast as well, and you can get to know Jasper and Owain a bit more through their editorials in Ancient Warfare and Ancient History magazine.