Hey folks! Year is coming to a close, so once again I’m going to offer a bit of an end-of-year reflection on the state of the project, along with a brief ‘what’s on the stove’ coverage of what may be coming up. Also, here’s a cat picture:
In terms of the project itself, 2024 was, in terms of views and viewers, basically the same as 2023 (technically a bit better), but a bit less than 2022 (but still wildly more than any year 2019-21). As I noted last year, I tend to benchmark my project against Eidolon (2015-2020)’s five-year run of c. 2m views as a bar for a successful public scholarship project. WordPress says we had 3.74m page views this year (up from 3.6m last year); Google Analytics is a bit more aggressive in filtering and says 3.42m year-to-date (cf. 3.34 last year). So the audience hasn’t grown much, but it’s pretty steady at what is still, for a public history project, a quite high level. I’m especially pleased with that result given that we were on hiatus for two full months.
The most popular post series this year was the Phalanx-Legion series (Ia, Ib, IIa, IIb, IIIa, IIIb, IVa, IVb, IVc, V) with a bit more than a quarter-of-a-million views split over all of its various parts. The Sci-Fi Body Armor post also was quite popular, as was the series on Alexander III of Macedon. Annoyingly, WordPress has changed the back-end analytics to make it annoyingly hard to see what the least well performing posts were, but it looks like of the Collections posts, it may have been the Imperator series (I, IIa, IIb, IIIa, IIIb). And yet, my campaign to bully Paradox into green-lighting Imperator II continues. A Philip II of Macedon once said, “We aren’t running away, only backing up that, as a battering ram, we can hurl back and hit again harder” (Polyaenus, Strat. 2.38.2). Expect my eleven-part five-part series on Imperator next year (I’m kidding; I think the next Teaching Paradox series should probably be Hearts of Iron IV, although I still haven’t quite pulled my thoughts together on it yet).
As for trends in the metrics, Twitter is still a major source of readers, but its decline – which I noted last year – continues. Twitter-based traffic is down by about a third from 2023, and in the last few months Twitter, which was typically the solid second-place of my traffic sources (after Google) has been fighting with Bluesky, Reddit and Hacker News for that top spot. Right now, I’m still splitting my time over Twitter and Bluesky (and trying to at least get all new post announcements on Mastodon) but as Twitter becomes both a less pleasant place and less useful for finding readers, I may de-prioritize it further. Overall, the fragmentation of the social media space is probably bad for me; I’m not a full time ‘social media influencer’ who has time to ‘foster engagement’ over multiple channels. It’s fortunate I established the core audience I did when I did.
Speaking of which, the ACOUP amici over on Patreon continue to grow: we had 1,183 folks supporting the project in January, 2023; 1,368 in January 2024 and right now we’re at 1,502. That support has enabled me to both continue this project and continue working on my scholarship. The book project (Of Arms and Men), which you’ll recall we had just gotten under contract this time last year is now further advanced: I have the full manuscript very nearly done (I’ll hit ‘feature complete’ in the next week or two). I think we’re hoping to have the book out sometime in 2025 (probably late in the year) and I’ll be sure to keep everyone posted. In addition, some time in the next year I’ll be putting up a sort of ‘roll of honor’ backer page, listing everyone who supported the project on Patreon over the years that Of Arms and Men was in the works.
As you may have gathered, Of Arms and Men is not a small project. I argue that Roman success was in more than just mobilizing men, but that instead a Roman mobilization advantage appears across the other costs of warfare (supplies, (very briefly) ships, non-battlefield kit, arms and armor) suggesting a more comprehensive mobilization advantage which was due to Rome’s unique system for mobilizing the resources of Italy, in contrast to the traditional explanations which foregrounded either raw Italian manpower or assumed exceptional Roman bellicosity. Making that argument stick requires covering what we know of the logistics, equipment, arms and armor and mobilization systems for not just Rome, but also Carthage, the three Hellenistic great powers (Antigonids, Seleucids, Ptolemies) and non-state peoples in pre-Roman Spain and Gaul. At last count, the running bibliography alone has more than 700 works in it (and still feels woefully incomplete in some areas).
In any case, as noted the whole thing should appear in print probably late next year. As a fair warning, while I have endeavored to make a book that is broadly legible (no untranslated passages, all terms defined, dates for events listed, maps to help you figure out where things are, as little jargon as possible), this is first and foremost a research work rather than a popular one and so is written a bit differently than the blog. Nevertheless, I know a fair number of you have been waiting on this one and you must wait a bit longer, but I will be sure to keep you informed as we get closer.
Naturally, with all of that work going into the book project, I had relatively fewer works of note off the blog. I wrote a review of Gladiator II for Foreign Policy, as well as another piece on the crisis of academic history’s implications for national security. I also wrote a piece for The Chronicle of Higher Education on inexpensive ways that departments could be less cruel to their fixed-term/adjunct/visiting professors. Finally, I wrote a grumpy piece in The Dispatch taking apart the Heritage Foundation’s annual “Index of U.S. Military Strength.”
For this coming year, I have a few things currently on the queue to do. I have a few specifically Roman historical topics I’ve seen come up that I want to treat: ‘On the Gracchi,’ a discussion of Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus taking a somewhat (but by no means entirely) negative view of figures that I think are often treated a bit too uncritically in how they tend to be taught in survey courses. I also want to treat the question of if Roman emperors were unusually likely to be crazy or insane (spoilers: no). For the worldbuilders out there, I want to put together a brief precis on ancient Mediterranean currency, in the hopes of giving folks a sense of how a pre-modern currency might work and just maybe to get more settings to move away from assuming that day-to-day transactions happen in a unit called ‘gold.’ I also think it might be fun to look at some of the armor styles in DragonAge: Veilguard (which I haven’t quite yet finished), because they’re an interesting mix of reasonable and what I can only describe as ‘terminal DeviantArt armor’ – a product of concept art whose only referents are other concept artworks.
