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'Fraid so.

As opposed to being crowned with yannies?

W-what? Was this a real thing?

Scipio Africanus: Greater Than Napoleon, by B. H. Liddell Hart. This focuses on the war with Carthage, particularly with Hannibal. Scipio Africanus was the Roman who defeated Hannibal.

Caesar's Legion: The Epic Saga of Julius Caesar's Elite Tenth Legion and the Armies of Rome, by Stephen Dando-Collins. As the title suggest, this focuses on a much later period, during and sometime after the career of Julius Caesar.

Incendiary birds work better, at least if you're Genghis Khan.

What would be a context flaming arrows would be used? To set fire to rooftops?

You’re not supposed to rest on your laurels.

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As someone with a name that translates to 'crowned with laurel', I very much appreciate this

Had no idea it’s leaves are what we call bay leaves. Delicious!

Grand Duchy of Warsaw was a move in that direction, that is not the PLC itself, but a 4th political power between the other 3 Eastern European powerhouses. Keep in mind doing so was antagonizing these. Napoleon defeated them, sure, but not completely. That is not how war worked unless you are Napoleon after Moscow and Europe has had enough. If you want geopolitical stability & not war after war each few years, then at some point you want to create a stable political context. Messing with Poland was one of the (many) reasons that served to perpetually antagonize in particular Russia & caused Napoleon to get in too deep.

No, not at all, this is really peak hollywood fantasy to make things flashy. Fire arrows were seldom used, and only in specific contexts, certainly not in battle.

But cinematically it is ‘nice’.

Stephen Kinzer- All the Shah's Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror

Were flaming arrows and those big, spiky wooden balls they always set on fire, really used in battle?

It seems like every medieval battle in movies has flaming arrows being sent at the enemy and those big fiery, spiky things rolling thru the battlefield.

I started reading "In the Name of Rome" by Adrian Goldsworthy. What are some other good books or lectures about the ancient Roman military?

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Can anyone recommend a good book on the overthrow of the Shah in Iran? I know pretty much nothing about the time period, except for watching the HBO documentary.

https://www.orkneyjar.com/history/maeshowe/maeshrunes.htm

Here's some, not ancient but still neat.

After he defeated Prussia, Austria, and Russia. Why did Napoleon not restore the Poland-Lithuanian commonwealth?

Maeshowe is a large Stone-age burial chamber in the Orkney Iskands (off the north coast of Scotland) from 5000 years ago. When antiquarians broke into the chamber in the 19th century they found they weren't the first such visitors. The walls were covered in runic graffiti from the 12th-century -- the islands having long been under Viking/Norse control. You can read some of them here. Some highlights are:

• "Tholfir Kolbeinsson carved these runes high up"
• "These runes were carved by the man most skilled in runes in the western ocean"
• "Ingigerth is the most beautiful of all women" (carved beside a rough drawing of a slavering dog)
• "Thorni f*cked. Helgi carved"

As far as Roman graffiti goes, the best preserved examples are probably the one from Pompeii, for obvious reasons. But there are also examples from Hadrian's Wall and visitors to Egypt basically already wrote "I was here" on all kinds of monuments in Roman times.

I can't tell you anything about non-Roman acient graffiti, unfortunately (except that I'm very sure that it existed)

Are there more examples of the funny graffiti found at Pompeii, not just in the Roman empire but worldwide