Who: Josiah Osgood

Claim To Fame: Josiah Osgood is Professor of Classics at Georgetown University. He is the author of Caesar’s Legacy: Civil War and the Emergence of the Roman Empire, Claudius Caesar: Image and Power in the Early Roman Empire, and his latest How to Be a Bad Emperor: An Ancient Guide to Truly Terrible Leaders. 

Where To Find Josiah His Website, Amazon

Praise For Josiah: “A lesser scholar would have easily lost the way in the array of sources from which the author gleans and rearranges his material in a stunning montage…Mr. Osgood provides an admirable demonstration of original scholarship.” — J.A. Lobur

When do you like to write? Are you regimented about your writing routine?

I am regimented in the sense that I try to get some writing done every day. It can be at 5 AM in the morning or late in the afternoon. I like the standard Churchill set for himself: “Every night I try myself by court-martial to see if I have done anything effective during the day.”

Where do you like to write? What does your ideal work environment look like?

I prefer to write in a quiet and well-stocked library. Next best is my office at Georgetown University, where I have a good collection of books related to my research. As awful as the COVID-19 pandemic has been, I’ve discovered a number of online resources and realized I really can write anywhere – at a kitchen table, on a lawn chair, in bed.

Do you have any pre-writing rituals or habits before you sit down to write?

Sometimes before I plunge in, I like to think for a few moments about a piece of writing I’ve really enjoyed. It could be a novel with an unforgettable character, like those by Muriel Spark, or an enthralling historical narrative, like Macaulay’s History of England.

What do you do when the writing isn’t coming easy? Do you struggle at all with that dreaded enemy of writing: writer’s block?

It’s rare that I have nothing to write but I can get stuck on how to express a thought or make a smooth transition to a new topic. I’ve gotten better at embracing those moments as opportunities to discover something new about the character or problem that you’re writing about.

All of your work is very research intensive. What is your method for researching and organizing material you might want to use for your future writing?

I try to take detailed notes, in MS Word files, of all the primary and secondary sources I consult, and then I can search them electronically. Even if something is available online, I think you absorb it better by entering it yourself into a file. For a historical episode where there are many sources I often create a table that compares what each source says, moment by moment. I also keep a notebook where I can jot down ideas that occur to me, for instance about how to sequence a chapter. I write a journal entry each morning and often thrash out a few ideas there.

For your latest book, How To Be A Bad Leader, you translated Suetonius—one of the great writers of the Ancient world who also wrote portraits of writers, poets, grammarians. Were there any lessons that you retained from working closely with his Latin that you apply to your writing routine?

Suetonius is the master of the anecdote.  He knew that a brief and funny story can memorably sum up a whole personality. In writing I’ve done since translating Suetonius, I’ve worked harder at collecting everything I can about a person I’m interested in and then selecting what is most revealing and arranging it for the greatest impact on the reader.

What books or writers have most influenced the way you think and the way you write?

When I was writing what became my first book Caesar’s Legacy (2006), on the experience of civil war in Rome, I was inspired by Paul Fussell’s The Great War and Modern Memory (1975). Some of the claims Fussell makes are probably exaggerated but he has had me thinking ever since about how a writer really captures an experience like trench warfare. Fussell had a taste for irony and satire that I am sympathetic too and quotes many fine examples, such as Siegfried Sassoon’s line: “When all is said and done, the war was mainly a matter of holes and ditches.”

What is your advice to aspiring writers?

If you have a good thought, stop everything and get it down in a notebook or a computer file. Take any opportunity you can to get your work edited. Turn off email, social media, web browsers for a couple of hours and see how much more you’ll get done.

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