I've also lectured and tutored in Greek and Roman history in New Zealand and Australia - I still have plans to combine military history and opera in an academic paper some day! I have attended conferences worldwide and presented papers on Nero in opera, Attila in opera and on the dating debate around Dido and Aeneas. I started to lecture and write about opera and have done so around Sydney since 2003. I also started to write scripts for the dead genre of the radio play - but have since branched out to write stage play scripts and opera libretti. When I was completing my Master's thesis on Polyaenus of Macedon and embarking on a Master's of Literature examining Sextus Julius Frontinus, I also became an opera singer (a second 'you're doing what?' in career terms from my parents!) - and being me, I began to explore and research the history and the world of opera too (as well as obsessively buy CDs and DVDs (well, videos back then, but now DVDs)). This interest in film continues in myresearch to this day. I would recommend this method highly as it led to my research on the Agora oinochoe, various aspects of the futhark, Old English Poetry, and Roman signalling and 'camp-gate' coins - all highly successful research enterprises! I also started examining film, especially those depicting warfare in the ancient and medieval worlds, or even just the worlds themselves (although in film terms, warfare is never far away) and ran a series of popular lectures called 'watching history happen'. I am wont to find a topic and then go 'off on a tangent' and explore it fully (just ask any of my supervisors over the years) even when I should be examining something else. From there I also branched out into studies on the runic alphabet (a combination of fascination with the vikings, Roman signalling and Roman paleography) and other topics (I once did an exhaustive study of the graffiti on the walls of Kirkstall Abbey in Leeds - because it was down the road from where we were living at the time). Of course, when I began studying it in the 1990s, military history was a little un-PC, but I stuck to my guns (no anachronistic pun intended). I've also dabbled all over the field of military history, not just in the ancient world, but also in viking, crusader and wider medieval warfare. I started out as an ancient military historian studying the didactic military literature tradition of Greece and Rome but which also encompasses other times and cultures. I'm originally from New Zealand but moved to Australia in 2001. Hi, I'm Murray Dahm, an independent academic researcher based in Sydney Australia.

Ancient warfare 2 gate