Comments on: Learning from History https://www.isegoria.net/2014/06/learning-from-history-2/ From the ancient Greek for equality in freedom of speech; an eclectic mix of thoughts, large and small Thu, 04 Jun 2026 12:05:23 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.6.1 By: Barnabas https://www.isegoria.net/2014/06/learning-from-history-2/comment-page-1/#comment-1301294 Barnabas Wed, 18 Jun 2014 13:38:51 +0000 http://www.isegoria.net/?p=35231#comment-1301294 Now history is quite consciously looked at only through a distorting lense of ideology. History is only useful to the extent that it can be used to serve the interests of current class power struggles.

]]> By: T. Greer https://www.isegoria.net/2014/06/learning-from-history-2/comment-page-1/#comment-1301015 T. Greer Wed, 18 Jun 2014 09:04:59 +0000 http://www.isegoria.net/?p=35231#comment-1301015 To be fair to the public, it is much easier to study the late Roman republic than it is the 3rd century Roman empire simply because of the sources we have for each.

Or, to put it another way, had Thucydides been writing in 270 BC instead of 400 BC, today we would hear comparisons of the modern world with the Wars of the Diadochi instead of with the wars of the Peloponnese.

That doesn’t account for everything (Sima Qian was a heckuva lot better historian than Herodotus, but we still hear much more about Xerxes than we do Xiang Yu), but it accounts for a lot of it.

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