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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 26 October 2009
The implied assumption about Ancient History, which in the present discussion will comprise mainly Graeco–Roman history, is that ‘relevance’ obtains. What this will chiefly mean is that in some sense history does teach lessons, and that specifically Ancient History has lessons to teach students of international affairs at the present day. A massive assumption, it may be thought. Some suggestions towards a defence of the proposition appear later. What might seem more readily defensible is the view that it is the present which may illuminate the past. Here the lessons of history, if we admit them, become retrospective. If Winston Churchill in certain aspects of his career in the 1930s resembled the orator Demosthenes in the fourth century B.C. pronouncing his Anti-Philippics, even more revealingly, perhaps, in enhancing contemporary understanding of the latter period, did Demosthenes fulfil the role of Winston Churchill in his “wilderness years”.
page 27 note 1 See Cramer, F. H., ‘Isolationism: A Case History’, Journal of the History of Ideas, i (1940), pp. 459–3.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
page 27 note 2 See particularly Peter Fliess, J., Thucydides and the Politics of Bipolarity (Lousiana State University Press, 1966).Google Scholar
page 29 note 1 In his ‘Introduction’ to Andrewes, A., Greek Society (London, 1971), p. xx.Google Scholar
page 30 note 1 In Aspects of Antiquity (London, 1972), p. 137.
page 30 note 2 (London, 1973).
page 35 note 1 See Wittfogel, Karl A., Oriental Despotism (London, 1957)Google Scholar for a comprehensive discussion of seminal value.
page 35 note 2 (London, 1938), p. vii.
page 35 note 3 Buchan, John, Life of Julius Caesar (London, 1932), p. 11.Google Scholar
page 36 note 1 Three valuable studies of ancient historians are Grant, Michael, The Ancient Historians (London, 1970)Google Scholar; Usher, Stephen, The Historians of Greece and Rome (London, 1969)Google Scholar and Bury, J. B., The Ancient Greek Historians (New York, 1958).Google Scholar
page 38 note 5 In The Grandeur that was Rome (London, 1911).Google Scholar