Book Review: Creators, Conquerors, and Citizens — What can we learn from ancient history?

The Spanish philosopher George Santayana famously said that “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” This site is devoted to practical philosophy, but Santayana strongly suggests that there is such a thing as practical history, in the sense of a way to learn from history that is not about what happened per se, but about what we can learn from what happened that will make our current and future lives better.

This is not, of course, how history is studied these days. A contemporary professional historian attempts to describe things, and cautiously analyze causes, in the most objective, and detached, way possible. Moral lessons are for philosophers and preachers. But the study of history actually began with a very practical, very moral bent. Thucydides, the guy who pretty much invented the field (together with his contemporary, Herodotus) with his famous History of the Peloponnesian War, articulated his opinions of what happened very clearly. When Pericles kept being elected general, for instance, he wryly commented that “Athens, in theory a democracy, was on the way to being ruled by the leading man.”

He ought to know. Thucydides commanded the Athenian fleet at Amphipolis in 424 BCE, coming too late to the defense of the town, which had just fellen to the Spartan general Brasidas, a good diplomat, among other things (“he was a pretty competent speaker, for a Spartan,” commented Thucydides). Thucydides was consequently prosecuted and given a lifelong exile by the Athenians. So he retired to Thrace and kept in touch with both sides, devoting himself to writing the history of the conflict. Lucky for us, the fickleness of the Athenian people deprived them of a mediocre (or even just unlucky) general and gave humanity one of its greatest historians and moralists.

This notion of history as a teacher of moral lessons, and hence of practical import for how to live our lives, is why I am writing here about Robin Waterfield’s Creators, Conquerors, and Citizens: A History of Ancient Greece (Oxford University Press, 2018).The book covers Greek history from the Archaic Period (750–480 BCE) through the Classical Period (479–323 BCE), the Hellenistic Period (323 BCE-30 CE), and the Roman conquest.