How To Read A Book- A Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading - Mortimer J. Adler, Charles Van Doren [113]
The Un iversal in History
We are not always able to read more than one history of an event. When we are not, we must admit that we do not have much chance of learning the truth of the matter in question-of learning what really happened. However, that is not the only reason to read history. It might be claimed that only the professional historian, the man who is writing a history himself, is required to cross-examine his sources by exhaustively checking one against the other. He must leave no stone untumed if he is to know what he ought to know about his subject. We, as lay readers of history, stand somewhere between 240 HOW TO READ A BOOK
the professional historian, on the one hand, and the irresponsible amateur, on the other hand, who reads history only for amusement.
Let us take the example of Thucydides. You may be aware that he wrote the only major contemporary history of the Peloponnesian War at the end of the fifth century B.C. In a sense, there is nothing to check his work against. What, then, can we expect to learn from it?
Greece is now a tiny country; a war that occurred there twenty-five centuries ago can have little real effect on our life today. Everyone who fought in it is long dead, and the specific things for which they fought are long dead, too. The victories are now meaningless, and the defeats without pain. The cities that were taken and lost have crumbled into dust. Indeed, if we stop to think of it, almost all that remains of the Peloponnesian War is Thucydides' account of it.
Yet that account is still important. For Thucydides' story
-we might as well use that word-has had an inHuen£e on the subsequent history of man. Leaders in later eras read Thucydides. When they found themselves in situations that even faintly approximated that of the tragically divided Greek city-states, they compared their own position to that of Athens or Sparta.
They used Thucydides as an excuse and a justification, and even as a pattern of conduct. The result was that by ever so little, perhaps, but perceptibly, the history of the world was changed by the view held of a small portion of it by Thucydides in the fifth century B.C. Thus we read Thucydides not because he described perfectly what happened before he wrote his book, but because he to a certain extent determined what happened after. And we read him, strange as this may seem, to know what is happening now.
"Poetry is more philosophical than history," wrote Aristotle.
By this he meant that poetry is more general, more universal.
A good poem is true not only in its own time and place, but in all times and places. It has meaning and force for all men.
History is not quite so universal as that. It is tied to events in a way that poetry is not. But any good history is also universal.
How to Read History 241
Thucydides himself said that he was writing his history so that men of the future would not have to repeat the mistakes he had seen made and from which he had suffered personally and through the agony of his country. He described the kinds of human mistakes that would have meaning to men other than himself, to men other than Greeks. Yet some of the very same errors that the Athenians and the Spartans made 2,50 years ago, or at least very similar ones, are being made now, as they have been made over and over again since Thucydides' time.
If your view of history is limited, if you go to it to discover only what really happened, you will not learn the main thing that Thucydides, or indeed any good historian, has to teach. If you read Thucydides well, you may even decide to give up trying to discover what really happened in the past.
History is the story of what led up to now. It is the present that interests us-that and the future. The future will