History was of greater interest in the 18th and 19th centuries, when men who were thought to possess great minds attempted to prove whether modernity was greater than antiquity, or to settle the question of Progress. Nowadays, those questions aren’t even raised. We have everything from archival and archaeological work to historical romances, but our mediocrity is ever-worse, ever less-polished, and our few good historians are not even taken seriously.
Rome Without Greatness
An interesting, little-noted truth about our time is that many celebrated historians are often mediocre minds and rarely good writers. Yet they produce increasingly labored and researched tomes of thousands of pages, at the end of which, the reader’s judgment has been bored or exhausted, but not necessarily educated. We have bestsellers and prizewinners, but our obsession with facts has not produced a rival to the last great historian, Churchill. We have only hobbyists who fail to grasp greatness.
History was of greater interest in the 18th and 19th centuries, when men who were thought to possess great minds attempted to prove whether modernity was greater than antiquity, or to settle the question of Progress. Nowadays, those questions aren’t even raised. We have everything from archival and archaeological work to historical romances, but our mediocrity is ever-worse, ever less-polished, and our few good historians are not even taken seriously.
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History was of greater interest in the 18th and 19th centuries, when men who were thought to possess great minds attempted to prove whether modernity was greater than antiquity, or to settle the question of Progress. Nowadays, those questions aren’t even raised. We have everything from archival and archaeological work to historical romances, but our mediocrity is ever-worse, ever less-polished, and our few good historians are not even taken seriously.
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