Excellent choice of authors, by the way. You don’t see much in the way of Classics anymore, especially the Roman authors.
I was discussing the movie “300” with someone recently, and they were fervently convinced it was fiction. I mentioned Herodotus and Thucycidides, in the context of the Greeks fighting the Persians and the modern example of Western democracy fighting militant Islam and had the sense of how we’ve lost that part of our history. Which is truly unfortunate, both for the lessons it offers and the richness of the experience.
I had a teacher of mine, a Jesuit priest, tell me that all of life’s lessons could be found in “The Pelopponesian Wars” by Thucyidides. I make a point of reading it every year and, as I get older, the more I believe he was right.
I quoted Polybius (“Those who don’t learn from the lessons of History are doomed to repeat them”) on an earlier post, and it seems that simplest axioms are the hardest to remember and the easiest to forget.
