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…