The Muse of History and the Science of Culture

Description

The conflict of arms and the raging of escarpments—that was

history to me back then.

Indeed, even in secondary school, where one of my course books was Countryman’s

Version of Morey’s Ancient Peoples, the set of experiences that mixed me was

“drum and trumpet history,” as I later learned it was mockingly called.

Now and again, however, the course book would stop its portrayal

of military activities and commit a whole section to the social existence of

the period under investigation. These sections I obediently read, however they exhausted

me. I was unable to sit tight for them to end and for Caesar to continue his victory of Gaul, and afterward to cross the Rubicon at the top of his armies