The historian Michael Arnheim reviews Mary Beard’s Emperor of Rome: Ruling the Ancient Roman World, which has just been published as a paperback. “What was it really like to rule and be ruled in the Ancient Roman world?” That is how Professor Mary Beard describes her book. In fact, it is a not particularly subtle […]
History as “a possession for all time”
History, by looking clearly at the past, can help to prepare for the future. This was proposed by the Greek historian Thucydides and expanded in the Renaissance by Machiavelli, whose analysis of power structures can be seen to apply again and again, argues Michael Arnheim, making history relevant “for all time”. Thucydides (c460 – c400 […]