Volume 10, Number 12 · June 20, 1968
Up from Democritus
By M.I. Finley
Democritus and the Sources of Greek Anthropology Association)
by Thomas Cole
Western Reserve University Press (for the American Philological, 225 pp., $6.50
The Idea of Progress in Classical Antiquity
by Ludwig Edelstein
Johns Hopkins, 211 pp., $8.00
The historian, we are frequently reminded, has to have sympathy with his subject. There is validity in the injunction: it would be difficult for anyone to write a reasonable history of the Assyrians if he shared the hatred expressed in the Old Testament. But there is also danger. Sympathy easily slides into identification, so that a past culture or society begins to look and sound like the historian's image of his own. Sympathy in that disguise requires the people who are the subject of the inquiry to have thought and felt in the right, advanced ways, not only in high culture but equally in social attitudes or economic doctrines. Histories of Greece and Rome still appear, in various western languages, in which slavery is scarcely mentioned (or is whitewashed); in which the brutality of the gladiatorial games is ignored or romanticized; in which all politicians are statesmen unless they are 'tyrants' or have plebeian habits and impulses; in which such slogans as libertas and humanitas are taken at face value and their advocates are assumed to be contending with present-day problems and opponents.
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