E. Badian

“It should now be a truism that the historian must not claim to give _the_ explanation of a complex historical phenomenon. Such questions as: "What were the causes of the Great War, of the Fall of the Roman Republic?" -- expecting, by implication, a list of neatly defined items -- such questions are by now relegated to the privacy of the tutorial or the examination room, where the historian is shielded from the critical eye of his professional colleagues. But it is the historian's legitimate task to single out some of the strands in the complex weave and to trace their importance in the pattern; and it is in this humbler frame of mind that he will most usefully perform his proper task of letting the present and past illuminate each other.”
― E. Badian, Lucius Sulla; the deadly reformer