Truls Ljungström’s Reviews > The Use and Abuse of History > Status Update

So much for the ideal type. In actual practice the system was filled with tensions and anomie.
1. To begin with, the Spartan army was not always big enough for its needs-needs which were more cause of the system than consequence. Perioeci were an integral part of the hoplite army, and, atleastonmajoroccasionssuchasthePeloponnesianWar,substan¬ tial numbers ofhelots and ex-helots (neodamodeis) were also enlisted.

Periclean Athens wntasfarasitwaspossible2goin1lineofdevelopment:restrictionoflegitimatemarriage2membersofzcitizenbodyonbothsides; zformalrequirement of ekdosis & engyesis; the classification of all children not the offspring of such marriagesas‘bastards’(nothoi),withtheirconsequentexclusionfrom intestate succession when there were legitimate children, and, at leastinthecaseofchildrenofa‘mixed’marriage,fromcitizenship

historia som propaganda, fallet john lilbourne

The analogy w/ individual memory is again useful. It, 2, normally stops at the 3 generation, w/ things told by grand¬ parents, by parents about their parents, by elderly nurses. It, too, is controlled by relevance. All memory is selective, and though the reason why something remains (apart from something actively and deliberately learned, like a school lesson) more often than not escapes us, defect in our knowledge,

‘Tradition’ did not merely transmit the past, it created it. In a shape
which sometimes looks like history, and has been widely accepted ashistorybothbytheGreeksand(withqualifications)bymany modern students, the bards fashioned a timeless mythology,

Whatphilosophywouldnothave,rhetorictookpossessionof.It is a sobering thought that the only ancient work to have come down to us which pretends to be a systematic essay on historiography is Lucian’sHowtoWriteHistory,writtensoonaftera.d.165.Andthat is nothing but a concoction of the rules and maxims which had become the commonplaces of a rhetorical education, a shallow and essentially worthless pot-boiler.

One can go much further. All Greek philosophers, to the last of the neo-Platonists, were evidently agreed in their indifference to history(asdiscipline).Atleastthatiswhattheirsilencesuggests,a silence broken only by the most fleeting of whispers. Aristotle’s pupil Theophrastus is reported to have written a work called On History, and so, too, the latter’s younger friend Praxiphanes, another
Peripatetic.