Storytelling the Past
In recent years, I have enjoyed reading Thomas Cahill’s Hinges of History series. Here is how he describes his task of researching and retelling the stories of the ancients:
My methods of approaching the past have scarcely changed since 
childhood and adolescence. I assemble what piece there are, contrast and compare, and try to remain in their presence till I can begin to see and hear and love what living men and women once saw and heard and loved, till from these scraps and fragments living men and women begin to emerge and move and live again – and then I try to communicate these sensations to my reader. So you will find in this book no breakthrough discoveries, no cutting-edge scholarship, just, if I have succeeded, the feelings and perceptions of another age and insofar as possible, real and rounded men and women. For me, the historian’s principal task should be to raise the dead to life.
Thomas Cahill, Why the Greeks Matter, 8
Like this:
Be the first to like this post.
