12 MAY 2007, Page 17

Ancient & modern

Now that the Oxford, Cambridge and Royal Society of Arts Examination Board (OCR) proposes to scrap the last remaining A-level in ancient history, it is time to consider what the purpose of history is.

The ancient Greeks invented the discipline as we understand it, i.e. narrative accounts of the past, discounting gods as the engines of human fortune and raising as many questions about the past as they answer. Herodotus (5th century BC) began his account of the Persian Wars (490-479 BC) an incredible two hundreds years before the event. His history, which roams far and wide over the Mediterranean world, is as interested in the customs and mind-sets of the different peoples he meets as it is in politics. His purpose was to ensure that ‘men’s achievements and the great and wonderful deeds of Greeks and nonGreeks alike should not go unrecorded’.

His contemporary Thucydides restricts himself to the history of the war between Athens and Sparta (431–404 BC) in which he was himself (briefly) a participant, and concentrates on politics and war: no colourful ethnography for him. For Thucydides, history’s purpose is to alert men to the sequence of events that caused the war so that, if a similar sequence recurred, they would be prepared for it. The whole work including the magnificent speeches explores with extraordinary brilliance men’s longing for power.

The seeds sown by these two towering geniuses, whose principles have informed historical writing ever since, produced an extraordinary harvest. Greeks and then Romans, seeing the influence that accounts of the past could have on the present, poured out their histories, each with its own particular spin – for Livy (59BC–AD17), the virtues that made Rome great, for Suetonius (c. AD 70130), imperial performance through biography, for Tacitus (c. AD 56-120), the corruption at the heart of the imperial system.

But if OCR has its way, that harvest will now begin to fail: pupils can whistle if they want to know about the origins of democracy in 5th century BC Athens, why Pericles was so important, how Rome came to rule the world for 700 years, why Christianity became the force it did, and so on. And if ancient history goes, why not all history? Log on to www.friendsclassics.demon.co.uk to register your views with Downing Street, and look on the ‘News’ tab for other means of protest.

Peter Jones