“If the study of history is the study of language in one form or another, and if we really fabricate our past, not merely—weakly—live it; then we can begin to see how the world was Greek once, or was Roman, since every page of consciousness was written in these tongues then. All the central documents—laws, plays, poems, reports, abiding wisdoms, letters, scientific learning, news—were couched in Greek or Latin phrases, and the chief historians consulted them, composed their chronicles from the same speech, in the same words. Don't you see that when a man writes the history of your country in another mother-language, he is bent on conquest?”

Source: The Tunnel (1995), p. 271

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William H. Gass16

Fiction writer, critic, philosophy professor 1924–2017

Julius Ruska (1867–1949) German historian

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A.J.P. Taylor (1906–1990) Historian

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André Weil (1906–1998) French mathematician

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“America is the new Roman empire and we Britons, like the Greeks of old, must teach them how to make it go.”

Harold Macmillan (1894–1986) British politician

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Thomas Cahill (1940) American scholar and writer

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Jeffrey H. Schwartz (1948) American anthropologist

What the Bones Tell Us (1997)