Quotes from Donald Kagan

Without history we are the prisoners of the accident of where and when we were born.

You have to liberate yourself first from the prejudices of the world in which you live.

Once again the historian who wishes to understand this difficult period must try to read between the lines. It

The development of hoplite warfare took place in this context of novel agrarianism, which promoted a particular type of moral excellence.

Fair and good [kalòn … agathòn] the man who falls fighting in the front rank, dying for the fatherland.

The Spartan attitude reflected an important fact about the condition of the Greek world from 479 to 461: Its stability was apparent only and not real. The alliance between Sparta and Athens was not an alliance of states but of factions. The faction of Cimon and the faction that would be headed by King Archidamus were prepared to accept limits to the hegemonal claims of their states, but in each state there were significant elements of the population who were not.

The hoplites drove the tyrants from power and created broad oligarchies in their place.

Philolaus of Corinth (about 730 B.C.?) had supposedly enacted regulations ensuring that the farms at Thebes might remain the same number in perpetuity. The Corinthian Pheidon, "one of the most ancient of the lawgivers," purportedly argued that the population and the number of plots ought always to remain roughly equal. An even more shadowy figure, Phaleas the Chalcedonian, advanced the concept that all citizens of the polis ought to hold equal amounts of property.148

History had its own way of explaining things. The way historians explain things is by telling a story.

From the time I was a little boy I found myself reading history when I had a choice. I read a lot of things, but history had a special appeal for me.

All comparisons between America's current place in the world and anything legitimately called an empire in the past reveal ignorance and confusion about any reasonable meaning of the concept empire, especially the comparison with the Roman Empire.

I can see that you [Bruce Cole] are a true historian because you really always ought to ask that question about anybody at a different place or a different time: What's the same and what's different?

We, to some degree, are like what we are because we inherited certain things from the Greeks and the Romans. One of them that's so striking is the whole area of politics.

I can see that you are a true historian because you really always ought to ask that question about anybody at a different place or a different time: What's the same and what's different?