New Book from Adrian Goldsworthy: How Rome Fell

[Jona Lendering]

Maybe it is this factor which puts off many budding writers that would otherwise write books that would give us whole new methods of studying history.

I think not. Most Anglosaxon historians, professionally trained or not, are unaware that the study of history involves working knowledge of things like: what is an explanation? how do you establish what is comparable and what is not? what is a fact? how do you find out which examples are representative?

Paul Cartledge's opinions about Thermopylae are a case in point. More than a century ago, Ed. Meyer argued that the Persian Wars had been decisive: had the Persians won, we would not have seen Athenian democracy, freedom, philosophy, the arts. Max Weber showed that this was unsound reasoning. He mercilessly pointed at Meyer's logical fallacies. Now we see that Cartledge repeats the nonsense of Meyer. This either means that he is unaware that logic happens to be an element of science and scholarship, or that he is simply a bad historian.