In repeating Henry Ford’s famous remark, I don’t mean as he apparently did that there is nothing to be learned from the events that happened in the past. I think there’s a great deal to learn from them. What I mean is that most of what you’ve read about the events of the past are bunk and the farther back in time you go the worse it is.
We have a pretty fair notion of what happened in the American Civil War because there are so many contemporaneous sources, official records, and eyewitness accounts. That was 150 years ago. Go back another 150 years and we know a lot less of what actually happened during England’s First Civil War because there just aren’t as many contemporaneous sources, official records, or eyewitness accounts available.
Go back a millennium to the invasion of England by the Normans and we know much, much less. We know it happened because of the aftermath. We’ve got the Bayeux Tapestry which depicts events during the Battle of Hastings. There are basically five written sources on which we rely for descriptions of the Battle of Hastings and they vary in quality and content. None presents a complete account of the battle. We depend almost entirely on later histories written by Anglo-Norman historians who all but certainly had axes to grind for other information about the conquest.
For events in classical antiquity we frequently rely on single manuscripts that were produced a millennium or more after the events they’re describing. Believing that they are true, complete, and accurate records of actual events is the equivalent of believing everything you read on the Internet.
Herodotus, for example.
Did you read Mary Beard’s SPQR ? My take is that modern classicism is not relying solely or at all on classical texts.
No, I probably should. Based on what I’ve read of it, I agree with her.
There are very few actual classical texts and most of those that exist are copies or fragments of the New Testament. What we actually have are late medieval copies of putatively classical texts preserved mostly by Christian monks for Christian reasons. Construing those as “classical texts” is something of a leap of faith.