Why Ancient History Matters

The College Board, the non-profit organization that owns the Advanced Placement program, recently announced that it will be entirely cutting ancient and medieval history from its A.P. World History course, the most widely taken world history class in the country. The new course will begin at the year 1450 and will only cover modern history, omitting the entire first 5,000 years of recorded history. The College Board will offer another course, called “pre-A.P. World History” which will include only ancient and medieval history; the problem is that material from this course will not be included on the A.P. test and no college credit for taking the course will be offered, so students will have little motivation to take it and schools will have little motivation to offer it. Furthermore, most public high schools will not be able to afford to offer it, because the course costs money.

The reason why ancient and medieval history are being cut is because teachers complained that it was too difficult to cover the entire 10,000-year span of human history in a single class that only lasts for one year. The College Board, deciding that modern history was more important than ancient and medieval history, concluded that it should take priority. Teachers and students across the country have reacted with outrage over this change and the College Board has expressed some willingness to negotiate, though no changes have yet been made to their original pronouncement.

What the College Board does not seem to realize is that ancient and medieval history is barely covered in schools as it is. When I was in school, ninth grade World History class was the first and only time we ever learned about the Greeks and Romans in school and we only covered them for about two weeks combined. Since very few people choose to study world history in college (especially if they have already scored well on a A.P. test), the College Board’s changes to the curriculum could mean that future generations of students taking A.P. World History will never learn about ancient or medieval history in class at all.

Already, most of what your typical American knows about the ancient world comes from television and Hollywood, neither of which are exactly known for historical reliability. (Remember Ancient Aliens?) If students are never taught ancient history in school, these television shows and films, along with other pop culture references, will become virtually their only sources of information on the subject. This raises the question: Does ancient history even matter? Why should ordinary people know about things that happened over a thousand years ago? How could any of that possibly have any relevance to people today?

Ancient history is extremely important and here are just a few of the reasons why:

#1. It tells us where we came from. It explains the origins of the cultures, traditions, organizations, and problems that still exist today.

The American modernist author William Faulkner famously wrote in his 1951 novel Requiem for a Nun: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” The old adage is equally true for ancient history as it is for modern history. So much of our culture originates from the ancient past. Here in the United States, our system of government is modeled on ancient Athenian democracy, the ancient Roman Republic, and the ancient Germanic alþing or folcgemōt. Many of the literary genres we recognize today, such as poetry, tragedy, comedy, and even, by late antiquity, the concept of a novel, were defined in antiquity and our literature draws heavily on Greco-Roman themes (more on this point later).

Even works of modern art that seem so far from the image of classical realism bear the distinct imprint of our classical heritage. (You do not get Pablo Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon without first having Praxiteles’s Aphrodite of Knidos.) The major world religions of Hinduism, Zoroastrianism, Confucianism, Taoism, Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam all originated in ancient times and still exist in some form or another today. Even the way we think has its origins in distant antiquity; modern western philosophy, morality, and ethics are all deeply rooted in ancient Greek and Roman and medieval Christian philosophies.

ABOVE: First or second-century A.D. Greco-Buddhist statue of Siddhartha Gautama from Gandhara, Pakistan. If you want to understand Buddhism, or any other modern religion, you need to know its origins and the history behind it, and all the most widely practiced religions today originated in ancient times.

It is not just contemporary cultures that stem from antiquity, but the problems and issues we face as well. Questions over the extent of the legality of free speech, the role of government in the lives of individuals, and the morality of civil disobedience have been wrestled with since the time of Sokrates and beyond, just to name a few. A person cannot possibly hope to understand the complexities of current issues if that person lacks any fundamental understanding of the long history behind those issues.

“Ok,” some skeptics may be thinking, “so history is needed to understand current situations and issues, but why do ordinary Americans need to understand those issues? They aren’t going to be policymakers and they certainly aren’t going to use history in the workplace.” Here is where the kicker comes in: Sure, most people probably will not use history in the workplace and they probably will not become policymakers, but they are the ones who choose who the policy makers are. We live in a representative democracy and that means each and every person needs to have at least a basic understanding of the present situation and, as I have already established, one cannot understand the present situation without also understanding the past circumstances that have led to it. Our own country’s founding father Thomas Jefferson believed that a well-educated public was the only way democracy could survive and flourish. While I have little praise for Jefferson’s hypocrisy over slavery, I vehemently agree with him on this matter: If you are going to live and vote in this country, you need to have a decently thorough knowledge of the past.

#2. We can learn from the past to make decisions for the present.

It is natural to assume that our modern civilization is so utterly different from anything that existed in the ancient world that we cannot possibly even compare the two. While there is some truth to this assumption, in that much has indeed changed since the days when most people still farmed for a living and the concept of “science” had not yet been invented, it is mostly inaccurate. Our technology, our society, and even our morals have all shifted drastically over the course the last 1,500 some years since the end of classical antiquity, but human nature has not. In order to apply lessons from the past to the present, our present circumstances do not need to be exactly identical to those in the past; they only need to be similar regarding the particular aspect for which they are being compared. To quote a famous saying often erroneously attributed to Mark Twain, “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.”

And rhyme it does. In witnessing the recent rise in xenophobic populist demagoguery on the global scale, one can hardly help but draw comparisons to the rise of similar demagogues in Athens during the late fifth century B.C., when leaders like Kleon and Hyperbolos rallied the Athenian populace behind them using relentless warmongering and scapegoating scare tactics. The way the United States has maintained global hegemony for the past seventy-three years primarily through “soft power” and cultural appeal rather than through violence and coercion is reminiscent of how the Roman Empire maintained its hegemony during most of the Pax Romana.

Studying history provides us with the unique ability to anticipate the success of proposed solutions to problems. The most reliable method of determining whether or not a new policy will be successful in the future is based on how that policy, or similar policies, have fared in the past. Some of the problems we face today are recent ones that did not exist in the ancient world, but others are as old as time. People have been objecting to the death penalty and torture, for instance, since at least the early centuries of the Christian Era; those same objections and similar ones are still being raised today. Despite all the amazing advances modern medicine has made over the course of the last two centuries, the threat of a massive pandemic is still every bit as real today as it was during the second century AD, when the Antonine Plague (165–180 AD) devastated populations across the Roman Empire. Even current problems that did not exist in the ancient world can sometimes be fruitfully compared to ones that did. The ancient Greeks, obviously did not have guns, so gun violence was not a concern, but they did have weapons and, as I pointed out in a previous article, quite a few laws regulating them.

ABOVE: The Plague of Athens (painted c. 1652–1654) by Michiel Sweerts, showing the artist’s imagining of the plague that devastated the city of Athens during the early years of the Peloponnesian War. Pandemics are a threat from antiquity that still remain a dangerous possibility even today.

Once again, democracy demands that ordinary Americans need to know history so they can make informed decisions when voting. Unfortunately, the lessons of history do not make any difference at all unless most people are aware of them.

#3. Ancient history helps give us our identities.

Probably the most prominent objection against the College Board’s decision to cut ancient and medieval history is the particular date they chose: 1450. This date roughly corresponds to the beginning of the Renaissance in western Europe. The problem is that the Renaissance is inherently and exclusively a western European event. While western Europe was experiencing the so-called “Dark Ages” (which were not really as spectacularly horrible as popular culture makes them seem, although that is a story for another time), the Byzantine Empire was thriving in the east and the Islamic world was experiencing its Golden Age.

This makes the date of 1450 already indelibly Eurocentric, but what makes it even worse is that it cuts out the many highly significant non-European civilizations that existed throughout the ancient and medieval world. I already mentioned that it omits the Islamic Golden Age, but it also excludes the pre-Islamic empires of Mesopotamia, Egypt, and the Middle East, the Ghana, Mali, and Songhai Empires and Great Zimbabwe civilization of sub-Saharan Africa, and the Olmec, Maya, Aztec, and Incan Empires, the Mound-Builders, ancestral Puebloans, and other civilizations of the pre-Columbian Americas. So, under this new curriculum, the first time students will hear about Africa will be in the context of the European slave trade. The first they will hear about the indigenous peoples of the Americas is them being conquered by Europeans and dying of smallpox and other European diseases.

ABOVE: Mansa Musa, shown here in an illustration from the Catalan Atlas (c. 1375) was an extraordinarily wealthy and powerful emperor of the sub-Saharan Mali Empire, but if you cut medieval history, students will never learn about him.

These changes certainly present a very distorted and disturbing portrayal of history. Teachers and educators have pointed out the positive impact that learning about ancient civilizations from outside Europe has had on minority students, because these civilizations show that Europeans were not always the ones in power and demonstrate the historical importance of non-Europeans. Consequently, they send a powerful message about the value that people from outside Europe still have in the world today. Cutting ancient and medieval history deprives minority students of their cultural heritage and instead sends them the message that they have always been dominated by European conquerors.

#4. Ancient and medieval history are essential if you want to understand references in modern literature or popular culture.

The parts of ancient and medieval history known to western Europeans have been taught to students for the entirety of modern history. Hence, modern authors, directors, and songwriters make references to ancient history with the expectation that their readers will know what they are referring to. It might be rather difficult, for instance, to understand Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar if you have never heard of Julius Caesar, or Timon of Athens if you have never heard of Cynic philosophy or Alkibiades. Good luck even trying to read James Joyce’s Ulysses without having ever heard of the Odyssey!

The problem, however, goes deeper than just understanding modern literature, because, even if ancient history is phased out of the classroom, ancient literature is still (at least for now) being taught in English classes. It is impossible to understand a work of literature without knowing anything at all about the culture and time period in which it was produced. In order to read the Odyssey, for example, a person needs to know at least some basic background information about archaic Greek society. For instance, to an uniformed reader, it makes little sense why Odysseus needs to slaughter the suitors of his wife Penelope at the end of the epic. Why can he not just tell them to leave? Then, once a person learns that the ancient Greeks regarded xenia (the reciprocal relationship of hospitality between a guest and a host) as one of the most important and sacred moral principles and that, in staying in Odysseus’s home, devouring all his livestock, mistreating his slaves and family, sleeping with his slave girls, and courting his wife, the suitors were violating this most sacred law, suddenly Odysseus’s violent revenge at the end makes much more sense.

ABOVE: Ulysses and Telemachus Massacre the Suitors of Penelope (1812) by Thomas Degeorge, depicting a scene from Book XXII of the Odyssey

#5. Knowledge is important for the sake of knowledge.

The prevailing attitude towards information in today’s society is one of dogmatic pragmatism; it holds that knowledge does not matter unless it can actually be used to accomplish something. By this logic, it stands that any information that does not give students an edge in the workforce is useless and ought to be eliminated from the curriculum. This very prevalent and widely accepted attitude is perhaps best symbolized by the current administration’s recent proposal to merge the Department of Education and the Department of Labor into one department. The idea behind this proposal is apparently that the sole purpose of education is to prepare students for the workforce.

Now, I agree that practical knowledge is important and that preparing students for the workforce is indeed a large part of what schools are for, but it is not their only purpose. Schools should not be viewed as machines for churning out workers. In my opinion, knowledge is worth having simply for the sake of having it. While there are plenty of practical reasons to learn about ancient history, ancient history is also worth studying simply because it is interesting on its own. People can personally benefit from learning about the past in ways that have no impact in the form of workforce productivity or occupational success.

We should remember that only knowledge that is passed on from one generation to the next will be preserved and, if no one at all learns something, eventually it will be forgotten. While there are usually experts whose job is to learn information most people do not know, if that information is not valued or understood at all by the general public, then those experts will no longer have a purpose or a motivation to learn that knowledge. So much of the ancient past has already been forgotten; we can hardly afford to lose any more. I do not think that we are currently in any danger of losing our knowledge of ancient history, but I think that, if we completely devalue its importance, then we will lose it eventually.

My point is that, regardless of what many people would naturally tend to assume, ancient history really does matter. I am not saying that everyone needs to be an expert, but I am saying that everyone needs to have a basic understanding of it.