ABSTRACT
Everyone knows, of course, what history was and is: quite simply, the study of the past.2 While other subjects, like philosophy, or physics, or geography, may include some consideration of the past-of earlier philosophers like Plato, of Newtonian mechanics, of the chronological development of land-forms-history is differentiated by its nature of having the past as its exclusive subject-matter. All historians have to do, therefore, is to find out what happened in that past, and then accurately record it-simply, in the words of Lucian in the second century AD, ‘laying out the matter as it is’, or was.
