ABSTRACT
The study of history is a personal activity – it is an individual reading the sources of history for himself. History is, or ought to be, the least authoritarian of the sciences. The conception of research as synonymous with the very study of history is not really pedantic: but in fact that much-abused word has long since been identified in our common thinking with a system of higher degrees granted for theses embodying an 'original contribution to knowledge'. On those aspects of history which are most central and worthy of study, original work in the sense of discovery must surely be the exception rather than the rule. Not less important than the immediate physical preservation of the original sources of history is the task of putting them into print. The history of classical Greece and Rome reminds us that only that material survives which exists in many copies.
