Each of these subject areas or stories that I mention in the previous post could be told by our own historians in hundreds, thousands of different ways, while always leaving much more still to be said. For as I would say the information available to us today online may be infinite and the historians among us who would describe what is happening would have to at least consider the infinite quantity of material available to them, without ever being able to take into account more than a tiny fraction of what’s our there. So what does the historian do? They write their own histories, and they compete with the hundreds of others writing no less their own histories often of the same controversy or war time battle for the reader’s attention.

Imagine now the existence of thousands of world voyagers much like Herodotus, writing about what they are observing in their travels. You don’t have to imagine it for it is happening right now. Why the New York Times and so many of the other Fake News publications do this every day. They have amazing writers and reporters that go out there into the world, much like Herodotus, to come back and tell us what they’ve seen. And I never tire of reading them, for reading them there is always more to learn about the world, more I did not know.

Imagine a thousand or more individuals with the intelligence and sensitivity of Thucydides looking closely at our own wars, giving us full descriptions of what happened, and more important what was going on underneath the surface disagreements and battles. Herodotus and Thucydides where are you now? Well you may very well be here with us but in multiple copies, and that’s good.

And I haven’t even mentioned Homer. But I’m sure he’s here too, somewhere. When you have thousands of us looking about us and writing about what we see it’s inevitable that there will be some of them who will have as much to tell us about our world, more actually, than the ancients, when there were only a very few, writing, about their own compared to ours, tiny world. Because today’s historians, and perhaps poets also, will have read the ancients and incorporated the ancient wisdom into their own works. Or something like that… I often think that we live in the best of times, assuming that we will have a decent guy as our president in January of 2021.