Why I Failed Ancient History

The Power of Story

‘Cicero,’ proclaimed my grammar school classics teacher, ‘was an old windbag.’

And that’s when it all came alive.

Foto de Andres Oropeza en Unsplash

I was a straight A student – Latin, Greek and Ancient History. What most people don’t know is that I failed my Ancient History exams at Cambridge. I’d never been that good at history, which wasn’t helped by our excruciatingly boring ‘normal’ history classes: lists of kings, battles, parliamentary bills, more battles.

But my classics teacher had specialised in Greek and Roman history and was absolutely passionate about it. She described the events graphically, evoking the emotions of the historical personages as if she’d been there herself. She talked about Homer and Sophocles, Cicero and Julius Caesar as if she’d known them personally. She urged me to read historical novels set in ancient Greece and Rome that she considered well researched and accurately documented.

I still had to memorise dates and battles, but it was so much easier as I played and replayed the exciting movie in my own head. I got a grade A.

However at university it was a different kettle of fish.

I learned that the stories of Greece and Rome my teacher had told me were the consensus of scholars who had studied the sources – the differing accounts of ancient historians and other writers,  inscriptions and other bits and pieces. Now, as aspiring classical scholars, we were expected to go and read the sources for ourselves, analyse and compare them and draw our own conclusions about what happened, what didn’t happen, what might have happened.

But I ‘knew’ what happened.  I couldn’t think outside that movie. More importantly, I didn’t want to.

I didn’t do the work required of me.

And so I failed my ancient history exams.

The point of this is to highlight how very powerful stories can be in shaping what we believe we know, and how difficult or even unthinkable it is to question them and, if necessary, to let them go.