Introductions

The formation of this blog was the culmination of a number of aborted attempts that initially started over a year back. As a history student, I loved reading and critiquing the theories and analyses of historians, yet I could never quite muster the initiative (beyond school work and monologues to my friends) to really articulate what I had to offer to the field. However, here I am, and hopefully this attempt will be a lasting one.

So what exactly will this blog be focused on? This won’t really be a site with well researched, articulate research essays, or extensively analytical articles. Nor will it be focused on a specific time period in great detail. Rather, I’ll be writing about whatever’s on my mind, be it about a battle in 216BC, or a treaty in 1648. As long as it’s about history – it’s gonna make its way here.

This, however, begs the question: What is history? Is it merely about dates and numbers, or about grand narratives and calamity? Is it enough to merely know that an event happened – to catalogue it and leave it at that? Many people do think it as such – in fact, it would be more often that not the first thing said by people after realising that I’d be studying history in university. (The following statement, of course, would be whether I’d be able to get a job).

But history is not about facts and numbers. It has never been about that. For ancient historians such as Tacitus and Herodotus, history was about a narrative. In fact, the Greek word for history, “historia”, literally means “a narrative”, or a story. Granted, early historians tended to stretch the “narrative” at the expense of factual accuracy – as many an exasperated reader of Livy will observe. But the core premise still stands: the study of history is about constructing a narrative (preferably, a logical and factually grounded one) for people to understand and to distil into their everyday lives and decision making. It’s about trying to understand the key assumptions that our status quo relies on, as a basis for our decisions which are contingent on our present realities. It may sound like fluff, but many pertinent issues today are very much influenced by the past.

Take for instance the decision by Cicero in 63BC to summarily execute arrested supporters of his opponent, Lucius Sergius Catilina, without trial. Cataline and his supporters were allegedly planning to “burn down Rome”, and in the process, overthrow Cicero’s consularship. When Cicero’s proposal was introduced to the Roman Senate, fierce debate ensued about the legality of such an unprecedented measure. The supporters arrested were Roman citizens – an execution without a proper trial would be a violation of their rights as Roman citizens, as many senators argued. However, others argued that Catiline’s conspiracy to torch Rome necessitated a state of emergency, in which the normal civil rights of Roman citizens should be waived in order to uphold national security. In the end, Cicero’s motion won, and he was acclaimed a hero for saving the state – yet, he was exiled in 58BC by political opponents who used his proposal to foster opposition against him.

Many of these concepts are relevant to us today – the tension between upholding national security and preserving human rights is a topic that is fiercely debated in parliaments all over the world. It’s a topic shaped by modern instances of terrorism and definitions of human rights, but it is one that is inherently rooted in the central concepts articulated by Roman senators in 63BC. We can only begin to understand why we may value national security over human rights, after studying the first recorded instance in which that consciously happened in Ancient Rome.

This goes back to the title of the blog: historia populi, or (badly translated), the history of the people. History is not just about facts and dates. Nor is it a field of study that belongs solely in academia, with the discussion and debate of grand theories and analyses with little public interest. Rather, the history that we should look at is the history of the people: a record propelled by human characteristics and emotions. It should be a story about human tendencies, and how their interactions have shaped our present. It should be a narrative, which can be understood and related to by everyone, because it is at its core, an analysis of what it means to be human.

– Haersh