The Past Is a Different Country

[stoutfellow]

Every so often, while reading one of the classics of antiquity, I get suddenly clubbed by the radical differences in attitude between now and then. In Arrian's book on Alexander, it was the repetition of "We came to a village, and asked them to give us all their gold. They refused, so we killed them all and took the gold anyway." (Not that that attitude isn't present today, but most people wouldn't say it so bluntly.)

I'm reading Polybius' history - just getting to the point where the various ongoing wars more or less coalesced - and ran across a reference to "the first necessaries of existence, cattle and slaves"....