Dwight D. Eisenhower, At Ease: Stories I Tell My Friends, 1967

My first reading love was ancient history. At an early age, I developed an interest in the human record and I became particularly fond of Greek and Roman accounts. These subjects were so engrossing that I frequently was guilty of neglecting all others. My mother’s annoyance at this indifference to the mundane life of chores and assigned homework grew until, despite her reverence for books, she took my volumes of history away and locked them in a closet.

This had the desired effect for a while. I suppose I gave a little more attention to arithmetic, spelling, and geography. But one day I found the key to that closet. Whenever Mother went to town to shop or was out working in her flower garden I would sneak out the books.

Out of that closet and out of those books has come an odd result. Even to this day, there are many unrelated bits of information about Greece and Rome that stick in my memory. Some are dates. I have a sort of fixation that causes me to interrupt a conversation when the speaker is one year off, or a hundred, in dating an event like Arbela; and often I put aside a book, until then interesting enough, when the authors is less than scrupulous about chronology.

In any case, the battles of Marathon, Zama, Salamis, and Cannae became as familiar to me as the games (and battles) I enjoyed with my friends in the school yard. In later years, the movies taught children that the bad guy was the one in the black hat. Such people as Hannibal, Caesar, Pericles, Socrates, Themistocles, Miltiades, and Leonidas were my white hats, my heroes. Xerxes, Darius, Alcibiades, Brutus, and Nero wore black ones. White or black, their names and those battles were fresh news as far as I was concerned for I could never seem to get it into my head that all these things had happened two thousand years earlier — or that possibly I would be better advised to pay at least a little attention to current, rather than ancient, affairs. Among all the figures of antiquity, Hannibal was my favorite.

This bias came about because I read one day that no account of Carthaginian history was ever written by a friendly hand. Everything ewe know about Carthage, about Hamilcar and his lion’s brood — of which Hannibal was one — was written by an enemy. For a great man to come down through history with his only biographers in the opposite camp is a considerable achievement. Moreover, Hannibal always seemed to be an underdog, neglected by his government, and fighting during most of active years in the territory of his deadly and powerful enemy. Though I later came to recognize that unless Rome had survived the Punic Wars, Western civilization might easily have disappeared from the earth, my initial championship of Hannibal continued throughout my youth.

In this I was, undoubtedly, much like the young people of all times. Lost causes arouse their sympathy more intensely than overwhelming success begets their admiration. Because they are soon the chief customers in the literary market, and sometimes the chief contributors to it, this youthful attitude, always for the underdog, may very well affect the writing of history both in quantity and tone.

In the literature of our own Civil War, Lee, for example, bulks larger in the sympathy and even veneration accorded him than Grant, the ultimate victor. Jeb Stuart, who died in battle, outshines Phil Sheridan, who, just as a daring, suffered no serious wound. And Lincoln, struck down when his hardest challenge was still before him, has always excited more study and more books than Washington, who would validly claim that all his public responsibilities had been met and fully discharged.

…

Looking back I realize that in reading about Egypt, Assyria, Persia, Greece, Rome, and, later, about the British and French, I was dealing largely with conquerors, battles, and dramatic events. Of course, I could read also about scholars and philosophers, but they seldom loomed so large in my mind as warriors and monarchs. Yet history is not made merely by big names or by startling actions, but also by the slow progress of millions and millions of people. They contribute to the creation of reputations and to the moments of history itself.

Hannibal and Caesar and Scipio would have been nothing except for loyal soldiers who marched and sweated and died to carry out the will of their masters. Plato and Aristotle would have spoken in futility to the breezes sweeping off the Aegean, had not their teachings slowly, almost imperceptibly, been incorporated into the texture of Western thought, and taken for granted (as it were) by people who never read them, possibly never heard of them.

I know now that as a youngster I was concerned almost exclusively with the peaks and promontories — the dramatic features — of the historical terrain. Today, I am interested too in the great valleys within which people, by their work, their zeal, and their persistence, have transformed a savage and crude environment into an industrial complex so that in the 1960s one man in the field can provide the food and fiber for twenty others.

…

For me, the reading of history was an end in itself, not a source of lessons to guide us in the present or to prepare me for the future. Nor did I become at all aware that the richness and variety of opportunity in this countery would give me, like all of us, a chance to be joined, intimately and productively, with both the past and future of the Republic. I did not know what opportunities were there for the learning. I read history for history’s sake, for myself alone. Sufficient unto the day was the evil thereof — and good, too — in my thinking.