Time & Perspective Quote by Donald Kagan

Kagan’s line flatters, but it also polices the boundaries of his craft: if you’re not asking “what’s the same and what’s different,” you’re not doing history so much as doing moral theater. The “true historian” isn’t the person who collects dates; it’s the person who resists the lazy comfort of either pure continuity (“people have always been like this”) or pure otherness (“they were primitives, so nothing applies”). He frames the discipline as a permanent balancing act between analogy and estrangement.

The intent is methodological, almost pedagogical. Kagan spent a career teaching students to think comparatively - from Athens and Sparta to the recurring patterns of war, ambition, and civic collapse. In that light, the question is a guardrail against two common academic sins: presentism (judging the past by today’s norms and categories) and antiquarianism (treating the past as sealed off, with no stakes for now). His formulation makes room for empathy without surrendering to relativism: you can recognize shared human motives while still admitting that institutions, incentives, and vocabularies change what those motives produce.

The subtext is also a quiet argument about power. Similarities invite lessons, warnings, and claims of relevance; differences demand humility and limit what we can “use” the past for. Kagan’s question is a tool for intellectual honesty because it forces you to name the mechanism, not just the vibe. If Athens “looks like” America, what’s the same - imperial reach, democratic rhetoric, factionalism - and what’s different - scale, economy, technology, global order? History, for Kagan, works when it disciplines our analogies before they harden into ideology.