argument’s sake, couldn’t Rome’s demise have been attributable to the simple fact that nothing lasts forever (including empires!) and that the particular point at which any entity expires is relatively arbitrary? Though this conclusion may not have actually been the case in this particular instance, the point is clear: we must be wary of the historian who so fervently seeks out profound insights that he creates them where the causes are actually superficial.It follows that documents or artifacts extracted from the past and their original context that are subsequently used to illustrate a pattern can be misleading in that they may not have been a part of any such pattern in the first place. Indeed, the pattern itself may not have existed, save for the links forced by the modern historian with his retrospective knowledge. If one did not know that Rome collapsed, would we be able to make predictive claims based solely on any of the aforementioned circumstances? Hindsight is 20/20; concepts like “the Fall of Rome” or “The Renaissance” were never perceived to exist at the beginning of the period/process -- they were only recognized and articulated (and capitalized) after the fact. As the historian A.F. Pollard asked, “Can we really be fair to men of the past, knowing what they could not know?” (quoted by Schlesinger Jr., 1967) What Pollard is alluding to here, is that applying our own knowledge to events past is a dangerous practice. We cannot impose present standards to evaluate or view the past and/or its significance, because once we know how things turned out, we tend to “rewrite” the past in terms of historical inevitability. Such “Presentism” coupled with hindsight can lead to horrible misrepresentations. In the end, once everyone who could have contradicted our interpretations is dead, we can never really know whether our reconstructions bear much relation ...
