Octocentenary
University of Patavium {Padova / Padua}, Veneto / Cis-Alpine Gaul {Gallia Cis-Alpina / Gallia Citerior}, Italian peninsula.
1222. MCCXXII.
`I invite
the reader’s attention to the much more serious consideration of the
kind of lives our ancestors lived, of who were the men, and what the
means both in politics and war by which Rome’s power was first acquired
and subsequently expanded; I would then have him trace the process of
our moral decline, to watch, first, the sinking of the foundations of
morality as the old teaching was allowed to lapse, then the rapidly
increasing disintegration, then the final collapse of the whole edifice,
and the dark dawning of our modern day when we can neither endure our
vices nor face the remedies needed to cure them.
The
study of history is the best medicine for a sick mind; for in history
you have a record of the infinite variety of human experience plainly
set out for all to see; and in that record you can find for yourself and
your country both examples and warnings; fine things to take as models,
base things, rotten through and through, to avoid.'
-- Titus Livius, Book I, `Ab urbe condita'.
