Laudator Temporis Acti

Arnold J. Toynbee, Hannibal's Legacy: The Hannibalic War's Effects on Roman Life, Vol. I: Rome and Her Neighbours Before Hannibal's Entry (London: Oxford University Press, 1965), p. 1:

Since it takes at least two belligerents to make a war, most wars, other than civil wars and world wars, need a double name like ‘Franco-Prussian’ or ‘Russo-Japanese’. Belligerents, taking their own participation for granted, are apt to label a war with the single name of their adversary in it. The Romans called their wars with Carthage ‘the Phoenician Wars’ (Bella Punica), to distinguish them from their innumerable wars with other victims of theirs; and, if we possessed an account of these same wars written by a Carthaginian historian—or by a Greek one writing, like Philinus, from the Carthaginian point of view—we should probably find Rome’s ‘Phoenician Wars’ being called Carthage’s ‘Roman Wars’, to distinguish them from her previous wars with Syracuse. A double name for a war is the only kind that is fully descriptive and duly neutral. In a case, like that of the Romano-Carthaginian Wars, in which the victor has succeeded in monopolising the telling of the tale to posterity, it is particularly important for an historian, and for his readers, not to adopt the victor’s one-sided nomenclature, however successful the victor may have been in putting this into cur­rency. If the historian falls into the victor-narrator’s semantic trap, he may find himself unintentionally seeing things with the victor’s eyes, instead of looking at them from the historian’s own proper independent standpoint.