Laudator Temporis Acti

Ronald Syme, "Human Rights and Social Status at Rome," in his Roman Papers, VI (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), pp. 182-192 (at 184):

Human rights are closely bound up with liberty and democracy. Liberty is an equivocal term, and in any age its ambitious advocates should be submitted to cool scrutiny. As for democracy, it took a long time to become respectable. John Adams somewhere styles it 'the most ignoble, unjust, and detestable form of government'. A writer who did much for its rehabilitation was George Grote, an English banker and liberal politician, in his History of Greece a century and a half ago.

Among the contemporaries of Adams, various and frequent appeal was made to precedents from the republics of antiquity. Some, however, such as Hamilton and Franklin, deplored the habit, and Randall of Massachusetts made a firm pronouncement: 'The quoting of ancient history was no more to the point than to tell how our ancestors dug clams at Plymouth.'

Preoccupation with the past can be burdensome, deceptive, or noxious. And, in the words of Henry Adams, 'history is in essence incoherent and immoral'.