Students of the drama, from Aristotle onwards, seem to agree that nearly all the great tragedies in literature are expositions of quite a few fundamental plots. And it is possible that the great tragedies of history--that is, the great civilizations that have been created by the spirit of man--may all reveal the same plot, if we analyse them rightly. Each civilization--for instance, the civilization of Mediaeval and Modern Europe and again that of Ancient Greece--is probably a variant of a single theme. And to study the plot of civilization in a great exposition of it--like the Hellenic exposition or our own Western exposition--is surely the right goal of a humane education. But of course one asks: Why study Ancient Hellenic civilization rather than ours? The study of any one civilization is so complex, it demands so many preliminary and subordinate studies--linguistic, institutional, economic, psychological--that it is likely to absorb all one's energies. The greatest historians have generally confined themselves to the study of a single civilization, and the great Greek historians--Herodotus, Thucydides, and Polybius--concentrated on their own, and only studied others in so far as their own came into contact with them. Clearly, people who are going to be historians, not for life, but as an education for life, must make their choice. They must practically confine themselves to studying one civilization if they are to reap the fruits of study at all, and in this case it is natural to ask: Why study Hellenism rather than our own history? There are two obvious arguments in favour of studying modern history. It seems more familiar and it seems more useful. And it would be a mistake to misrepresent these arguments by stating them only in their cruder forms. 'Familiar' does not mean 'easy', and to say that modern history seems more useful than ancient does not mean that the study of it is a closer approximation to a Pelman course. There is an exceedingly crude view of education among some people just now--perhaps it is largely due to the war, and may disappear like other ugly effects of the war--which inclines to concentrate education on applied chemistry, say, or engineering, with a vague idea that people whose education has been devoted to these subjects will be more capable of competing with foreigners in the dye industry or of working in munition factories in the next emergency. In the same way, conceivably, concentration on modern history might be supposed to equip a student for securing concessions abroad for a firm, or for winning a parliamentary election. Of course, this attitude, though it is rather widespread just now, is absurd. The fallacy lies in confusing the general theoretical knowledge of a subject acquired through being educated in it with the technical knowledge and personal experience which one must have to turn the same subject to practical account in after life. There is no difference of opinion on this point