A History of Histories: Epics, Chronicles, Romances and Inquiries from Herodotus and Thucydides to the Twentieth Century
By John Burrow
Allen Lane £25; 553 pages
FT bookshop price: £20

The greatest military power in the world had a problem. A distant city had begun acting independently. How was it to be punished? The military power was Athens, the city was the long-forgotten Mytilene, but the words that the popular leader Cleon proclaimed in Athens, calling for the upstart’s destruction, were ones that Messrs Cheney and Bush would take heart from today.

Only power was respected, Cleon told the assembled Athenians: “People despise those who treat them well.” We must ignore the intellectuals who pretend to understand the situation, he went on: following their lead would be ridiculous.

It was tough-minded, it was realistic – and it proved catastrophic for Athens. The city lost its moral leadership; allies abandoned it, and when it finally lost its army – in a distant invasion that fared badly – there was no one left to help it.

This story alone would be compelling, but Thucydides, the great 5th-century historian who recounts it, explains that many Athenians knew this was liable to happen; his writings show how those dissenters were increasingly ignored.

It’s hard to make such accounts from the great historians boring, but enough years in British academia can give one skills that ordinary mortals lack, and John Burrow, an intellectual historian, gives it a good try.

Burrow, a former professor at Sussex and Oxford, suffers from a problem common to intellectual historians. If their writing has enough flair or relevance to intrigue the general reader, their colleagues are liable to look down on it. But if – as with this book – everything’s done in a way that no colleague could criticise, the result is too stodgy to be of wider interest. It introduces a lot of thinkers, but misses the vividness that makes reading them worthwhile.

It’s a shame, for Burrow’s underlying point is a good one. Historians often share the unspoken assumptions which their society holds – and when they write, they’re likely to bring these assumptions to bear. Burrow goes through the great historians in sequence, from the classical Greeks onwards, showing this in operation.

Medieval historians, for example, believed history to express the truth of the Church. To them, and their audience, Christian history was so coherent that nothing other than a universal Church, based in Rome, would do it justice. The clear evidence of the existence of the universe backed that. Early Renaissance historians, by contrast, developed new skills in judging the accurate transmission of texts. As Burrow shows us, though this may seem a matter of fussy minutiae, it had great effect in undercutting previous views.

Much of the Church’s authority rested on a document from the Emperor Constantine, in the 4th century AD, transferring the authority of the emperors on to the Pope. Lorenzo Valla, a 15th-century Italian humanist, however, showed that the document was fake. In time that led to historical critiques of the Bible – the consequences took Europe on a very different path to that which medieval Islam, with its very different historians, then followed.

More recently, a school of German and especially Prussian historians took shape in the 1800s, which was to be more scientific than any previous group. Many proponents were convinced that only military force could lead Germany forward, and their writing held that assumption too – and this was reflected in society through growing pride in military expansionism. Analogies with American belief in its world mission are not hard to make.

Many scholars have seen the difficulty of escaping from their own biases. Near the end of his book, Burrow discusses Herbert Butterfield’s 1931 essay, ’’The Whig Interpretation of History’’. Butterfield decried the sort of chauvinistic British history where everything advances in line with Providence, beginning with Saxon tribesmen and ending with Disraeli’s parliament.

Such assumptions comforted Victorians who wanted to justify their trusteeship of a worldwide empire. But 20th-century Marxists hated that essay too, as Burrow notes, for good Marxists also needed to believe in the inevitable march of history.

Perhaps we don’t want to free ourselves totally of our comforting biases. A decade after his essay, Butterfield recanted to say that however flawed the Whig interpretation might be, ’’it has had a wonderful effect on our politics.’’ Societies need cohesion, and shared historical beliefs help create that. The problem is when they go too far. That’s what leaves us vulnerable to modern Cleons, lacking the historical perspective to glimpse where they might lead us.

David Bodanis is author of ‘Passionate Minds: The Great Enlightenment Love Affair’ (Macmillan)