The challenge of history is that we trust people who are good with words to bring it life for us. Consequently, we get an overly dramatic, condensed, and deeply misleading narrative of people and events that compromises our appreciation of present realities. Towers of ilium, is not gifted with prose stylists like Manchester, Caro, Chaucer, Gibbon, or Pliny (staff budget at this blog is meager but internships are available). Reports on events in this format are unreliable, but they may be more honest than the biographical tomes that occasionally make the bestseller list.
Human life, if a person is lucky, involves the development of routines that persist for days, months, and years. Bad moments do not define us. Birth and death bookends an incremental improvement of perspective on the memories of moments. A laborer on the pyramids achieved happiness not only through the participation in the creation of a monument but by having a favorite breakfast food. That history preserved the glory of pharaohs over the glory of eggs only reveals our own bias, and the unfortunate persistence of large heaps of stone. Eat eggs.
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