From The Washington Post:
THE CLASSICAL WORLD: An Epic History From Homer to Hadrian By Robin Lane Fox.Greek and Latin may long since have lost their central place in Western education, but the influence of the classical world on our own culture remains very strong. It’s there in language and law, and far more vividly present in ideas and ways of thinking about the world. Both the name and concept of democracy came from the Greeks (even if in practice ancient democracies varied massively from each other and their modern counterparts). A century ago, people were fond of comparing the British Empire to that of Rome, and nowadays it is common to look at America in the same way. The great Greek historian Thucydides would have been delighted but not surprised by such analogies; when he chronicled the struggle between Athens and Sparta in the 5th century B.C., he claimed that the events he described would be “repeated in much the same way in the future.”
In reality, the parallels are rarely so neat, and all too often people twist the past to confirm their own preconceptions.
More here.