History of the Western world

An old oriental story tells of a young king who was suddenly seized with a burning desire to investigate the past. He sent for his scholars and ordered them to write down the history of the past. After several years he remembered his situation and sent for the scholars and asked them how they had progressed in their work. They happily told him that they had just completed it in sixty volumes. He thanked them for their toil, pointed to his gray hair, and asked them to compress it into three volumes; in this they had spent another ten years. The king had neither the time nor the strength to read it, so he ordered them to compress it all into one volume. They set to work with incredible effort and brought the book to the royal court in due time. But the king was now old and feeble and his eyesight was almost failing. He said to the chief scholar: "e;Tell me, you who have spent your whole life in this exhausting work, summarise for me in one sentence all the history of the past that you have learned."e; "e;O King, may you live forever,"e; said the old man. "e;Have mercy on me, for I cannot do this."e; But the king insisted. "e;I have learned that many generations of men have been born, grown, loved, suffered, and died,"e; said the old man. The king was angry, and rightly so, for he could have said so without difficulty. He handed the old man over to the public executioner, and lamented the brevity of human life and the length of history.