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Thank you so much Hannah. As I was coming here I had a thought I suddenly had a memory of a conversation that Michael and I had years back.

And I think we could probably say that the conversation was verging on bitter, not between us.

Sorry. I thought I'd air this all in public.

I'm sorry.

It was because it was a time when the idea of engaging with the past and particularly with the distant past was considered something that wasn't just redundant but that was verging on the self-indulgence.

And I think it was very early, it was when we first met.

And I don't know if you remember, ladies and gentlemen, there was a sort of moment with the millennial year approaching, the year 2000,

when there was this rather extraordinary notion that the past was just a dry irrelevant husk, and all the answers lay in the future. I remember us really

having to kind of battle the value of what we did. So I just thought before we started

properly to set the record straight, could you tell us Michael why you think it's worth

everybody spending an hour and a half in our company while we talk about the machinations

of the long dead? In a few words.

Well, I mean on the one hand, we've all just been through an example of ancient history

in the referendum as an example of direct democracy a la that of ancient Greece and ancient Athens.

Now we may not like it, we may not want it again for quite some time, but we've been experiencing what the ancient

paths might well have been like. But from the point of view of this book and

and global history thinking in the ancient world about the global context rather than any one particular society.

I think the value is that we fundamentally counteract what Eric Wolf called the lazy history of civilization.

The Greeks begot the Romans, the Romans,

...