The ancient purpose of history
For the classical world, history was not chiefly explanation; it was instruction. One studied the past in order to become better — wiser, steadier, more fit to act and to judge. The platform reads this as the governing assumption behind the whole ancient practice of history and biography, stated openly by Livy, who said he wrote so that readers might find examples to imitate and examples to avoid, and perfected by Plutarch, who designed the Lives expressly to form the character of those who read them.
How the instruction works
The platform reads the mechanism as the historical example — the exemplum. History instructs not by issuing rules but by displaying cases: particular people in particular situations, whose conduct the reader can weigh, remember and carry into situations the historian never imagined. By living, in imagination, through Pericles' self-command or Coriolanus' ruinous pride, the reader acquires a trained sense of how character bears on conduct under pressure. The instruction is the slow formation of judgement through a stock of remembered cases, not the transfer of maxims.
The modern objection
The platform takes the modern objection seriously. Since the nineteenth century, professional history has largely renounced the moral use of the past, on the grounds that it distorts — that reading history for lessons tempts the reader to flatten complexity, to judge the dead by present standards, to take the exemplary anecdote for the truth. There is real force here, and the platform concedes it: history read only for moral instruction can become sentimental and false. The exemplum can lie.
The defence
But the platform reads the wholesale renunciation as an overcorrection. The choice is not between rigorous explanation and naive moralising; it is possible to read history with full critical discipline and for the formation of judgement. Plutarch's own practice shows the way: he weighs his sources, marks the uncertain, and still asks what a life teaches. The platform's wager is that the past is worth studying partly because it can make us wiser about conduct and power — that to refuse the moral use of history entirely is to give up something the ancients understood and we have half-forgotten. The Roman case for this is in why Roman history became moral instruction; the general defence of the practice is the uses of history.