One great advantage of studying cultural history is the certainty if its more important facts, compared with those of history in the ordinary sense of narrated events: these are frequently uncertain, controversial, colored, or, given the Greek talent for lying, entirely the invention of imagination or self-interest. Cultural history by contrast possesses a primary degree of certainty, as it consists for the most part of material conveyed in an unintentional, disinterested or even involuntary way by sources and monuments; they betray their secrets unconsciously and even, paradoxically, through fictitious elaborations, quite apart from the material details they may set out to record and glorify, and are thus doubly instructive for the cultural historian. —Jacob Burckhardt, *The Greeks and Greek Civilization, ed. Oswyn Murray, trans. Sheila Stern (1998), p. 5