This light of history is pitiless; it has this strange and divine quality that, all luminous as it is, and precisely because it is luminous, it often casts a shadow just where we saw a radiance; of the same man it makes two different phantoms, and the one attackes and punishes the other, and the darkness of the despot struggles with the splendour of the captain. Hence results a truer measure in the final judgement of the nations. Babylon violated lessens Alexander; Rome enslaved lessens Caesar; massacred Jerusalem lessends Titus. Tyranny follows the tyrant. It is woe to a man to leave behind him a shadow which has his form.

Victor Hugo