A Selection of Passages from Important Thinkers on the Cyclical Aspects of History

Euripides, 423 BC
The Suppliants

Herodotus, c. 420 BC
The Histories

Xenophon, c. 370 BC
Memorabilia

Aristotle, c. 330 BC
The Nicomachean Ethics

Aristotle, c. 330 BC
The Politics

Polybius, c. 133 BC
The Histories

Cicero, c. 52 BC
On The Republic

Sallust, c. 42 BC
The Conspiracy of Catiline

Dionysius, 7 BC
Roman Antiquities

Pomponius, 530 AD
Digest of Justinian

Thomas Aquinas, 1267
De Regimine Principum

Dante Alighieri, 1312
De Monarchia

Ibn Khaldun, 1377
The Muqadimmah

Jean Bodin, 1566
Method for the Easy Comprehension of History

Machiavelli, 1581
The Discourses

F. Sansovino, 1583
Propositioni

Charles I, 1642
Answer to the Nineteen Propositions

James Harrington, 1656
The Commonwealth of Oceana

Giambattista Vico, 1725
The New Science

Montesquieu, 1748
The Spirit of the Laws

John Adams, 1763
All Men would be Tyrants if they Could

Thomas Paine, 1776
Common Sense

John Adams, 1787
Defence of the Constitutions

Washington, 1796
Farewell Address

Byron, 1818
Childe Harold's Pilgrimage

De Tocqueville, 1835
Democracy in America

T. Mommsen, 1854
The History of Rome

Walter Bagehot, 1867
The English Constitution

A. H. Beesly, 1886
The Gracchi, Marius, and Sulla

Thorstein Veblen, 1899
The Theory of the Leisure Class

Frank F. Abbott, 1901
Roman Political Institutions

W. M. F. Petrie, 1911
The Revolutions of Civilisation

V. Gordon Childe, 1942
What Happened in History

George Orwell, 1945
Animal Farm

George Orwell, 1949
1984

J. G. De Beus, 1953
The Future of the West

Mario A. Levi, 1955
Political Power in the Ancient World

Mundy & Riesenberg, 1958
The Medieval Town

Herbert J. Muller, 1963
Freedom in the Western World

Crane Brinton, 1965
The Anatomy of Revolution

Wolfgang Kunkel, 1966
Roman Legal and Constitutional History

Will & Ariel Durant, 1968
The Lessons of History

A. W. Lintott, 1968
Violence in Republican Rome

Paul F. Grendler, 1969
Sansovino and Italian Popular History

Gary Trompf, 1979
Historical Recurrence in Western Thought