Just reading a history of the end of the Roman Empire (by Peter Heather, very good), and in a discussion of Attila’s campaigns in Greece, he says that raiding parties went as far south as
Thermopylae, where Leonidas’s troops had fought the Persians almost a thousand years before
and I was stunned by the sudden realisation of the passage of historical time – that Leonidas and the Persian wars were farther away from Attila and the last days of Western Roman Empire than the Norman Conquest is from us today.
And the Eastern Empire had a further thousand years to run. Sudden perspective. Whoa.