War & Peace Podnotes, A Study Guide

Tolstoy starts his infamous epilogue by giving his definition of the term "history" as the life of nations and humanity. He describes that a limitation of this definition is the inability of man to sufficiently pin down the history of any nation or human movement. He posits there is more to it than the scientific approach of piecing together what happened and then attributing motivations based on objective analysis. For the most part, piecing together history is inadequate guesswork, some efforts more eloquent than others. Tolstoy then focuses on ancient civilizations and how they dealt with explaining reasons for historical events. He suggests ancient historians tended to regard rulers (say a Julius Caesar, Hannibal, or famous King), as symbolic of the group ruled. Tolstoy thinks that approach has shortcomings. He then asks the most important question of the Second Epilogue, How do rulers get the masses to act as they wished? He doesn’t think it is just a question of acquiring the raw power to impose