the biggest problem with understanding "history" is we cannot know all the details of the life and world in which they lived, thus we don't understand them or why they did what they did or even the true meanings in what they may have wrote or said.

everyone has a "point of view" based on their experiences, perceptive, and conditioning and that point of view, which is based on real things, real life as lived, is never known from someone in modern times looking back and trying to understand why certain people did and said what they did.