In his Law of Nations, Emer de Vattel not only recurs to common examples of pietas and clementia drawn from Roman history, but also refers to more contemporary historical events to frame his vision of the international legal order. Literary exemplarity was a fundamental value for authors like Alberico Gentili and Hugo Grotius, who used classical history as a powerful rhetorical arsenal of arguments to construct customary rules of the law of nations. Such rules were often legal idealisations of the values, myths and virtues of the classical past. Against this traditional framework, Vattel seems no longer under the ideological spell of classical history. Instead, he claims that, in the study of the law of nations, modern historiography should be preferred over ancient literary history. Vattel not only claims that Grotius already gave us plenty of information about the past and that it is time to move on to more contemporary and urgent questions; but also warns that indulgence in antiquarian arguments produces a mere ‘parade of erudition’ that alienates readers (LN, preface 19–20).