HISTORIANS have strange relationships with the future. Sometimes they are tempted to endow their discipline with a prophetic function, as if they have only to project the changes of the past, which they know and understand, into the future in order to predict what will take place and thus steer future actions. But history never repeats itself, and if thinking about the way past societies functioned helps us to understand our own, it does not provide us with certain knowledge of what is to come. Sometimes, on the other hand, historians turn away from the future and even from the present, claiming that the past alone is their area of expertise, as if our interpretation of the past could somehow be separated from all that we are today, from what we know, and also from what we hope for the future. More seriously still, they sometimes forget that we ourselves are the future of the past societies that, as historians, we study. It is usually the gesta of these societies that we study, that is to say the deeds they have done in what was their present. For some time now we have also been giving close consideration to their memoria – the way these societies reconstructed their own past and the ‘sites of remembrance’ (lieux de mémoire) that they chose as catalysts to the memory of that past. But we should also give some thought to their futura – the way these past societies projected themselves into their future, the future that we, at least in part, constitute. Our view of the past must take into account the idea that we are ‘the future of the past’ – ‘die vergangene Zukunft’, to use Reinhard Koselleck’s phrase – the future of ancient societies, bearing in mind all the while that the future of which our present represents the partial realisation is only one of the futures that were then possible: history is not a forward march along a single, straight track, a continuous and necessary thread that we have simply to unwind from the past to our present and then into a future that is certain and knowable. On the contrary, it is a succession of possible choices, of futures that are all available at any given moment, of which only a few are realised and which we cannot know in advance.