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* de minimis non curat praetor / the praetor does not concern himself with trifles.
Historicism contents itself with establishing a causal connection between various moments in history. But no fact that is a cause is for that very reason historical. It became historical post-humously, as it were, through events that may be separated from it by thousands of years.
A historian who takes this as his point of departure stops telling the sequence of events like the beads of a rosary. Instead, he grasps the constellation which his own era has formed with a definite earlier one. Thus he establishes a conception of the present as the "time of now" which is shot through with chips of Messianic time.
Annex A to Walter Benjamin's "Theses on the Philosophy of History" [Full text in pdf / on Scribd, translated by Harry Zohn ]
Recommended reading in a time where with the events unfolding in Greece, Twitter timelines and Facebook Walls closely resemble the aforementioned rosary's beads (while of course indulging oneself in playing with them).