When in Europe, from the end of the Middle Ages onwards, the ancient Greeks were being seen through scholarly spectacles of various tints, their long history of petty warfare and their occasional major encounters were viewed, with other aspects of Hellenic culture, within the framework of successive changes in fashionable ethics and politics. Once Classical culture was thought of as an exemplar, each generation constructed an ancient Greece for itself embodying the qualities thought most socially desirable at the time, and therefore "good", while the unfamiliar and alien traits were played down as "bad". The process, of course, continue today, in so far as every historian and age creates an individual past, but we no longer feel the necessity for making the Greeks paragons living in a Golden Age that is a product of our wishful thinking, and aspects once felt to be embarrassing - slavery, pederasty, warfare aggressive or internecine - can be accommodated in a view of Greek culture hardly possible in the past.