The scope of one person's life is almost unimaginable. For every one thing we know about a prominent person's life, there's a thousand more we can never know and only guess about.

As a result, we generally severely underestimate historical peoples, because there's just too much stuff there to get to know it all. We're constantly reifying facts and narrative to fit extremely complex events. We have to do it to our own lives, and the lives of the people around us, yet even the people we know the most intimately have vast swaths of their inner lives that you will never be able to fathom.