by Judy Jones
In 1633, thirty-three years after Bruno took the torch, Galileo was invited to have a look at the Inquisition’s instruments of torture, and abjured. According to legend, he also said in an aside, Eppur si muove: It—that is, the earth— moves, even if you and I say it doesn’t. But this doesn’t make Galileo a martyr, only a brinkman. When it came to actually dying for ideas, Galileo wasn’t having any.
As for Lavoisier, his head did roll in Robespierre’s terror, but the case against him wasn’t that he had invented modern chemistry, only that he had been a tax collector under the anden régime. Like Galileo, Lavoisier believed that ideas were worth living for, not dying for, and so informed his accusers, thereby evoking the famous response, “The Republic has no need of scientists.” But this, by and large, has not been the view of scientists themselves.
The World According to Whom?
Gosh, so much has happened over the years. Wars and revolutions, edicts and referendums, dynasties and one-night stands, rebuffs and embraces. You’d think we’d have learned something from the whole business by now; after all, as the turn-of-the-century Harvard philosopher George Santayana admonished, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” But how do you decide whose version of things you’re going to buy? Well, you should begin by realizing that there’s history (or, more formally, historiography), which is the writing down of everything that ever happened, and then there’s the philosophy of history, which attempts to say what, exactly, that act of writing down accomplishes and/or where, eventually, the historical process itself leads; and that most “historians” do one or the other, although some wind up doing both. Beyond that, don’t look at us: We’ve just examined everybody’s celebrated account of one or more of the world’s great moments and it seems perfectly obvious that everybody’s lying. SPOKESPERSONS
Ten guys, two each from five different history-minded civilizations; listen to them and you’ll find out how the world—and the history biz—has been going for the past 2,500 years. The Greeks: Herodotus and Thucydides
The Greeks got history—from their word histor, “learned man”—started, the same way they got philosophy and drama started, and their history, like their philosophy and drama, hits the ground running. Suddenly, it seemed obvious that events accumulated and that the past connected not only to the present but to the future. For the Greeks, the big deal was war, with a tip of the hat to revolution, and it was to wars that the two great Greek historians addressed themselves: Herodotus (c. 484–c. 425 b.c.) to the Persian ones, which were still going on when he was growing up; Thucydides (c. 460–c. 400 b.c.) to the Peloponnesian one (likewise), which ended in 404 b.c., shortly before he died.
Both men are clear-eyed, go-with-your-instincts observers, but there the resemblance ends. Although only a generation older, Herodotus has less in common with Thucydides than he does with Homer, who’d been dead for five centuries already. Expansive, digressive, myth-minded, insatiably curious, and gossipy, capable of repeating anything anybody tells him (not that he necessarily believes it himself), with, as Macaulay put it, “an insinuating eloquence in his lisp,” Herodotus comes across like Truman Capote. Thucydides, on the other hand, is Gore Vidal: concentrated, critical, clinical, obsessed with his own methodology and limited in his interests, cold, aristocratic, grave. Of the two, Herodotus, who claimed in his History to want only “to preserve the great and wonderful actions of the Greeks and the Barbarians from losing their due meed of glory,” is the good read—the one you could get into on a cross-country bus trip, where his anthropologist’s impulses would seem right at home. Thucydides, who was more the political-scientist type and who hoped his The Peloponnesian War “would be judged useful by those inquirers who desire an exact knowledge of the past as an aid to the interpretation of the future,” is the choice of assistant professors, junior senators, op-ed-page writers, and anybody else who requires a little status along with his relevance.
Herodotus (left) and Thucydides The Romans: Livy and Tacitus
It was one thing after another in that burg, and getting it all down on papyrus took priority over figuring out what the hell it meant. The top stories invariably concerned the state and the men who ran it, and they went from being exercises in glorification and myth-making in the days when Rome was still getting started (and still smelling like a rose), to displays of outrage and breast-beating a mere hundred years later. Livy (c. 59 B.C.–c. A.D. 17), who was reportedly employed by various government agencies, winds up sounding like the PR person with the Ancient Rome account: From Aeneas and “the founding of this great city,” through Romulus and Remus, the Sabine women, Cincinnatus, Hannibal, et al., up to his own Augustan Age and “the establishment of an empire which is now, in power, next to the immortal gods,” his History of Rome is historiography at the disposal of patriotism, even more full of drum rolls than the Aeneid of his contemporary, Virgil—also, it turns out, on the imperial payroll. (For what it’s worth, the only other history with as many plugs for divine providence, manifest destiny, tradition, election, and generation is the Old Testament.)
Tacitus (c. A.D. 55– c. 117), the most readable as well as the most reliable of the Roman historians, gives us just as one-sided a view. His Rome is well into its decline, without a scrap of fides, pietas, or clementia to its name, a city that’s part bordello, part reign of terror, and part George Romero movie. (It’s Tacitus who, in the Annals, provides us with the lowdown on Tiberius, Claudius, Nero, and Agrippina, complete with poisoned mushrooms and ships that fall apart in the night.) Against a background of evil like you wouldn’t believe, Tacitus— doing his last-moral-man routine—inveighs, exposes, and pours on the lurid details. “This I regard as history’s highest function,” he says, “to let no worthy action go uncommemorated, and to hold out the reprobation of posterity as a terror to evil words and deeds.” With the emphasis on the latter. The Germans: Ranke and Mommsen
Not exactly household names. Still, if anyone turned history around—made it rigorous and new—and pointed it roughly in the direction it’s still moving in today, it was the Germans, who, beginning around 1800, left the Enlightenment (so glib, so self-involved, so French) doing its nails and marched purposefully off to the university library and the archeological dig. Leopold von Ranke (1795–1886) is not only the most important of these German historians, he may be the most important of all nineteenth-century historians. Determined to see every epoch in its own terms (as opposed to the terms dictated by his epoch), he searched for the “ideas” and “tendencies” that ruled it, comprehending rather than passing judgment, applying “scientific” principles where, before, murky humanistic ones had prevailed—a methodology he summed up in the somewhat memorable phrase “wie es eigentlich gewesen,” how it really was. Not that the old boy was as clinical and impartial as he’d have you think: An archconservative, who depended on the support first of Metternich, then of Bismarck, and who believed that Germany had a mission to develop a culture and a political system all its own; a Lutheran who, in his History of the Reformation in Germany, gave Luther the benefit of every doubt; a mystic who claimed to see “God’s finger” in human affairs—he didn’t travel light or bias-free.
Theodor Mommsen (1817–1903), his colleague and chief among his legatees, is, by contrast, one of those inspiration-to-us-all people. Like Ranke a practitioner of the new objective history, he was a model of professionalism, of scholarship, and of saying what he meant. His History of Rome is based, not on old legends and myths, but on coins, inscriptions, and artifacts, many of which Mommsen literally dug up himself. Modest, wise, and good, he sought “to bring a more vivid knowledge of classical antiquity to wider circles.” And he’s the flip side to Ranke on the Days-of-Prussia LP: a frustrated liberal who had sided with the protesters in 1848, who deeply resented Bismarck, who deplored the beginnings of anti-Semitism in Germany, and who, when awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1902, asked everyone not to clap. The times, he said, were too grave. The Victorian
s: Macaulay and Carlyle
Don’t make the mistake of writing Victorian England off as simply self-satisfied, all eight-course dinners and back-slapping conversations about how well things were going in the Punjab. In fact, the place was schizophrenic, divided down the middle by issues as unwieldy and unsettling as economic reform, Darwinism, industrialization (already run amok), and what to do about women. Which means, before you read any historian of the era, you’d better know which team he’s playing on. Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800–1859) is self-satisfied, at peace with his age (though an outspoken critic of its culture), an influential politician, and in favor of peace, liberty, property, applied science, progress, and the Industrial Revolution. He’s in sympathy with the Whigs of the previous century and their descendants, the Liberals of his own day. He announces to a nation of Englishmen that they are “the greatest and most highly civilized people that ever the world saw”—and that things are only going to get better. (A lot of them listened: His History of England from the Accession of James II has gone through more printings than any other book in English but the Bible.) And if he’s a little philistine, a little too much the bellow of the Establishment, he could still tell the kind of good story—upbeat, well-paced, easy to read—that made his constituents feel better about the wacky times they were living through.
Not so Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881), a Scot with a sense of mystery, a fetish for imagination, and the conviction that Macaulay’s History was “a book to which 400 editions could not lend any permanent value.” Carlyle was the era’s self-appointed prophet, also its scourge, the sworn enemy of the Establishment, the Spirit of Progress, and the looking-out-for-number-one middle class. His French Revolution—“A wild savage Book, itself a kind of French Revolution,” as he put it—which features an imaginary reporter as its narrator, has a you-are-there, docudrama quality that is as riveting, and as off-the-wall, as history, of whatever century, gets. Here, as in his biographies of Cromwell (whom he rehabilitated) and Frederick the Great (whom he adored), Carlyle’s central thesis—which would be shared by Nietzsche, Shaw, D. H. Lawrence, and Wagner, and which would, rightly, be cited as a contributing factor in the rise of Fascism—was that the Hero, not the Establishment or the State, causes things to evolve, that “Universal History … is at bottom the History of the Great Men who have worked here.”
Macaulay (left) and Carlyle Meanwhile, Back at the Ranch: Turner and Beard
You realize, of course, that there’s an ocean between us and them, and that they’re stunted and jaded and on their way out. Frederick Jackson Turner (1861–1932) realized it, and singlehandedly wrested American history not only from the Old World but from New England too, relocating it smack-dab in the middle of his own upper Mississippi Valley. For Turner, the frontier was “the cutting edge of American civilization,” and American democracy and the American character the products of “the existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement westward.” Part Walt Whitman, part Mr. Chips, Turner now stands for the turn-of-the-century national and regional values he swore by. If modern historians have long since stopped subscribing, they still remove their hats.
Charles A. Beard (1874–1948) is a tougher nut, less influential than Turner (who established a whole school of history) and more controversial. Irreverent and nonconformist, even before he studied his Marx he’d arrived at an economic interpretation of American history: The Constitution was “an economic document drawn with superb skill by men whose property interests were immediately at stake” and there was something hokey about its ratification; the Civil War had nothing to do with slavery or states’ rights, but was instead the collision of the old agrarian culture with the new industrial one. All very stimulating. And, it turned out, most unsound: Beard had manipulated facts and deliberately overlooked evidence in order to prove his theory. It didn’t help, either, that he preached isolationism during World War II—“American continentalism” was his term—and accused FDR of staging Pearl Harbor. Still, he got everybody thinking, he was a useful prototype for young activist intellectuals, and he obviously loved what he did. “The history of a civilization, if intelligently conceived,” he says in the introduction to a bestselling textbook he wrote with his wife, Mary, “may be an instrument of civilization.” THINK TANKERS
You know the type—reclusive but bossy. These are the historians who couldn’t care less about documents, artifacts, and eyewitness accounts. They’re not out to reconstruct the past, but to let us in on what it, plus the present and the future, mean.
ST. AUGUSTINE (354–430): Forget the Persian Wars and the founding of Rome: The big events in human history have been the Fall, the Incarnation, and the Resurrection, with the Second Coming next on the agenda. History is not cyclical (Christ died only once for our sins), but a glorious unfolding, “the great melody of some ineffable composer.” The earth is merely the footstool on which History rests her feet, the existence of man a subplot in the Divine Comedy. And, through thirteen centuries and a succession of anchorpersons as persuasive as Dante and Milton, that’s simply the way it was—night after night after night.
VICO (1668–1744): A poor scholar in dusty, provincial Naples, he announced to anybody who’d listen that history was not a succession of great men, a wrap-up of the millennium’s top stories, or a grade-school pageant with God as director, box-office manager, or even prompter. It was, rather, the work—and the reflection—of men, men like you and me, men who can love and understand history (unlike nature, which will always remain a mystery to us) precisely because we’ve created it. Not content with one bombshell, Vico dropped another: Nations, like human intelligence, undergo an ordered and predictable progression, from an initial primitive stage through divine (or childish), heroic (or adolescent), and finally civil (or adult) ones. Then they die, and the process begins somewhere else. History is not a great unfolding; it is, rather, cyclical.
VOLTAIRE (1694–1778): Fed up with Augustine, with their own bishop Bossuet (whose Histoire Universelle parroted him), and with God, the philosophes made faces at, and attempted to refute, all three. Voltaire, the most unstoppable of them, in his Essay on the Customs and the Spirit of Nations, rejected Providence, thanks just the same; opined that events have more to do with chance than with design; and proposed a new kind of histoire universelle (note the lowercase letters), based on the notion that men are alike, no matter what country they live in, endowed with the same natural rights and faculties, destined to proceed along the same path of reason and enlightenment. It’s a small world, after all! And mainstream history is, for the first time, worldly in spirit.
HERDER (1744–1803): The first wave in the German intellectual tide that would wash over the nineteenth century. According to this earnest Protestant pastor, the world isn’t all that small, or people all that much alike. Rather, true civilization arises from native roots: It is the common people, the Volk, who engender a national character, the Volksgeist. German ways are different from French or English ones—not necessarily better, just different—and nationalism is inevitable. And one more thing: It’s a mistake to treat the past as if it were the present’s slightly retarded older brother, even if it does dress funny.
HEGEL (1770–1831): Not only are German ways different, they’re a whole lot better. They’re also the next sure thing, how history will be carried through the upcoming stage in its development from Pure Being (that was China) all the way to the Absolute Idea (the highest unity of thought, all integration and harmony, and obviously Prussia). World-Historical Individuals—heroic types who seem to embody the very nature of the transition to come—count for something, but the State is the important thing; in his Philosophy of History, Hegel invites it to fill the tall-and-big-men’s shoes recently vacated by the Church. As you may already have heard, the mechanism underlying the whole historical process he outlined is called the dialectic, and it, at least, isn’t hard to grasp: The dominant idea, or “truth,” of an epoch (its thesis),
brings with it its precise negation (its antithesis); out of their sparring emerges a brand new, more or less hybrid “truth,” or synthesis. (This was Marx’s favorite part). Thus the very disunity of Germany, the fact of its being fragmented into all those little principalities and duchies, summons up the idea of unity, and must ultimately bring about the creation of a German state. That is, State—according to Hegel, the institutional embodiment of reason and liberty, “the march of God through the world.”
SPENGLER (1880–1936): Surprise! The state isn’t that big a deal, after all. In fact, the real action is all in the “culture,” which passes through four historical phases (just like Vico said), eventually falling into complete, irreversible decay. And we’re no exception, according to Spengler, who, in The Decline of the West, foresaw imminent Asiatic domination. Doom, gloom, and the dubious comfort that it’s always been and always will be thus. Toynbee would agree. So, in a way, would the Nazis, to whom all this pessimism looked like a welcome mat. In fact, as early as 1918, Spengler was claiming to hear their “quiet firm step.” LEGENDS
Two major reputations—one still in vogue, one already in mothballs—you simply have to deal with. Edward Gibbon (1737-1794)
It was at Rome, on the 15th of October, 1764, as I sat musing amidst the ruins of the Capitol, while the barefooted friars were singing vespers in the Temple of Jupiter, that the idea of writing the decline and fall of the city first started to my mind.
from Memoirs
The various modes of worship, which prevailed in the Roman world, were all considered by the people as equally true; by the philosopher, as equally false; and by the magistrate, as equally useful.
