THE WEALTH OF ROMAN INSCRIPTIONS
It is easy to understand how Niebuhr, whose enthusiastic and lifelong labours were devoted to the history of ancient Rome, should have coldly turned aside from the period of imperial rule and cherished no desire to carry his history beyond the fall of the republic. Certainly it would be unjust to judge of his attitude towards the first-named period from the brief lecture with which he concluded his lectures on Roman history, but we shall nevertheless do no injustice to his undying merits by maintaining that in his heart of hearts he felt no sympathy with it. For it is not possible to conjure up a mental picture of the civilisation and condition of the empire from the scanty and imperfect records of literary tradition, a tradition that is not sufficient even for the first century, and fails us almost completely with regard to the second, and even more with regard to the third. Nothing can make up for this deficiency except an exhaustive study of monuments, and, more especially, of inscriptions, but this Dis Manibus literature, as he was pleased to call it, was a thing which Niebuhr, in spite of his many years of residence in Rome, neither cared for nor understood. For this we can hardly blame him, because, while the subject of coins had received admirable treatment at the hands of Joseph Eckhel, the inscriptions were hardly accessible for scientific purposes till long after Niebuhr’s death.
It is difficult for a later generation to realise the condition of epigraphic research before the critical compilation of the Corpus inscriptionum Latinarum had put an end to the frightful state of things that prevailed in this study, discredited as it was by all sorts of forgeries. But when we see the insuperable difficulties with which a scholar of the first rank, like Bartolommeo Borghesi, had to contend in collecting and sifting the boundless abundance of materials for the researches on the subject of the history of the empire, which he planned on so vast a scale and carried through with such admirable acumen; when we see how the chief work of his life came to nought for lack of any firm standing-ground whatsoever, we can easily understand that Niebuhr should have preferred not to venture on such dangerous ground.
From every part of the earth where Roman feet have trod, these direct witnesses to the past arise from the grave in almost disquieting abundance: the inexhaustible soil of Rome and its immediate vicinity has already yielded more than thirty-five thousand stones; we possess more than thirty thousand from other parts of Italy; and the number of those bestowed upon us by Africa, which was not opened up to research until the last century, is hardly smaller. Again, the Illyrian provinces, Dalmatia first and foremost, but Roumania, Bulgaria, and Servia, all in their degree, and even Bosnia, almost unknown ground till a short time ago, have become rich mines of discovery in our own days, thanks to increased facilities of communication and to the civilisation which has made its way into those countries.
There is, no doubt, much chaff that has attained to an unmerited longevity in these stone archives, much that we would willingly let go by the board. But one thing is certain: that only out of these materials—which of late have been singularly supplemented by the masses of papyri discovered in Egypt—can a history of the Roman Empire be constructed; and that any one who addresses himself to the solution of a problem of this kind without exact knowledge of them, though he were as great a man as Leopold von Ranke, must fall far short of the goal within reach. What can be done with such materials has been shown by Mommsen in the masterly description of the provinces from the time of Cæsar to the reign of Diocletian, given in the fifth volume of his History of Rome, a volume which not only forms a worthy sequel to those which preceded it, but in many respects marks an advance upon them, and makes us all the more painfully aware of the gap which we dare scarcely hope to see filled by his master hand.