Nothing can be more fallacious than an inference drawn from the silence of historians relative to particular facts. For a full, comprehensive, and, if the phrase may be used, a business-like method of writing history, in which nothing important—nothing which a well-informed reader will look for, must be omitted, is the produce of modern improvements in thinking and writing. The general diffusion of knowledge, and the activity of criticism, occasion a much higher demand in matters of information to be made upon writers than was thought of in ancient times. A full and exact communication of facts has come to be valued more highly than any mere beauties of style; at least, no beauties of style are allowed to atone for palpable deficiencies in matters of fact. The moderns must be taught—and pleased; but the ancients would be pleased, and taught. Ancient writers, and historians not less than others, seem to have formed their notions of prose composition very much upon the model of poetry, which, in most languages, was the earliest kind of literature. As their epics were histories, so, in some sense, their histories were epics. Such particulars, therefore, were taken up in the course of the narrative, as seemed best to accord with the abstract idea of the work—not always those which a rigid adherence to a comprehensive plan would have made it necessary to bring forward.
8. The influence of personal or party prejudices is indefinite; and as it may distort the representations of an historian almost unconsciously to himself, and without impugning his general integrity, so will it, in most instances, be difficult, especially after the lapse of ages, to discover the extent to which the operation of such prejudices should be allowed for. But if it cannot be ascertained how much of the colouring of the picture is to be attributed to the medium through which an historian exhibits his characters, yet the general hues of that medium will hardly escape the observation of an intelligent reader; and when once observed, the illusion is destroyed.
But in relation to the influence of prejudices of this sort, ancient historians unquestionably appear to advantage when compared with those of modern times. Instances of equanimity might be cited from the Greek historians to which few parallels could be adduced, drawn from the pages of modern writers. Like the sculptures of the same people, the works of the Greek historians, though not wanting in the distinctive characters, or the moving energy of life, present an aspect from which the sublimity of repose is never lost. These writers seem to have been conscious that they were holding up the picture of their times to the eyes of mankind in all ages: they forgot, therefore, the passions and interests of the moment.
With ourselves, the instantaneous diffusion of books through all ranks of the community, places a modern author too nearly in the presence of his contemporaries to allow him to think much of posterity. The clamour of public opinion rings around his seclusion: his situation, in its essential circumstances, is almost the same as that of the public speaker—the din of the crowd fills his thoughts, and he almost forgets the distant fame which his genius might command. This nearness of his audience offers therefore to a modern writer every excitement and every inducement to the indulgence of party misrepresentations. If it were not for the correcting influences of a free press, nothing worthy of the name of history would be produced in modern times.
9. That the Greeks were not in fact much inferior to the representations given of them by their historians, the existing monuments of their philosophy, of their poetry, and of their arts, sufficiently attest. Indeed if we pass from an examination of these monuments and remains to the perusal of Herodotus, Thucydides, and Xenophon, we shall be far from thinking that a tone of exaggerated encomium is to be charged upon those writers. From the pages of the historians alone, we should fail to form an adequate idea of the perfection that was attained in all departments of literature and art by the people whose political affairs they narrate. Scarcely half of the history of Greece, in a full and philosophical sense of the term, is to be gathered from its historians:—we must seek for it rather in the remains of its literature at large,—in museums, and cabinets, and among the ruins that still bespread its soil.
It is not therefore this sort of general misrepresentation that is to be suspected in the Greek historians; for more is made certain by other means than is explicitly affirmed by them. Yet it has been supposed that, in their accounts of military affairs, the Greek historians, in order to enhance the glory of their countrymen in repelling the Persian invasions, have exaggerated the power and extent of the Asiatic monarchy, and the numbers of the armies with which those of Greece had to contend. Some amount of misrepresentation, of this kind, may have been admitted. But yet the pictures given by the Greek writers of the wealth and resources of the Persian power—of the puerile ambition of its monarchs—of the countless hosts which they drove before them, by the lash, into Scythia, Egypt, and Europe—conquering nations rather by devastation than by military conduct—by the mouths, more than by the swords of their armies, are so strikingly similar to unquestionable facts in the later history of the Asiatic empires, that, as the one cannot be doubted, the other need not be deemed incredible.
10. The arrogance with which, under the term barbarians, the Greek writers speak of all nations that were not of Greek extraction, naturally suggests the belief that we must not expect to derive from them a just idea of the civilization of the surrounding nations. In truth, not a few indications may be gathered from other sources, which authorize the belief that, in communities not very distant from Greece itself, or its colonies, a degree of intelligence and of refinement existed of which it was their shame to be ignorant, or their greater shame to have taken so little notice.
11. With the Romans it was perhaps less from mere national vanity, than from a dictate of that deep-plotted policy by which they supported their unbounded pretensions, that they were induced to misrepresent the resources and the conduct of the nations on whose necks they trampled. This policy would often produce misrepresentations of a contrary kind to those suggested by national vanity. That universal empire was the right of the Roman arms was the principle of the state: a reverse of fortune therefore was not simply a calamity—it was a seeming impeachment of the high claims of the republic. The nations must not think that their masters could anywhere find equals or rivals in courage or military skill. A defeat hurt the political faith of the Roman citizen more than it alarmed his fears; and he would rather waive the glory of having broken an arm of equal strength with his own, than confess that there was anywhere an arm of equal strength, to resist his will. He would choose to sustain the aggravated shame of having been beaten by an inferior, rather than redeem a part of his dishonour by acknowledging that he had encountered a superior. A writer therefore could not do full justice to the courage, conduct and successes of the enemies of Rome, without offering such an outrage to the common feeling as would have amounted almost to treason against the state. Modern historical criticism—exercised by such a writer as Niebuhr, has sufficed to remove from early Roman history a very large amount of the misstatements and the exaggerations which Livy and his predecessors had accumulated around it.
CHAPTER XII.
CONFIRMATIONS OF THE EVIDENCE OF ANCIENT HISTORIANS, DERIVABLE FROM INDEPENDENT SOURCES.
Most of the principal facts mentioned by ancient historians, as well as many particulars of less importance, are confirmed by evidence that is altogether independent, both in its nature, and in the channels through which it has reached us. In truth, although the narratives of historians serve to connect and explain the entire mass of information that has descended to modern times, relative to the nations of remote antiquity, they are far from being the sole sources of that information:—perhaps they hardly furnish so much as a half of the materials of history. These independent sources of information may be classed under the following heads:—