The historians' history of the world in twenty-five volumes, volume 04

by Unknown

Our present concern is with the part of Herodotus that deals explicitly with the affairs of Greece. This has particular reference to the Persian Wars, although giving many incidental references to other periods of history. For this period of the Persian invasions Herodotus is practically our sole source, and we have drawn on him largely at first hand. His narrative here may be paraphrased and in some slight details modified, but can never be supplanted. The account of Herodotus closes with the year 478—the definitive year in which the Persians were finally expelled from Greece. As Herodotus was six years old in 478, he must have had personal recollections of the effect produced upon his elders by the accounts of the battles of Thermopylæ, Salamis, and Platæa; must indeed all his life have been associated with men who participated in these conflicts; his account, therefore, has all the practical force of the report of a contemporary witness.

As we have said, the period following the Persian wars—the age of Pericles—found no contemporary historian, though the writings of the poets and the orators to some extent make amends for the deficit; and the art treasures that have been preserved are more eloquent than words in their testimony to the culture of the time. The general historians and biographers supply us with the chief details of the political events of the time and bridge for us the gap between the Persian and the Peloponnesian wars.

When we reach the Peloponnesian War itself we come upon the work of the master historian Thucydides. A critical estimate of his writings has already been given and need not be repeated here. Neither need we take up at length the work of Xenophon, who, as already noted, explicitly continued the history of Thucydides. We have previously had occasion to point out that Xenophon did not equal his great predecessor in true historical sense, or in breadth and impartiality of view. His partiality for Sparta and his friendship for Agesilaus led him to do scant justice to the great Theban Epaminondas, and we have previously noted how the record of Diodorus, rather than the contemporary account of Xenophon, is our best source for the history of the Theban hero. Nevertheless Xenophon remains an important source for the period of which his Hellenica treats. His more popular work, the Anabasis, describes a picturesque incident in Grecian history, which was important rather as an adumbration of possible future events than because of its intrinsic interest.

Coming to the Macedonian epoch we find, as might be expected, that the picturesque life of Alexander called forth a multitude of chroniclers; all of which, as has been said, were superseded by the later works of Arrian and Curtius.

Recapitulating in a few words what has just been said of the original sources of Grecian history, it would appear that the reader who has before him the works of Diodorus, Justin, Plutarch, Nepos, Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophon, and Arrian will have access to the chief fountain-heads upon which modern historians have drawn. But it will be clear to anyone who considers these authors in their entirety that the idea of Grecian history to be gained by reading these classical writers alone would be a somewhat disjointed and unsatisfactory one. Many points of chronology would remain obscure; there would be many gaps in the story. Yet, the view thus to be gained was the only one accessible until about a century ago. The revival of interest in the classical authors that came about along with the general intellectual advance in the time of Elizabeth, had led to the translation of many classical authors by such men as Thomas North, Philemon Holland, and Arthur Golding. It had led also, as we have noted, to the production of Sir Walter Raleigh’s general history, which was complete for the period during which Greece was an important nation. But there was no other attempt to unify the story of Grecian history and give it a modern garb until more than a century later.

Then the stimulus given to historical investigation by the success of Gibbon’s splendid work, led to an attempt to treat the history of Greece in a manner equally comprehensive. The man who first undertook the task in England was William Mitford. The work that he produced was an epochal one, replete with scholarship, yet it had certain limitations which led directly to the production by another hand of a yet more monumental work on the same subject. For, as is well known, the history of Grote was written with the explicit intention of combating the conception of Grecian civilisation that Mitford’s book had made current.

There are two quite different points of view from which the history of a foreign nation may be regarded. One of these may be called the “sympathetic,” the other the “antipathetic” view. It was the latter of these which Mitford chose, or rather to which he was impelled by temperament, in dealing with those phases of Athenian life which are the central facts in the political history of Greece. It may be laid down almost as an axiom that it is impossible to write a truly great history of a great people from the antipathetic standpoint. At best, one can obtain only a surface knowledge of a foreign people—it is hard enough to gain a correct knowledge of one’s own race. Every people, like every individual, is a strangely inconsistent organism. The deeds of its diverse moods never seem to harmonise; they are as different as the two sides of a shield or medal, and in proportion as we seize on one phase or another of the inconsistencies, we change utterly the type of the picture. Of course the great historian must see all sides and properly adjust them; but the difficulty is this: it is much easier to detect the inconsistencies than the underlying consistencies, which, after all, are necessary to national life. Hence the antipathetic historian makes out a strong case against the nation with relative ease, while quite overlooking the better side; whereas the sympathetic historian, while searching for the better side, cannot by any possibility overlook the obvious inconsistencies.

To illustrate from the case in hand: Mitford was an ardent tory, and he insisted on weighing Greek conduct in his own balance. He never failed to sneer at the democratic tendency of Athens, and to point out the inconsistencies in Athenian life. And he found ample material. Nothing is more startling to the student who undertakes a careful survey of the history of Greece than the glaring defects of this people. Take two or three illustrations: The Athenians contended all along for equality of rights, yet (1) the majority of their co-residents were slaves; (2) they frequently denied to their best citizens the privilege of living in Athens, banishing them, without even the charge of crime, by ostracism; and (3) they strove all along to establish imperial power for Athens over other cities—strove so fiercely for it that the final result was the utter overthrow of Greece itself.

Again, the Athenian is said to have worshipped the æsthetic and the beautiful. His poetry and art attest the truth of the claim. Yet at table he ate with his fingers; in the streets he committed indescribable vulgarities without concealment; and in his relations with his fellows he indulged in practices of the most revolting kind so commonly that to “love after the manner of the Greeks” became an opprobrious by-word among nations. Herodotus himself records that the Greeks taught these practices to the Persians, who to this day are reproached with them.

To go no further, here is plenty of material for the antipathetic historian. Yet even a very brief analysis might serve to modify the first judgment which would tend to denounce the Greeks as the most inconsistent and disreputable of mortals.