It might appear the height of paradox to preface a discourse on the Ancient World by asserting the conviction that the only genuine and important history is contemporary history. Yet reflection on this doctrine will show that it is not only consistent with a serious and steady interest in what is called Antiquity (and indeed in the past in general), but its only rational basis and justification. Were the past really past it were dead—dead and done with, and it were wisdom for us who are alive to let the dead bury their dead. Much of what has been done and suffered under the sun is indeed gone beyond recall, and is well buried in forgetfulness. In such forgetfulness lies the fact and evidence of progress. 'Vex not its ghost'; no necromancy will or should evoke the departed spirits or avail to make them utter significant speech to living men. The chain of links which once bound stage to stage of human history is somewhere for ever broken; and as we retrace, in the memory of the race or in that of individual, the Ariadne-clue which we here call 'the unity of History' it vanishes somewhere beyond our vision into the dark backward and abysm of time. True, of late Archaeology and Anthropology have cast their search-lights into the darkness, piercing a little deeper than of old into the mists that surround the origins of our civilization; but before that dimly illuminated region of pre-history there still lies, and will always lie, an impenetrable pall. As again in thought we move forward down the stream of time, the light available to us for a while increases, increases till we reach the present where it threatens to blind us with its dazzling excess, and then suddenly fades and is quenched in the twilight and final darkness by which the future is hidden from us. Of the whole stream of history our best or utmost intelligence illuminates but a short reach, and that imperfectly.
'Our ignorance is infinitely greater than our knowledge,' and the wise historian is sobered but not discouraged by this reminder of the limits of his possible understanding. Neither the remote past nor the distant future can be the objects of knowledge nor, properly speaking, the subjects of judgement. If our insatiate curiosity has bounds thus eternally set to its satisfaction, we remember also that it is not either in the past or the future that we live, that we act and are acted upon, determine or have determined for us what we do or are to do, what we suffer or are to suffer. The present alone is real, and of the real alone is genuine knowledge possible. But if this is so, it is also so that of this alone does it import us to ascertain the true nature. What we have to discover (or perish in our blindness) is what we now are and where we now stand. All other so-called knowledge or understanding, save as it ministers to the framing of a true judgement concerning our present selves and our present situation and world, is but vanity or lumber, at best a rhetorical device for bringing before ourselves or others what we so judge concerning the one and the other. Genuine understanding, however it disguise itself as chronicle or prophecy, is always of the present or nothing.
But this present is not the momentary meeting-place of two eternities or the brief span of time which psychologists have named 'the specious present'. Its content is whatsoever is not the dead past or the unborn future; it is whatever is still or already alive, whatever is yet or already operative and formative in our inward selves or our outward environment—in a word what is contemporary, contemporary with our present doings and sufferings. To such a present it is idle to attempt to fix limits of date before or behind. A new conception of the unity of History rises before us as we realize that the Past and the Future are not severed by the Present, but that these meet and are made one in its living and concrete actuality. This is the fact, the centre to which all radii converge and from which they diverge again; and in the Present the Past and the Future live and are, together and all at once.
Bearing this in mind, we approach the records of history in a new spirit and with a new hope. We desire to know neither origins nor ends, we expect no cosmogony and we look for no apocalyptic vision. What we aim at understanding is what we now are and where we now stand, and we realize that to understand this we must not restrict our study to what is merely of recent acquisition or growth. Neither ourselves nor our environment are bounded by chronological limits; both are contemporary with the Pyramids just as much as with the Eiffel Tower. We are not merely the heirs but the epitomes of the ages. As our bodies are but the present forms on which the secular forces of the earth continue their dateless activities, so our spirits, our minds, our very selves are the forms in which other spirits now forgotten or dimly remembered still live and move and have their being, fulfilling the work which, while still their names were named, they initiated or advanced. Not in pious gratitude only must we labour to rescue their memory from fast-coming oblivion, but because only so can we reach that knowledge of ourselves and our world which is to us as living men all and alone important. Nor will such study deny to us the reward we seek. So approaching the labours of the historian, we shall not be jealous because he comes before us with a tale, or as we call it, with a 'story'—a narrative of 'old unhappy things and battles long ago'. For though he so puts it, spacing it out in sections, half-concealing, half-revealing its logical connexions and ultimate unity, its real meaning, its ultimate—which is also its present—import is an account of what we now are and the situation in which we now stand; and unless somehow for each of us its message comes into such an account, distils and sublimates into such a quintessential judgement on the present, History remains but 'a tale of sound and fury, signifying nothing'. It is in the profoundest sense useless to us unless in the end we can say 'De nobis fabula narratur'—it is our history to which we have been listening.
This is especially true of the history of the Ancient World—the world of classical antiquity. It is not a dead world; its deeds and thoughts are not past but still live, still 'breathe and burn' in us. They are largely the stuff of which our present selves and our present world are made. Not merely, I repeat, in the sense that then were the foundations of both laid, not merely in the sense that we are heirs to the labours of our ancestors. We are the Greeks and the Romans, made what we now are by their deeds and thoughts and experiences, our world their world, at a later stage of an evolution never interrupted but always one and single. Our births and deaths are but a sleep and a forgetting in the unbroken biography of a spirit, not above but in us all, which is the hero of the history of European civilization, itself a part of the history of Humanity. Thus the history of Antiquity, and especially of Classical Antiquity, is the record of the thoughts and deeds of our own youth.
Our deeds (and also our thoughts) still travel with us from afar,
And what we have been makes us what we are.
This is the spirit and the conviction in which I would invite you to approach the study of Classical Antiquity—not merely in that of gratitude and reverence, not certainly in that of idle and futile curiosity, but as seekers for knowledge of yourselves and your world. For what other knowledge matters?
This quest is but the beginning of a search which is and must be lifelong. Perhaps I am wrong in calling it the beginning, and there are others who would and do bid you begin earlier. I can only ask you to begin where I began or begin myself. At any rate if you begin later or elsewhere I am confident that you will lose much light on your present selves and your present world. My own temptation has been rather to stop too soon and so to overleap the intervening period—the 'Middle Ages'—between such Antiquity and the Present. Fortunately for you, you have guides who will point out to you the way of a profitable and instructive journey across the—to me—unknown or imperfectly explored land. I must, however, in no controversy with any of my fellow lecturers here, say a word on the contention that the true beginning of the modern mind and its world—our mind and our world—lies later and elsewhere than in Classical Antiquity. The birthday and birthplace of that mind and its world have been variously fixed. We have been bidden to find the one, say, as late as the sixteenth century and the other—not from the same point of view—in the plains and woods of Northern Europe or in the deserts of Arabia or in some still more vaguely indicated region of the East. But I must avow my conviction that our civilization—and I specially remember that we are Englishmen—is not only in origin but in essence, Greco-Roman, modified no doubt by influences unknown to that in its earlier stages, but still Greco-Roman grown to a larger stature and a clearer self-consciousness, self-shaped to its present form, the same vital and vitalizing force, constantly reinvigorated and re-enlightened by reflection upon its own past. It is a true instinct that in this country still bases our system of higher education upon a study of the languages and literature of Classical Antiquity. We are, as Englishmen, co-heirs, because co-descendants of Classical Antiquity, with France and Italy and Greece, yes also with Germany, for European civilization—and not European civilization only—is, I reiterate, in essence still Greco-Roman, not Teutonic or Semitic. At least, if this inheritance is not ours by descent it is ours by adoption, and we are equally legitimate members of the household. And the bonds of such spiritual kinship are closer and more durable than those of blood, if indeed those of blood provably exist at all.
The works and thoughts of which I am to speak—the dreams, the plans, the hopes and aspirations—are assuredly ours also, the stuff and substance of our being, our inner genius, our guiding and controlling selves, what we in our first youth imagined and conceived, what we believed, what we, in our later maturity, designed and in part executed. If we turn inward we cannot read them there, for the characters are small and faded; but as we hear their history recounted as it is by professional historians, we recognize it as the record of a past which is our very own, while at the same time it is a past which we share with other nations who are our co-partners in the work of conserving, deepening, extending, enriching the present-day civilization of Europe and the world.
In most of us at all times, and in all of us at most times, these influences and their operations lie deep below the threshold of consciousness, some of them deeper than any plummet of self-analysis can sound. They are also the unseen foundations of the social and political superstructure in which we live. Or, to use another figure, they form the fertile soil in which we, with all our activities and institutions, are rooted and from which we draw no small part of our spiritual sustenance. Hence it is highly pertinent here and now to examine them, for in this identity of foundation is to be found the primary unity of the now diffused life of Europe which has parted into so many and so widely divergent currents of national life. We all come spiritually from the same ancient home, and it is well and wise to recall its memories. So we and others shall be the more disposed to re-knit the old bonds and to weave new ones which may one day restore on a grander scale, in more organized fullness and more efficacious potency, the primordial unity which interests and passions have with rude violence, at least in appearance, disrupted and dissolved and so for a time arrested or enfeebled.