It should be noted before we pass to Rome that with the expansion of Hellenism the subject of historians expanded as well. Universal history was begun by Ephorus, the rhetorician, and formed the theme of Polybius and Deodorus. Exiled Greeks were the first to write histories of Rome worthy of the name. The Alexandrian Eratosthenes placed chronology upon the scientific basis of astronomy, and Apollodorus drew up the most important chronica of antiquity.
History-writing in Rome,—except for the Greek writers resident there,—was until the first half of the 1st century B.C. in the form of annals. Then came rhetorical ornamentation,—and the Ciceronian era. The first Roman historian who rose to the conception of a science and art combined was Sallust, the student of Thucydides. The Augustan age produced in Livy a great popular historian and natural artist and a trained rhetorician (in the speeches),—but as uncritical and inaccurate as he was brilliant. From Livy to Tacitus the gulf is greater than from Herodotus to Thucydides. Tacitus is at least a consummate artist. His style ranges from the brilliancy of his youth to the sternness and sombre gravity of age, passing almost to poetic expression in its epigrammatic terseness. Yet in spite of his searching study of authorities, his keen judgment of men, and his perception of underlying principles of moral law, his view was warped by the heat of faction, which glows beneath his external objectivity. After him Roman history-writing speedily degenerated. Suetonius’ Lives of the Caesars is but a superior kind of journalism. But his gossip of the court became the model for historians, whose works, now lost, furnish the main source for the Historia Augusta. The importance to us of this uncritical collection of biographies is sufficient comment on the decline of history-writing in the latter empire. Finally, from the 4th century the epitomes of Eutropius and Festus served to satisfy the lessening curiosity in the past and became the handbooks for the middle ages. The single figure of Ammianus Marcellinus stands out of this age like a belated disciple of Tacitus. But the world was changing from antique to Christian ideals just as he was writing, and with him we leave this outline of ancient history.
The 4th and 5th centuries saw a great revolution in the history of history. The story of the pagan past slipped out of mind, and in its place was set, by the genius of Eusebius, the story of the world force which had superseded it, Christianity, and of that small fraction of antiquity from which it sprang,—the Jews. Christianity from the first had forced thinking men to reconstruct their philosophy of history, but it was only after the Church’s triumph that its point of view became dominant in historiography. Three centuries more passed before the pagan models were quite lost to sight. But from the 7th century to the 17th—from Isidore of Seville and the English Bede for a thousand years,—mankind was to look back along the line of Jewish priests and kings to the Creation. Egypt was of interest only as it came into Israelite history, Babylon and Nineveh were to illustrate the judgments of Yahweh, Tyre and Sidon to reflect the glory of Solomon. The process by which the “gentiles” have been robbed of their legitimate history was the inevitable result of a religion whose sacred books make them lay figures for the history of the Jews. Rejected by the Yahweh who became the Christian God, they have remained to the present day, in Sunday schools and in common opinion, not nations of living men, with the culture of arts and sciences, but outcasts who do not enter into the divine scheme of the world’s history. When a line was drawn between pagan and Christian back to the creation of the world, it left outside the pale of inquiry nearly all antiquity. But it must be remembered that that antiquity was one in which the German nations had no personal interest. Scipio and the Gracchi were essentially unreal to them. The one living organization with which they came into touch was the Church. So Cicero and Pompey paled before Joshua and Paul. Diocletian, the organizing genius, became a bloodthirsty monster, and Constantine, the murderer, a saint.
Christian history begins with the triumph of the Church. With Eusebius of Caesarea the apologetic pamphlets of the age of persecutions gave way to a calm review of three centuries of Christian progress. Eusebius’ biography of Constantine shows what distortion of fact the father of Church history permitted himself, but the Ecclesiastical History was fortunately written for those who wanted to know what really happened, and remains to-day an invaluable repository of Christian antiquities. With the continuations of Socrates, Sozomen and Theodoret, and the Latin manual which Cassiodorus had woven from them (the Historia tripartita), it formed the body of Church history during all the middle ages. An even greater influence, however, was exercised by Eusebius’ Chronica. Through Jerome’s translation and additions, this scheme of this world’s chronology became the basis for all medieval world chronicles. It settled until our own day the succession of years from the Creation to the birth of Christ,—fitting the Old Testament story into that of ancient history. Henceforth the Jewish past,—that one path back to the beginning of the world,—was marked out by the absolute laws of mathematics and revelation. Jerome had marked it out; Sulpicius Severus, the biographer of St Martin, in his Historia sacra, adorned it with the attractions of romance. Sulpicius was admirably fitted to interpret the miraculous Bible story to the middle ages. But there were few who could write like him, and Jerome’s Chronicle itself, or rather portions of it, became, in the age which followed, a sort of universal preface for the monastic chronicler. For a time there were even attempts to continue “imperial chronicles,” but they were insignificant compared with the influence of Eusebius and Jerome.
From the first, Christianity had a philosophy of history. Its earliest apologists sought to show how the world had followed a divine plan in its long preparation for the life of Christ. From this central fact of all history, mankind should continue through war and suffering until the divine plan was completed at the judgment day. The fate of nations is in God’s hands; history is the revelation of His wisdom and power. Whether He intervenes directly by miracle, or merely sets His laws in operation, He is master of men’s fate. This idea, which has underlain all Christian philosophy of history, from the first apologists who prophesied the fall of the Empire and the coming of the millennium, down to our own day, received its classic statement in St Augustine’s City of God. The terrestrial city, whose eternity had been the theme of pagan history, had just fallen before Alaric’s Goths. Augustine’s explanation of its fall passes in review not only the calamities of Roman history—combined with a pathetic perception of its greatness,—but carries the survey back to the origin of evil at the creation. Then over against this civitas terrena he sets the divine city which is to be realized in Christendom. The Roman Empire,—the last general form of the earthly city,—gives way slowly to the heavenly. This is the main thread of Augustine’s philosophy of history. The mathematical demonstration of its truth was left by Augustine for his disciple, Paulus Orosius.
Orosius’ Seven Books of Histories against the Pagans, written as a supplement to the City of God, is the first attempt at a Christian “World History.” This manual for the middle ages arranged the rise and fall of empires with convincing exactness. The history of antiquity, according to it, begins with Ninus. His realm was overthrown by the Medes in the same year in which the history of Rome began. From the first year of Ninus’ reign until the rebuilding of Babylon by Semiramis there were sixty-four years; the same between the first of Procas and the building of Rome. Eleven hundred and sixty-four years after each city was built, it was taken,—Babylon by Cyrus, Rome by Alaric, and Cyrus’ conquest took place just when Rome began the Republic. But before Rome becomes a world empire, Macedon and Carthage intervene, guardians of Rome’s youth (tutor curatorque). This scheme of the four world-monarchies, which was to prevail through all the middle ages, was developed through seven books filled with the story of war and suffering. As it was Orosius’ aim to show that the world had improved since the coming of Christ, he used Trogus Pompeius’ war history, written to exalt Roman triumphs, to show the reverse of victory,—disaster and ruin. Livy, Caesar, Tacitus and Suetonius were plundered for the story of horrors; until finally even the Goths in Spain shine by contrast with the pagan heroes; and through the confusion of the German invasions one may look forward to Christendom,—and its peace.
The commonest form of medieval historical writing was the chronicle, which reaches all the way from monastic annals, mere notes on Easter tables, to the dignity of national monuments. Utterly lacking in perspective, and dominated by the idea of the miraculous, they are for the most part a record of the trivial or the marvellous. Individual historians sometimes recount the story of their own times with sober judgment, but seldom know how to test their sources when dealing with the past. Contradictions are often copied down without the writer noticing them; and since the middle ages forged and falsified so many documents,—monasteries, towns and corporations gaining privileges or titles of possession by the bold use of them,—the narrative of medieval writers cannot be relied upon unless we can verify it by collateral evidence. Some historians, like Otto of Freising, Guibert of Nogent or Bernard Gui, would have been scientific if they had had our appliances for comparison. But even men like Roger Bacon, who deplored the inaccuracy of texts, had worked out no general method to apply in their restoration. Toward the close of the middle ages the vernacular literatures were adorned with Villani’s and Froissart’s chronicles. But the merit of both lies in their journalistic qualities of contemporary narrative. Neither was a history in the truest sense.
The Renaissance marked the first great gain in the historic sense, in the efforts of the humanists to realize the spirit of the antique world. They did not altogether succeed; antiquity to them meant largely Plato and Cicero. Their interests were literary, and the un-Ciceronian centuries were generally ignored. Those in which the foundations of modern Europe were laid, which produced parliaments, cathedrals, cities, Dante and Chaucer, were grouped alike on one dismal level and christened the middle ages. The perspective of the humanists was only one degree better than that of the middle ages. History became the servant to literature, an adjunct to the classics. Thus it passed into the schools, where text-books still in use devote 200 pages to the Peloponnesian war and two to the Athens of Pericles.
But if the literary side of humanism has been a barrier to the progress of scientific history, the discovery and elucidation of texts first made that progress possible. Historical criticism soon awoke. Laurentius Valla’s brilliant attack on the “Donation of Constantine” (1440), and Ulrich von Hutten’s rehabilitation of Henry IV. from monkish tales mark the rise of the new science. One sees at a glance what an engine of controversy it was to be; yet for a while it remained but a phase of humanism. It was north of the Alps that it parted company with the grammarians. Classical antiquity was an Italian past, the German scholars turned back to the sources of their national history. Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini (Pius II.) had discovered Otto of Freising and Jordanes. Maximilian I. encouraged the search for manuscripts, and Vienna became a great humanistic centre. Conrad Celtes left his Germania illustrata unfinished, but he had found the works of Hroswitha. Conrad Peutinger gathered all sorts of Chronicles in his room in Vienna, and published several,—among them Gregory of Tours. This national movement of the 15th century was not paralleled in France or England, where the classical humanities reigned. The Reformation meanwhile gave another turn to the work of German scholars.
The Reformation, with its heated controversies, seems a strange starting-point for science, yet it, even more than the Renaissance, brought out scientific methods of historical investigation. It not only sobered the humanist tendency to sacrifice truth for aesthetic effect, it called for the documents of the Church and subjected them to the most hostile criticism. Luther himself challenged them. Then in the Magdeburg Centuries (1559-1574) Protestantism tried to make good its attack on the medieval Church by a great collection of sources accompanied with much destructive criticism. This gigantic work is the first monument of modern historical research. The reply of Cardinal Baronius (Annales ecclesiastici, 1588-1697) was a still greater collection, drawn from archives which till then had not been used for scientific history. Baronius’ criticism and texts are faulty, though far surpassing anything before his day, and his collection is the basis for most subsequent ones,—in spite of J. J. Scaliger’s refutation, which was to contain an equal number of volumes of the errors in Baronius.