How the past has been written

The plague and the inquiry

In the summer of 430 BC, in the second year of the war between Athens and Sparta, farm families from the countryside crowded inside the walls of Athens, and a sickness began, first in the port of the Piraeus. It came back in 427 BC, and it killed the Athenian leader Pericles in 429. No one knows how many died; the usual guess is something like a quarter of the people it touched. A man of about thirty caught it and lived, and years afterward he wrote that he would “simply set down its nature, and explain the symptoms by which perhaps it may be recognized by the student, if it should ever break out again.” He added, in the 1874 English version of Richard Crawley: “I had the disease myself, and watched its operation in the case of others.” His name was Thucydides.

Modern doctors still disagree about what the disease was. Typhoid, typhus, measles, smallpox, and even an Ebola-like fever have been proposed. That is itself instructive. A description written to be useful, by a man who was careful about what he had seen, still cannot settle the question twenty-four centuries later. But he understood what a record is for: recognition by someone who was not there.

Two founding gestures

Lesson 1 met Herodotus, born about 484 BC. Thucydides, born about 460 BC, never names him, but he corrects him. At 1.20 he lists popular errors, among them that the Spartan army has a company called the Pitanate company, “there being simply no such thing.” In Herodotus (9.53) a Spartan officer commands “the Pitanate cohort” at Plataea in 479 BC. Thucydides had served as an Athenian general, failed in the winter of 424–423 BC to save the city of Amphipolis from the Spartan Brasidas, and was exiled for twenty years, as he says himself. He used the exile to write his history of the war, which breaks off in 411 BC, in the middle of the war.

The two men set the pattern for how the West wrote the past, and they did it in different ways. Herodotus asks widely: about customs, rivers, kings, the reasons nations fought. He reports what is said, and says so. Thucydides narrows. He takes one war, one that he lived through, and sets out his rules in the one chapter (1.22) that every historian is taught. Reports, his own and other people’s, were tried “by the most severe and detailed tests possible,” and he says the absence of the fabulous may make his book less pleasing to the ear. He wants it to be “a possession for all time,” not the applause of the moment. He is honest about a limit: speeches could not be remembered word for word, so he made speakers say what, in his opinion, the occasion demanded.

The series this course draws on reads the difference as a difference in time. Herodotus, it says, has “episodic time”: each story makes its own time, and the stories are laid side by side. Thucydides invents “linear time,” a single line along which everything is put in order. In this course’s reading, that is a useful caricature and no more. Herodotus does reckon time. He counts in reigns (Croesus ruled fourteen years), in generations (the Egyptian priests, he says, counted 341 generations of men since their first king, 2.142), and by a spine of Persian kings from Cyrus to Xerxes. What Thucydides added was a rule and an argument. The rule: his war is told in a continuous grid of summers and winters. The argument: dating by lists of local officials is unreliable. At 2.2 he shows what that looked like. To date the Theban attack on Plataea in the spring of 431 BC he gives three local dates at once, the priestess at Argos, an official in Sparta, and the Athenian archon, and at 5.20 he explains why he refuses to count that way.

The Chinese tradition had a year-by-year grid long before. The Chunqiu (春秋, Spring and Autumn Annals) is the court chronicle of the state of Lu, running from 722 to 481 BC, 242 years in terse entries of about ten characters each. The Zuozhuan (左传) tells the stories behind them, including the Qi and Jin scenes of Lesson 1. So “linear time” was not a Greek discovery. What was new in Greece was an author saying openly how he chose and tested.

A history with God in it

Augustine of Hippo (354–430) wrote his Confessions about 397 to 400, and The City of God between about 413 and 426, after Alaric’s troops sacked Rome in 410 and Christians were blamed for the disaster. His answer was a history. The world, he said, holds two cities, the city of God and the earthly city, “entangled together in this world, and intermixed until the last judgment effects their separation,” in the English of Marcus Dods (1.35). The Latin word there is saeculum, an old word for a lifetime or generation, which Christian writers used for “this present age.” The series this course draws on says Augustine coined the word, and that he turned time into space. Neither is quite right. Augustine did not invent saeculum, and in his book it is still time: the present age, with a beginning, a course, and an end. The two cities share it until the end.

What is true is that Augustine fixed a frame. History runs in a straight line, from Creation through the Fall and Christ to the Judgment, and it happens once. He rejected the pagan notion that the same events recur in a great cycle: once, he wrote, Christ died for our sins, and rising from the dead he dies no more. In this course’s reading, medieval historians therefore treated events as scenes in a plan already known to God, with people acting in the foreground. That is one reading, and it should not be made too strong. Medieval writers kept careful year-by-year records. Bede, in England, spread the practice of counting years from the birth of Christ (De temporum ratione, 725), and in the Ecclesiastical History (about 731) he named his sources. Otto of Freising wrote a chronicle on Augustine’s two cities in the 1140s. Thomas Aquinas (about 1225–1274), the other great name in the lecture series’ account, was a theologian rather than a historian. He stopped writing his Summa Theologiae, unfinished, on 6 December 1273, saying that all he had written seemed to him like straw, and he died on 7 March 1274.

A mirror for the present

A thousand years after Augustine, a new set of readers turned back to the ancient world with a different question. Petrarch (1304–1374), the Italian poet crowned on the Capitoline Hill in 1341, found a manuscript of Cicero’s letters in the cathedral library at Verona in 1345 and wrote letters back to the dead author. He treated antiquity as a light and his own age as a shadow, and the image of the “dark ages” came later from that habit. Leonardo Bruni (1369–1444) began his History of the Florentine People in 1415, modeled on Livy; the city published it in 1442.

The sharpest scene is in Naples, in 1439–40. Lorenzo Valla (about 1407–1457), who worked for King Alfonso of Aragon, then in conflict with the pope, took up a document that claimed that the Emperor Constantine, in the fourth century, had given Pope Sylvester and his successors Rome and the western provinces. Valla did not argue from doctrine. He argued from language and from dates. The Latin was barbarous, he said, and unlike anything a Roman of Constantine’s age would write; it used words such as “satrap” that did not fit; and its internal dating was impossible. He showed that the Donation was a forgery. Scholars place its writing about the middle of the eighth century. (Nicholas of Cusa had expressed doubts a few years earlier, about 1433; Valla’s was the most thorough case.) The point for historians is the method. Valla found that a document’s own words can betray when it was written.

The Renaissance humanists also had a purpose for the ancient past: imitation. Reading Plutarch and Livy, they looked for models of character, and the aim of a history was to supply examples. The idea is old. Cicero, in On the Orator (55 BC), called history “the witness of the times, the light of truth, the life of memory, the teacher of life, the messenger of antiquity.” (He was praising oratory, which hands history on, not historians.) The Latin phrase for “teacher of life,” magistra vitae, became a motto for two thousand years. Reinhart Koselleck argued in a famous essay in 1967 that it faded only when people began to see history as unrepeatable and accelerating, so that last century’s examples no longer fit.

Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592), mayor of Bordeaux from 1581 to 1585, wrote his Essays (first published in 1580, enlarged in 1588) by thinking with ancient authors, quoting them constantly. The series says his aim was to show models, as Francis Bacon’s Essays (1597, 1612, 1625) offered counsel. That is half right. Montaigne’s own aim, he said in the preface, was himself: “I am myself the matter of my book.” Erasmus (about 1466–1536), the other great humanist the series names, published his Adages in 1500 with about 800 sayings and enlarged it until the 1536 edition had 4,151; In Praise of Folly was written in 1509 and printed in 1511. In this course’s reading, what these writers share is a past that is treated as alive, a conversation partner and not a closed account. It is a reading, not a technical term.

China had its own tradition of the mirror. Emperor Taizong of Tang is recorded as saying after the death of his minister Wei Zheng in early 643: “With bronze as a mirror you can straighten your cap; with antiquity as a mirror you can know rise and fall; with men as a mirror you can see gain and loss. I always kept these three mirrors to guard against my own faults. Now Wei Zheng is gone, and I have lost one mirror.” (The words are in the Old Book of Tang: 以古为镜，可以知兴替. The modern slogan with “history” instead of “antiquity” is a paraphrase.) And about 1084, Sima Guang (1019–1086) presented the Zizhi tongjian (资治通鉴), “Comprehensive Mirror to Aid Governance,” a title the emperor Shenzong gave it in 1067: 294 chapters, from 403 BC to 959 AD, arranged year by year, with an extra thirty chapters to explain discrepancies among the sources.

Context

The series gives René Descartes (1596–1650) a large role in what happened next, and with some irony: in the Discourse on the Method (1637) Descartes admits that the memorable deeds of history lift the mind, but says that even the most faithful histories leave out “the meanest and least striking” circumstances, so that those who take examples from them risk the extravagances of the knights of romance. The historian most often tied to the rational Enlightenment is Charles-Louis de Secondat, baron de Montesquieu (1689–1755). In Considerations on the Romans (1734) he argued that history is not ruled by chance: there are general causes, moral and physical, and if the accident of a battle ruined a state, a deeper cause had made it ready to fall by a single battle. In The Spirit of the Laws (1748) he related laws to climate, soil, religion, customs, and trade. A claim in the lecture series needs correcting: the book did not found the Continental civil-law system. That descends from Justinian’s Roman law (529–534), the medieval common law of Europe, and codes such as the French Code civil of 1804. Montesquieu’s real legacy is the idea of causes beyond the single event and the separation of powers, which James Madison, in Federalist 47, attributed to “the celebrated Montesquieu.”

Others widened the frame. Voltaire’s Essay on the Customs and Spirit of the Nations (Essai sur les mœurs, 1756) treated China, India, Islam, and the New World, and looked for customs rather than dynasties. Edward Gibbon said the idea of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire came to him on 15 October 1764 as he sat musing among the ruins of the Capitol in Rome; the six volumes appeared from 1776 to 1788. Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803) argued that each people has its own “center of gravity” and its own measure of what is good, and should not be judged by another’s. From these strands came what the Germans called Historismus, the view that each age or culture must be understood on its own terms. Leopold von Ranke put it in lectures to King Maximilian II of Bavaria in 1854: every epoch stands in direct relation to God, and its value lies in what it is, not in what comes of it.

In the nineteenth century this produced vast works, each built on a different context. Johann Gustav Droysen’s history of Hellenism (1836–43; he coined the word), Ernst Curtius’s history of Greece (1857–67), and Theodor Mommsen’s History of Rome (1854–56, and later; Nobel Prize in Literature 1902) are only three. Each historian found a different Greece or Rome because each picked a different context. In this course’s reading, that is the point: an event gets its meaning from the web it sits in. A word of care, though. “Historicism” in English also names a different thing, Karl Popper’s target in The Poverty of Historicism (1957): the belief that history follows laws toward a known end. Lesson 4 returns to that.

Three clocks

The twentieth century brought a revolt against the history of kings and battles. In 1929, at Strasbourg, two French historians, Marc Bloch (1886–1944) and Lucien Febvre (1878–1956), founded a journal, Annales d’histoire économique et sociale, to write about economies, climates, and ordinary people. Bloch wrote in The Historian’s Craft, a book he left unfinished, that misunderstanding of the present is the inevitable consequence of ignorance of the past. The Gestapo arrested him in March 1944 and shot him on 16 June; the book was published in 1949.

The Annales school’s best-known work was written by a prisoner. Fernand Braudel (1902–1985) was captured in June 1940 and spent the rest of the war in German officers’ camps, first at Mainz and then near Lübeck. There he wrote a doctoral thesis on the Mediterranean in the age of Philip II, in school exercise books, largely from memory, sending the pages to Febvre. (The legend of “entirely from memory” overstates it: he revised after the war.) He defended it in 1947, and it appeared in 1949. Braudel’s book had three parts, for three kinds of time. The first is almost motionless: the sea, the mountains, the plains, the way grain, olive, and vine shaped life around the water. The second is slow, in cycles of decades: prices, trade, population. The third is the time of events: battles, treaties, the deaths of kings. In 1958 he named the slowest of these in a famous article, la longue durée, the long duration.

The point of the three clocks is not that events do not matter, but that each speed shows something the others hide. A newspaper sees only the fast clock. The historian of the long duration asks why the same grain routes, the same mountain passes, the same crossings keep mattering for centuries. This is how history grows larger than the doings of rulers. And once you have a clock slower than a lifetime, a question becomes hard to avoid: how slow a clock, and how large a frame, can history use? Braudel’s slowest clock still ticks in millennia. In the next lesson, the clock is run back to the beginning of time.