IV

IT is evident that here Thucydides is ready to admit the variety of

manifestations which external causes bring about in their workings on the

uniform character of the nature of man. Yet, after all is said, these

are perhaps but very general statements: the ordinary effects of peace

and war are dwelt on, but there is no real analysis of the immediate

causes and general laws of the phenomena of life, nor does Thucydides

seem to recognise the truth that if humanity proceeds in circles, the

circles are always widening.

Perhaps we may say that with him the philosophy of history is partly in

the metaphysical stage, and see, in the progress of this idea from

Herodotus to Polybius, the exemplification of the Comtian Law of the

three stages of thought, the theological, the metaphysical, and the

scientific: for truly out of the vagueness of theological mysticism this

conception which we call the Philosophy of History was raised to a

scientific principle, according to which the past was explained and the

future predicted by reference to general laws.

Now, just as the earliest account of the nature of the progress of

humanity is to be found in Plato, so in him we find the first explicit

attempt to found a universal philosophy of history upon wide rational

grounds. Having created an ideally perfect state, the philosopher

proceeds to give an elaborate theory of the complex causes which produce

revolutions, of the moral effects of various forms of government and

education, of the rise of the criminal classes and their connection with

pauperism, and, in a word, to create history by the deductive method and

to proceed from _a priori_ psychological principles to discover the

governing laws of the apparent chaos of political life.

There have been many attempts since Plato to deduce from a single

philosophical principle all the phenomena which experience subsequently

verifies for us. Fichte thought he could predict the world-plan from the

idea of universal time. Hegel dreamed he had found the key to the

mysteries of life in the development of freedom, and Krause in the

categories of being. But the one scientific basis on which the true

philosophy of history must rest is the complete knowledge of the laws of

human nature in all its wants, its aspirations, its powers and its

tendencies: and this great truth, which Thucydides may be said in some

measure to have apprehended, was given to us first by Plato.

Now, it cannot be accurately said of this philosopher that either his

philosophy or his history is entirely and simply _a priori_. _On est de

son siècle même quand on y proteste_, and so we find in him continual

references to the Spartan mode of life, the Pythagorean system, the

general characteristics of Greek tyrannies and Greek democracies. For

while, in his account of the method of forming an ideal state, he says

that the political artist is indeed to fix his gaze on the sun of

abstract truth in the heavens of the pure reason, but is sometimes to

turn to the realisation of the ideals on earth: yet, after all, the

general character of the Platonic method, which is what we are specially

concerned with, is essentially deductive and _a priori_. And he himself,

in the building up of his Nephelococcygia, certainly starts with a

_καθαρὸς πίναξ_, making a clean sweep of all history and all experience;

and it was essentially as an _a priori_ theorist that he is criticised by

Aristotle, as we shall see later.

To proceed to closer details regarding the actual scheme of the laws of

political revolutions as drawn out by Plato, we must first note that the

primary cause of the decay of the ideal state is the general principle,

common to the vegetable and animal worlds as well as to the world of

history, that all created things are fated to decay—a principle which,

though expressed in the terms of a mere metaphysical abstraction, is yet

perhaps in its essence scientific. For we too must hold that a

continuous redistribution of matter and motion is the inevitable result

of the nominal persistence of Force, and that perfect equilibrium is as

impossible in politics as it certainly is in physics.

The secondary causes which mar the perfection of the Platonic ‘city of

the sun’ are to be found in the intellectual decay of the race consequent

on injudicious marriages and in the Philistine elevation of physical

achievements over mental culture; while the hierarchical succession of

Timocracy and Oligarchy, Democracy and Tyranny, is dwelt on at great

length and its causes analysed in a very dramatic and psychological

manner, if not in that sanctioned by the actual order of history.

And indeed it is apparent at first sight that the Platonic succession of

states represents rather the succession of ideas in the philosophic mind

than any historical succession of time.

Aristotle meets the whole simply by an appeal to facts. If the theory of

the periodic decay of all created things, he urges, be scientific, it

must be universal, and so true of all the other states as well as of the

ideal. Besides, a state usually changes into its contrary and not to the

form next to it; so the ideal state would not change into Timocracy;

while Oligarchy, more often than Tyranny, succeeds Democracy. Plato,

besides, says nothing of what a Tyranny would change to. According to

the cycle theory it ought to pass into the ideal state again, but as a

fact one Tyranny is changed into another as at Sicyon, or into a

Democracy as at Syracuse, or into an Aristocracy as at Carthage. The

example of Sicily, too, shows that an Oligarchy is often followed by a

Tyranny, as at Leontini and Gela. Besides, it is absurd to represent

greed as the chief motive of decay, or to talk of avarice as the root of

Oligarchy, when in nearly all true oligarchies money-making is forbidden

by law. And finally the Platonic theory neglects the different kinds of

democracies and of tyrannies.

Now nothing can be more important than this passage in Aristotle’s

_Politics_ (_v._ 12.), which may he said to mark an era in the evolution

of historical criticism. For there is nothing on which Aristotle insists

so strongly as that the generalisations from facts ought to be added to

the data of the _a priori_ method—a principle which we know to be true

not merely of deductive speculative politics but of physics also: for are

not the residual phenomena of chemists a valuable source of improvement

in theory?

His own method is essentially historical though by no means empirical.

On the contrary, this far-seeing thinker, rightly styled _il maestro di

color che sanno_, may be said to have apprehended clearly that the true

method is neither exclusively empirical nor exclusively speculative, but

rather a union of both in the process called Analysis or the

Interpretation of Facts, which has been defined as the application to

facts of such general conceptions as may fix the important

characteristics of the phenomena, and present them permanently in their

true relations. He too was the first to point out, what even in our own

day is incompletely appreciated, that nature, including the development

of man, is not full of incoherent episodes like a bad tragedy, that

inconsistency and anomaly are as impossible in the moral as they are in

the physical world, and that where the superficial observer thinks he

sees a revolution the philosophical critic discerns merely the gradual

and rational evolution of the inevitable results of certain antecedents.

And while admitting the necessity of a psychological basis for the

philosophy of history, he added to it the important truth that man, to be

apprehended in his proper position in the universe as well as in his

natural powers, must be studied from below in the hierarchical

progression of higher function from the lower forms of life. The

important maxim, that to obtain a clear conception of anything we must

‘study it in its growth from the very beginning,’ is formally set down in

the opening of the _Politics_, where, indeed, we shall find the other

characteristic features of the modern Evolutionary theory, such as the

‘Differentiation of Function’ and the ‘Survival of the Fittest’

explicitly set forth.

What a valuable step this was in the improvement of the method of

historical criticism it is needless to point out. By it, one may say,

the true thread was given to guide one’s steps through the bewildering

labyrinth of facts. For history (to use terms with which Aristotle has

made us familiar) may be looked at from two essentially different

standpoints; either as a work of art whose _τέλος_ or final cause is

external to it and imposed on it from without; or as an organism

containing the law of its own development in itself, and working out its

perfection merely by the fact of being what it is. Now, if we adopt the

former, which we may style the theological view, we shall be in continual

danger of tripping into the pitfall of some _a priori_ conclusion—that

bourne from which, it has been truly said, no traveller ever returns.

The latter is the only scientific theory and was apprehended in its

fulness by Aristotle, whose application of the inductive method to

history, and whose employment of the evolutionary theory of humanity,

show that he was conscious that the philosophy of history is nothing

separate from the facts of history but is contained in them, and that the

rational law of the complex phenomena of life, like the ideal in the

world of thought, is to be reached through the facts, not superimposed on

them—_κατὰ πολλῶν_ not _παρὰ πολλά_.

And finally, in estimating the enormous debt which the science of

historical criticism owes to Aristotle, we must not pass over his

attitude towards those two great difficulties in the formation of a

philosophy of history on which I have touched above. I mean the

assertion of extra-natural interference with the normal development of

the world and of the incalculable influence exercised by the power of

free will.

Now, as regards the former, he may be said to have neglected it entirely.

The special acts of providence proceeding from God’s immediate government

of the world, which Herodotus saw as mighty landmarks in history, would

have been to him essentially disturbing elements in that universal reign

of law, the extent of whose limitless empire he of all the great thinkers

of antiquity was the first explicitly to recognise.

Standing aloof from the popular religion as well as from the deeper

conceptions of Herodotus and the Tragic School, he no longer thought of

God as of one with fair limbs and treacherous face haunting wood and

glade, nor would he see in him a jealous judge continually interfering in

the world’s history to bring the wicked to punishment and the proud to a

fall. God to him was the incarnation of the pure Intellect, a being

whose activity was the contemplation of his own perfection, one whom

Philosophy might imitate but whom prayers could never move, to the

sublime indifference of whose passionless wisdom what were the sons of

men, their desires or their sins? While, as regards the other difficulty

and the formation of a philosophy of history, the conflict of free will

with general laws appears first in Greek thought in the usual theological

form in which all great ideas seem to be cradled at their birth.

It was such legends as those of Œdipus and Adrastus, exemplifying the

struggles of individual humanity against the overpowering force of

circumstances and necessity, which gave to the early Greeks those same

lessons which we of modern days draw, in somewhat less artistic fashion,

from the study of statistics and the laws of physiology.

In Aristotle, of course, there is no trace of supernatural influence.

The Furies, which drive their victim into sin first and then punishment,

are no longer ‘viper-tressed goddesses with eyes and mouth aflame,’ but

those evil thoughts which harbour within the impure soul. In this, as in

all other points, to arrive at Aristotle is to reach the pure atmosphere

of scientific and modern thought.

But while he rejected pure necessitarianism in its crude form as

essentially a _reductio ad absurdum_ of life, he was fully conscious of

the fact that the will is not a mysterious and ultimate unit of force

beyond which we cannot go and whose special characteristic is

inconsistency, but a certain creative attitude of the mind which is, from

the first, continually influenced by habits, education and circumstance;

so absolutely modifiable, in a word, that the good and the bad man alike

seem to lose the power of free will; for the one is morally unable to

sin, the other physically incapacitated for reformation.

And of the influence of climate and temperature in forming the nature of

man (a conception perhaps pressed too far in modern days when the ‘race

theory’ is supposed to be a sufficient explanation of the Hindoo, and the

latitude and longitude of a country the best guide to its morals {57})

Aristotle is completely unaware. I do not allude to such smaller points

as the oligarchical tendencies of a horse-breeding country and the

democratic influence of the proximity of the sea (important though they

are for the consideration of Greek history), but rather to those wider

views in the seventh book of his _Politics_, where he attributes the

happy union in the Greek character of intellectual attainments with the

spirit of progress to the temperate climate they enjoyed, and points out

how the extreme cold of the north dulls the mental faculties of its

inhabitants and renders them incapable of social organisation or extended

empire; while to the enervating heat of eastern countries was due that

want of spirit and bravery which then, as now, was the characteristic of

the population in that quarter of the globe.

Thucydides has shown the causal connection between political revolutions

and the fertility of the soil, but goes a step farther and points out the

psychological influences on a people’s character exercised by the various

extremes of climate—in both cases the first appearance of a most valuable

form of historical criticism.

To the development of Dialectic, as to God, intervals of time are of no

account. From Plato and Aristotle we pass direct to Polybius.

The progress of thought from the philosopher of the Academe to the

Arcadian historian may be best illustrated by a comparison of the method

by which each of the three writers, whom I have selected as the highest

expression of the rationalism of his respective age, attained to his

ideal state: for the latter conception may be in a measure regarded as

representing the most spiritual principle which they could discern in

history.

Now, Plato created his on _a priori_ principles; Aristotle formed his by

an analysis of existing constitutions; Polybius found his realised for

him in the actual world of fact. Aristotle criticised the deductive

speculations of Plato by means of inductive negative instances, but

Polybius will not take the ‘Cloud City’ of the _Republic_ into account at

all. He compares it to an athlete who has never run on ‘Constitution

Hill,’ to a statue so beautiful that it is entirely removed from the

ordinary conditions of humanity, and consequently from the canons of

criticism.

The Roman state had attained in his eyes, by means of the mutual

counteraction of three opposing forces, {59} that stable equilibrium in

politics which was the ideal of all the theoretical writers of antiquity.

And in connection with this point it will be convenient to notice here

how much truth there is contained in the accusation often brought against

the ancients that they knew nothing of the idea of Progress, for the

meaning of many of their speculations will be hidden from us if we do not

try and comprehend first what their aim was, and secondly why it was so.

Now, like all wide generalities, this statement is at least inaccurate.

The prayer of Plato’s ideal City—_ἐξ ἀγαθῶν ἀμείνους_, _καὶ ἐξ ὠφελιμῶν

ὠφελιμωτέρους ἀεὶ τοὺς ἐκγόνους γίγνεσθαι_, might be written as a text

over the door of the last Temple to Humanity raised by the disciples of

Fourier and Saint-Simon, but it is certainly true that their ideal

principle was order and permanence, not indefinite progress. For,

setting aside the artistic prejudices which would have led the Greeks to

reject this idea of unlimited improvement, we may note that the modern

conception of progress rests partly on the new enthusiasm and worship of

humanity, partly on the splendid hopes of material improvements in

civilisation which applied science has held out to us, two influences

from which ancient Greek thought seems to have been strangely free. For

the Greeks marred the perfect humanism of the great men whom they

worshipped, by imputing to them divinity and its supernatural powers;

while their science was eminently speculative and often almost mystic in

its character, aiming at culture and not utility, at higher spirituality

and more intense reverence for law, rather than at the increased

facilities of locomotion and the cheap production of common things about

which our modern scientific school ceases not to boast. And lastly, and

perhaps chiefly, we must remember that the ‘plague spot of all Greek

states,’ as one of their own writers has called it, was the terrible

insecurity to life and property which resulted from the factions and

revolutions which ceased not to trouble Greece at all times, raising a

spirit of fanaticism such as religion raised in the middle ages of

Europe.

These considerations, then, will enable us to understand first how it was

that, radical and unscrupulous reformers as the Greek political theorists

were, yet, their end once attained, no modern conservatives raised such

outcry against the slightest innovation. Even acknowledged improvements

in such things as the games of children or the modes of music were

regarded by them with feelings of extreme apprehension as the herald of

the _drapeau rouge_ of reform. And secondly, it will show us how it was

that Polybius found his ideal in the commonwealth of Rome, and Aristotle,

like Mr. Bright, in the middle classes. Polybius, however, is not

content merely with pointing out his ideal state, but enters at

considerable length into the question of those general laws whose

consideration forms the chief essential of the philosophy of history.

He starts by accepting the general principle that all things are fated to

decay (which I noticed in the case of Plato), and that ‘as iron produces

rust and as wood breeds the animals that destroy it, so every state has

in it the seeds of its own corruption.’ He is not, however, content to

rest there, but proceeds to deal with the more immediate causes of

revolutions, which he says are twofold in nature, either external or

internal. Now, the former, depending as they do on the synchronous

conjunction of other events outside the sphere of scientific estimation,

are from their very character incalculable; but the latter, though

assuming many forms, always result from the over-great preponderance of

any single element to the detriment of the others, the rational law lying

at the base of all varieties of political changes being that stability

can result only from the statical equilibrium produced by the

counteraction of opposing parts, since the more simple a constitution is

the more it is insecure. Plato had pointed out before how the extreme

liberty of a democracy always resulted in despotism, but Polybius

analyses the law and shows the scientific principles on which it rests.

The doctrine of the instability of pure constitutions forms an important

era in the philosophy of history. Its special applicability to the

politics of our own day has been illustrated in the rise of the great

Napoleon, when the French state had lost those divisions of caste and

prejudice, of landed aristocracy and moneyed interest, institutions in

which the vulgar see only barriers to Liberty but which are indeed the

only possible defences against the coming of that periodic Sirius of

politics, the _τύραννος ἐκ προστατικῆς ῥίζης_.

There is a principle which Tocqueville never wearies of explaining, and

which has been subsumed by Mr. Herbert Spencer under that general law

common to all organic bodies which we call the Instability of the

Homogeneous. The various manifestations of this law, as shown in the

normal, regular revolutions and evolutions of the different forms of

government, {63a} are expounded with great clearness by Polybius, who

claimed for his theory, in the Thucydidean spirit, that it is a _κτῆμα ἐς

ἀεί_, not a mere _ἀγώνισμα ἐς τὸ παραχρῆμα_, and that a knowledge of it

will enable the impartial observer {63b} to discover at any time what

period of its constitutional evolution any particular state has already

reached and into what form it will be next differentiated, though

possibly the exact time of the changes may be more or less uncertain.

{63c}

Now in this necessarily incomplete account of the laws of political

revolutions as expounded by Polybius enough perhaps has been said to show

what is his true position in the rational development of the ‘Idea’ which

I have called the Philosophy of History, because it is the unifying of

history. Seen darkly as it is through the glass of religion in the pages

of Herodotus, more metaphysical than scientific with Thucydides, Plato

strove to seize it by the eagle-flight of speculation, to reach it with

the eager grasp of a soul impatient of those slower and surer inductive

methods which Aristotle, in his trenchant criticism of his greater

master, showed were more brilliant than any vague theory, if the test of

brilliancy is truth.

What then is the position of Polybius? Does any new method remain for

him? Polybius was one of those many men who are born too late to be

original. To Thucydides belongs the honour of being the first in the

history of Greek thought to discern the supreme calm of law and order

underlying the fitful storms of life, and Plato and Aristotle each

represents a great new principle. To Polybius belongs the office—how

noble an office he made it his writings show—of making more explicit the

ideas which were implicit in his predecessors, of showing that they were

of wider applicability and perhaps of deeper meaning than they had seemed

before, of examining with more minuteness the laws which they had

discovered, and finally of pointing out more clearly than any one had

done the range of science and the means it offered for analysing the

present and predicting what was to come. His office thus was to gather

up what they had left, to give their principles new life by a wider

application.

Polybius ends this great diapason of Greek thought. When the Philosophy

of history appears next, as in Plutarch’s tract on ‘Why God’s anger is

delayed,’ the pendulum of thought had swung back to where it began. His

theory was introduced to the Romans under the cultured style of Cicero,

and was welcomed by them as the philosophical panegyric of their state.

The last notice of it in Latin literature is in the pages of Tacitus, who

alludes to the stable polity formed out of these elements as a

constitution easier to commend than to produce and in no case lasting.

Yet Polybius had seen the future with no uncertain eye, and had

prophesied the rise of the Empire from the unbalanced power of the

ochlocracy fifty years and more before there was joy in the Julian

household over the birth of that boy who, born to power as the champion

of the people, died wearing the purple of a king.

No attitude of historical criticism is more important than the means by

which the ancients attained to the philosophy of history. The principle

of heredity can be exemplified in literature as well as in organic life:

Aristotle, Plato and Polybius are the lineal ancestors of Fichte and

Hegel, of Vico and Cousin, of Montesquieu and Tocqueville.

As my aim is not to give an account of historians but to point out those

great thinkers whose methods have furthered the advance of this spirit of

historical criticism, I shall pass over those annalists and chroniclers

who intervened between Thucydides and Polybius. Yet perhaps it may serve

to throw new light on the real nature of this spirit and its intimate

connection with all other forms of advanced thought if I give some

estimate of the character and rise of those many influences prejudicial

to the scientific study of history which cause such a wide gap between

these two historians.

Foremost among these is the growing influence of rhetoric and the

Isocratean school, which seems to have regarded history as an arena for

the display either of pathos or paradoxes, not a scientific investigation

into laws.

The new age is the age of style. The same spirit of exclusive attention

to form which made Euripides often, like Swinburne, prefer music to

meaning and melody to morality, which gave to the later Greek statues

that refined effeminacy, that overstrained gracefulness of attitude, was

felt in the sphere of history. The rules laid down for historical

composition are those relating to the æsthetic value of digressions, the

legality of employing more than one metaphor in the same sentence, and

the like; and historians are ranked not by their power of estimating

evidence but by the goodness of the Greek they write.

I must note also the important influence on literature exercised by

Alexander the Great; for while his travels encouraged the more accurate

research of geography, the very splendour of his achievements seems to

have brought history again into the sphere of romance. The appearance of

all great men in the world is followed invariably by the rise of that

mythopœic spirit and that tendency to look for the marvellous, which is

so fatal to true historical criticism. An Alexander, a Napoleon, a

Francis of Assisi and a Mahomet are thought to be outside the limiting

conditions of rational law, just as comets were supposed to be not very

long ago. While the founding of that city of Alexandria, in which

Western and Eastern thought met with such strange result to both,

diverted the critical tendencies of the Greek spirit into questions of

grammar, philology and the like, the narrow, artificial atmosphere of

that University town (as we may call it) was fatal to the development of

that independent and speculative spirit of research which strikes out new

methods of inquiry, of which historical criticism is one.

The Alexandrines combined a great love of learning with an ignorance of

the true principles of research, an enthusiastic spirit for accumulating

materials with a wonderful incapacity to use them. Not among the hot

sands of Egypt, or the Sophists of Athens, but from the very heart of

Greece rises the man of genius on whose influence in the evolution of the

philosophy of history I have a short time ago dwelt. Born in the serene

and pure air of the clear uplands of Arcadia, Polybius may be said to

reproduce in his work the character of the place which gave him birth.

For, of all the historians—I do not say of antiquity but of all time—none

is more rationalistic than he, none more free from any belief in the

‘visions and omens, the monstrous legends, the grovelling superstitions

and unmanly craving for the supernatural’ (_δεισιδαιμονίας ἀγεννοῦς καὶ

τερατείας γυναικώδους_ {68}) which he himself is compelled to notice as

the characteristics of some of the historians who preceded him.

Fortunate in the land which bore him, he was no less blessed in the

wondrous time of his birth. For, representing in himself the spiritual

supremacy of the Greek intellect and allied in bonds of chivalrous

friendship to the world-conqueror of his day, he seems led as it were by

the hand of Fate ‘to comprehend,’ as has been said, ‘more clearly than

the Romans themselves the historical position of Rome,’ and to discern

with greater insight than all other men could those two great resultants

of ancient civilisation, the material empire of the city of the seven

hills, and the intellectual sovereignty of Hellas.

Before his own day, he says, {69a} the events of the world were

unconnected and separate and the histories confined to particular

countries. Now, for the first time the universal empire of the Romans

rendered a universal history possible. {69b} This, then, is the august

motive of his work: to trace the gradual rise of this Italian city from

the day when the first legion crossed the narrow strait of Messina and

landed on the fertile fields of Sicily to the time when Corinth in the

East and Carthage in the West fell before the resistless wave of empire

and the eagles of Rome passed on the wings of universal victory from

Calpe and the Pillars of Hercules to Syria and the Nile. At the same

time he recognised that the scheme of Rome’s empire was worked out under

the ægis of God’s will. {69c} For, as one of the Middle Age scribes most

truly says, the _τύχη_ of Polybius is that power which we Christians call

God; the second aim, as one may call it, of his history is to point out

the rational and human and natural causes which brought this result,

distinguishing, as we should say, between God’s mediate and immediate

government of the world.

With any direct intervention of God in the normal development of Man, he

will have nothing to do: still less with any idea of chance as a factor

in the phenomena of life. Chance and miracles, he says, are mere

expressions for our ignorance of rational causes. The spirit of

rationalism which we recognised in Herodotus as a vague uncertain

attitude and which appears in Thucydides as a consistent attitude of mind

never argued about or even explained, is by Polybius analysed and

formulated as the great instrument of historical research.

Herodotus, while believing on principle in the supernatural, yet was

sceptical at times. Thucydides simply ignored the supernatural. He did

not discuss it, but he annihilated it by explaining history without it.

Polybius enters at length into the whole question and explains its origin

and the method of treating it. Herodotus would have believed in Scipio’s

dream. Thucydides would have ignored it entirely. Polybius explains it.

He is the culmination of the rational progression of Dialectic.

‘Nothing,’ he says, ‘shows a foolish mind more than the attempt to

account for any phenomena on the principle of chance or supernatural

intervention. History is a search for rational causes, and there is

nothing in the world—even those phenomena which seem to us the most

remote from law and improbable—which is not the logical and inevitable

result of certain rational antecedents.’

Some things, of course, are to be rejected _a priori_ without entering

into the subject: ‘As regards such miracles,’ he says, {71} ‘as that on a

certain statue of Artemis rain or snow never falls though the statue

stands in the open air, or that those who enter God’s shrine in Arcadia

lose their natural shadows, I cannot really be expected to argue upon the

subject. For these things are not only utterly improbable but absolutely

impossible.’

‘For us to argue reasonably on an acknowledged absurdity is as vain a

task as trying to catch water in a sieve; it is really to admit the

possibility of the supernatural, which is the very point at issue.’

What Polybius felt was that to admit the possibility of a miracle is to

annihilate the possibility of history: for just as scientific and

chemical experiments would be either impossible or useless if exposed to

the chance of continued interference on the part of some foreign body, so

the laws and principles which govern history, the causes of phenomena,

the evolution of progress, the whole science, in a word, of man’s

dealings with his own race and with nature, will remain a sealed book to

him who admits the possibility of extra-natural interference.

The stories of miracles, then, are to be rejected on _a priori_ rational

grounds, but in the case of events which we know to have happened the

scientific historian will not rest till he has discovered their natural

causes which, for instance, in the case of the wonderful rise of the

Roman Empire—the most marvellous thing, Polybius says, which God ever

brought about {72a}—are to be found in the excellence of their

constitution (_τῇ ἰδιότητι τῆς πολιτείας_), the wisdom of their advisers,

their splendid military arrangements, and their superstition (_τῇ

δεισιδαιμονίᾳ_). For while Polybius regarded the revealed religion as,

of course, objective reality of truth, {72b} he laid great stress on its

moral subjective influence, going, in one passage on the subject, even so

far as almost to excuse the introduction of the supernatural in very

small quantities into history on account of the extremely good effect it

would have on pious people.

But perhaps there is no passage in the whole of ancient and modern

history which breathes such a manly and splendid spirit of rationalism as

one preserved to us in the Vatican—strange resting-place for it!—in which

he treats of the terrible decay of population which had fallen on his

native land in his own day, and which by the general orthodox public was

regarded as a special judgment of God sending childlessness on women as a

punishment for the sins of the people. For it was a disaster quite

without parallel in the history of the land, and entirely unforeseen by

any of its political-economy writers who, on the contrary, were always

anticipating that danger would arise from an excess of population

overrunning its means of subsistence, and becoming unmanageable through

its size. Polybius, however, will have nothing to do with either priest

or worker of miracles in this matter. He will not even seek that ‘sacred

Heart of Greece,’ Delphi, Apollo’s shrine, whose inspiration even

Thucydides admitted and before whose wisdom Socrates bowed. How foolish,

he says, were the man who on this matter would pray to God. We must

search for the rational causes, and the causes are seen to be clear, and

the method of prevention also. He then proceeds to notice how all this

arose from the general reluctance to marriage and to bearing the expense

of educating a large family which resulted from the carelessness and

avarice of the men of his day, and he explains on entirely rational

principles the whole of this apparently supernatural judgment.

Now, it is to be borne in mind that while his rejection of miracles as

violation of inviolable laws is entirely _a priori_—for discussion of

such a matter is, of course, impossible for a rational thinker—yet his

rejection of supernatural intervention rests entirely on the scientific

grounds of the necessity of looking for natural causes. And he is quite

logical in maintaining his position on these principles. For, where it

is either difficult or impossible to assign any rational cause for

phenomena, or to discover their laws, he acquiesces reluctantly in the

alternative of admitting some extra-natural interference which his

essentially scientific method of treating the matter has logically forced

on him, approving, for instance, of prayers for rain, on the express

ground that the laws of meteorology had not yet been ascertained. He

would, of course, have been the first to welcome our modern discoveries

in the matter. The passage in question is in every way one of the most

interesting in his whole work, not, of course, as signifying any

inclination on his part to acquiesce in the supernatural, but because it

shows how essentially logical and rational his method of argument was,

and how candid and fair his mind.

Having now examined Polybius’s attitude towards the supernatural and the

general ideas which guided his research, I will proceed to examine the

method he pursued in his scientific investigation of the complex

phenomena of life. For, as I have said before in the course of this

essay, what is important in all great writers is not so much the results

they arrive at as the methods they pursue. The increased knowledge of

facts may alter any conclusion in history as in physical science, and the

canons of speculative historical credibility must be acknowledged to

appeal rather to that subjective attitude of mind which we call the

historic sense than to any formulated objective rules. But a scientific

method is a gain for all time, and the true if not the only progress of

historical criticism consists in the improvement of the instruments of

research.

Now first, as regards his conception of history, I have already pointed

out that it was to him essentially a search for causes, a problem to be

solved, not a picture to be painted, a scientific investigation into laws

and tendencies, not a mere romantic account of startling incident and

wondrous adventure. Thucydides, in the opening of his great work, had

sounded the first note of the scientific conception of history. ‘The

absence of romance in my pages,’ he says, ‘will, I fear, detract somewhat

from its value, but I have written my work not to be the exploit of a

passing hour but as the possession of all time.’ {76} Polybius follows

with words almost entirely similar. If, he says, we banish from history

the consideration of causes, methods and motives (_τὸ διὰ τί_, _καὶ πως_,

_καὶ τίνος χάριν_), and refuse to consider how far the result of anything

is its rational consequent, what is left is a mere _ἀγώνισμα_, not a

_μάθημα_, an oratorical essay which may give pleasure for the moment, but

which is entirely without any scientific value for the explanation of the

future. Elsewhere he says that ‘history robbed of the exposition of its

causes and laws is a profitless thing, though it may allure a fool.’ And

all through his history the same point is put forward and exemplified in

every fashion.

So far for the conception of history. Now for the groundwork. As

regards the character of the phenomena to be selected by the scientific

investigator, Aristotle had laid down the general formula that nature

should be studied in her normal manifestations. Polybius, true to his

character of applying explicitly the principles implicit in the work of

others, follows out the doctrine of Aristotle, and lays particular stress

on the rational and undisturbed character of the development of the Roman

constitution as affording special facilities for the discovery of the

laws of its progress. Political revolutions result from causes either

external or internal. The former are mere disturbing forces which lie

outside the sphere of scientific calculation. It is the latter which are

important for the establishing of principles and the elucidation of the

sequences of rational evolution.

He thus may be said to have anticipated one of the most important truths

of the modern methods of investigation: I mean that principle which lays

down that just as the study of physiology should precede the study of

pathology, just as the laws of disease are best discovered by the

phenomena presented in health, so the method of arriving at all great

social and political truths is by the investigation of those cases where

development has been normal, rational and undisturbed.

The critical canon that the more a people has been interfered with, the

more difficult it becomes to generalise the laws of its progress and to

analyse the separate forces of its civilisation, is one the validity of

which is now generally recognised by those who pretend to a scientific

treatment of all history: and while we have seen that Aristotle

anticipated it in a general formula, to Polybius belongs the honour of

being the first to apply it explicitly in the sphere of history.

I have shown how to this great scientific historian the motive of his

work was essentially the search for causes; and true to his analytical

spirit he is careful to examine what a cause really is and in what part

of the antecedents of any consequent it is to be looked for. To give an

illustration: As regards the origin of the war with Perseus, some

assigned as causes the expulsion of Abrupolis by Perseus, the expedition

of the latter to Delphi, the plot against Eumenes and the seizure of the

ambassadors in Bœotia; of these incidents the two former, Polybius points

out, were merely the pretexts, the two latter merely the occasions of the

war. The war was really a legacy left to Perseus by his father, who was

determined to fight it out with Rome. {78}

Here as elsewhere he is not originating any new idea. Thucydides had

pointed out the difference between the real and the alleged cause, and

the Aristotelian dictum about revolutions, _οὐ περὶ μικρῶν ἀλλ’ ἐκ

μικρῶν_, draws the distinction between cause and occasion with the

brilliancy of an epigram. But the explicit and rational investigation of

the difference between _αἰτία_, _ἀρχὴ_, and _πρόφασις_ was reserved for

Polybius. No canon of historical criticism can be said to be of more

real value than that involved in this distinction, and the overlooking of

it has filled our histories with the contemptible accounts of the

intrigues of courtiers and of kings and the petty plottings of backstairs

influence—particulars interesting, no doubt, to those who would ascribe

the Reformation to Anne Boleyn’s pretty face, the Persian war to the

influence of a doctor or a curtain-lecture from Atossa, or the French

Revolution to Madame de Maintenon, but without any value for those who

aim at any scientific treatment of history.

But the question of method, to which I am compelled always to return, is

not yet exhausted. There is another aspect in which it may be regarded,

and I shall now proceed to treat of it.

One of the greatest difficulties with which the modern historian has to

contend is the enormous complexity of the facts which come under his

notice: D’Alembert’s suggestion that at the end of every century a

selection of facts should be made and the rest burned (if it was really

intended seriously) could not, of course, be entertained for a moment. A

problem loses all its value when it becomes simplified, and the world

would be all the poorer if the Sibyl of History burned her volumes.

Besides, as Gibbon pointed out, ‘a Montesquieu will detect in the most

insignificant fact relations which the vulgar overlook.’

Nor can the scientific investigator of history isolate the particular

elements, which he desires to examine, from disturbing and extraneous

causes, as the experimental chemist can do (though sometimes, as in the

case of lunatic asylums and prisons, he is enabled to observe phenomena

in a certain degree of isolation). So he is compelled either to use the

deductive mode of arguing from general laws or to employ the method of

abstraction, which gives a fictitious isolation to phenomena never so

isolated in actual existence. And this is exactly what Polybius has done

as well as Thucydides. For, as has been well remarked, there is in the

works of these two writers a certain plastic unity of type and motive;

whatever they write is penetrated through and through with a specific

quality, a singleness and concentration of purpose, which we may contrast

with the more comprehensive width as manifested not merely in the modern

mind, but also in Herodotus. Thucydides, regarding society as influenced

entirely by political motives, took no account of forces of a different

nature, and consequently his results, like those of most modern political

economists, have to be modified largely {81} before they come to

correspond with what we know was the actual state of fact. Similarly,

Polybius will deal only with those forces which tended to bring the

civilised world under the dominion of Rome (ix. 1), and in the

Thucydidean spirit points out the want of picturesqueness and romance in

his pages which is the result of the abstract method (_τὸ μονοειδὲς τῆς

συντάξεως_) being careful also to tell us that his rejection of all other

forces is essentially deliberate and the result of a preconceived theory

and by no means due to carelessness of any kind.

Now, of the general value of the abstract method and the legality of its

employment in the sphere of history, this is perhaps not the suitable

occasion for any discussion. It is, however, in all ways worthy of note

that Polybius is not merely conscious of, but dwells with particular

weight on, the fact which is usually urged as the strongest objection to

the employment of the abstract method—I mean the conception of a society

as a sort of human organism whose parts are indissolubly connected with

one another and all affected when one member is in any way agitated.

This conception of the organic nature of society appears first in Plato

and Aristotle, who apply it to cities. Polybius, as his wont is, expands

it to be a general characteristic of all history. It is an idea of the

very highest importance, especially to a man like Polybius whose thoughts

are continually turned towards the essential unity of history and the

impossibility of isolation.

Farther, as regards the particular method of investigating that group of

phenomena obtained for him by the abstract method, he will adopt, he

tells us, neither the purely deductive nor the purely inductive mode but

the union of both. In other words, he formally adopts that method of

analysis upon the importance of which I have dwelt before.

And lastly, while, without doubt, enormous simplicity in the elements

under consideration is the result of the employment of the abstract

method, even within the limit thus obtained a certain selection must be

made, and a selection involves a theory. For the facts of life cannot be

tabulated with as great an ease as the colours of birds and insects can

be tabulated. Now, Polybius points out that those phenomena particularly

are to be dwelt on which may serve as a _παράδειγμα_ or sample, and show

the character of the tendencies of the age as clearly as ‘a single drop

from a full cask will be enough to disclose the nature of the whole

contents.’ This recognition of the importance of single facts, not in

themselves but because of the spirit they represent, is extremely

scientific; for we know that from the single bone, or tooth even, the

anatomist can recreate entirely the skeleton of the primeval horse, and

the botanist tell the character of the flora and fauna of a district from

a single specimen.

Regarding truth as ‘the most divine thing in Nature,’ the very ‘eye and

light of history without which it moves a blind thing,’ Polybius spared

no pains in the acquisition of historical materials or in the study of

the sciences of politics and war, which he considered were so essential

to the training of the scientific historian, and the labour he took is

mirrored in the many ways in which he criticises other authorities.

There is something, as a rule, slightly contemptible about ancient

criticism. The modern idea of the critic as the interpreter, the

expounder of the beauty and excellence of the work he selects, seems

quite unknown. Nothing can be more captious or unfair, for instance,

than the method by which Aristotle criticised the ideal state of Plato in

his ethical works, and the passages quoted by Polybius from Timæus show

that the latter historian fully deserved the punning name given to him.

But in Polybius there is, I think, little of that bitterness and

pettiness of spirit which characterises most other writers, and an

incidental story he tells of his relations with one of the historians

whom he criticised shows that he was a man of great courtesy and

refinement of taste—as, indeed, befitted one who had lived always in the

society of those who were of great and noble birth.

Now, as regards the character of the canons by which he criticises the

works of other authors, in the majority of cases he employs simply his

own geographical and military knowledge, showing, for instance, the

impossibility in the accounts given of Nabis’s march from Sparta simply

by his acquaintance with the spots in question; or the inconsistency of

those of the battle of Issus; or of the accounts given by Ephorus of the

battles of Leuctra and Mantinea. In the latter case he says, if any one

will take the trouble to measure out the ground of the site of the battle

and then test the manœuvres given, he will find how inaccurate the

accounts are.

In other cases he appeals to public documents, the importance of which he

was always foremost in recognising; showing, for instance, by a document

in the public archives of Rhodes how inaccurate were the accounts given

of the battle of Lade by Zeno and Antisthenes. Or he appeals to

psychological probability, rejecting, for instance, the scandalous

stories told of Philip of Macedon, simply from the king’s general

greatness of character, and arguing that a boy so well educated and so

respectably connected as Demochares (xii. 14) could never have been

guilty of that of which evil rumour accused him.

But the chief object of his literary censure is Timæus, who had been

unsparing of his strictures on others. The general point which he makes

against him, impugning his accuracy as a historian, is that he derived

his knowledge of history not from the dangerous perils of a life of

action but in the secure indolence of a narrow scholastic life. There

is, indeed, no point on which he is so vehement as this. ‘A history,’ he

says, ‘written in a library gives as lifeless and as inaccurate a picture

of history as a painting which is copied not from a living animal but

from a stuffed one.’

There is more difference, he says in another place, between the history

of an eye-witness and that of one whose knowledge comes from books, than

there is between the scenes of real life and the fictitious landscapes of

theatrical scenery. Besides this, he enters into somewhat elaborate

detailed criticism of passages where he thought Timæus was following a

wrong method and perverting truth, passages which it will be worth while

to examine in detail.

Timæus, from the fact of there being a Roman custom to shoot a war-horse

on a stated day, argued back to the Trojan origin of that people.

Polybius, on the other hand, points out that the inference is quite

unwarrantable, because horse-sacrifices are ordinary institutions common

to all barbarous tribes. Timæus here, as was common with Greek writers,

is arguing back from some custom of the present to an historical event in

the past. Polybius really is employing the comparative method, showing

how the custom was an ordinary step in the civilisation of every early

people.

In another place, {86} he shows how illogical is the scepticism of Timæus

as regards the existence of the Bull of Phalaris simply by appealing to

the statue of the Bull, which was still to be seen in Carthage; pointing

out how impossible it was, on any other theory except that it belonged to

Phalaris, to account for the presence in Carthage of a bull of this

peculiar character with a door between his shoulders. But one of the

great points which he uses against this Sicilian historian is in

reference to the question of the origin of the Locrian colony. In

accordance with the received tradition on the subject, Aristotle had

represented the Locrian colony as founded by some Parthenidæ or slaves’

children, as they were called, a statement which seems to have roused the

indignation of Timæus, who went to a good deal of trouble to confute this

theory. He does so on the following grounds:—

First of all, he points out that in the ancient days the Greeks had no

slaves at all, so the mention of them in the matter is an anachronism;

and next he declares that he was shown in the Greek city of Locris

certain ancient inscriptions in which their relation to the Italian city

was expressed in terms of the position between parent and child, which

showed also that mutual rights of citizenship were accorded to each city.

Besides this, he appeals to various questions of improbability as regards

their international relationship, on which Polybius takes diametrically

opposite grounds which hardly call for discussion. And in favour of his

own view he urges two points more: first, that the Lacedæmonians being

allowed furlough for the purpose of seeing their wives at home, it was

unlikely that the Locrians should not have had the same privilege; and

next, that the Italian Locrians knew nothing of the Aristotelian version

and had, on the contrary, very severe laws against adulterers, runaway

slaves and the like. Now, most of these questions rest on mere

probability, which is always such a subjective canon that an appeal to it

is rarely conclusive. I would note, however, as regards the inscriptions

which, if genuine, would of course have settled the matter, that Polybius

looks on them as a mere invention on the part of Timæus, who, he remarks,

gives no details about them, though, as a rule, he is over-anxious to

give chapter and verse for everything. A somewhat more interesting point

is that where he attacks Timæus for the introduction of fictitious

speeches into his narrative; for on this point Polybius seems to be far

in advance of the opinions held by literary men on the subject not merely

in his own day, but for centuries after.

Herodotus had introduced speeches avowedly dramatic and fictitious.

Thucydides states clearly that, where he was unable to find out what

people really said, he put down what they ought to have said. Sallust

alludes, it is true, to the fact of the speech he puts into the mouth of

the tribune Memmius being essentially genuine, but the speeches given in

the senate on the occasion of the Catilinarian conspiracy are very

different from the same orations as they appear in Cicero. Livy makes

his ancient Romans wrangle and chop logic with all the subtlety of a

Hortensius or a Scævola. And even in later days, when shorthand

reporters attended the debates of the senate and a _Daily News_ was

published in Rome, we find that one of the most celebrated speeches in

Tacitus (that in which the Emperor Claudius gives the Gauls their

freedom) is shown, by an inscription discovered recently at Lugdunum, to

be entirely fabulous.

Upon the other hand, it must be borne in mind that these speeches were

not intended to deceive; they were regarded merely as a certain dramatic

element which it was allowable to introduce into history for the purpose

of giving more life and reality to the narration, and were to be

criticised, not as we should, by arguing how in an age before shorthand

was known such a report was possible or how, in the failure of written

documents, tradition could bring down such an accurate verbal account,

but by the higher test of their psychological probability as regards the

persons in whose mouths they are placed. An ancient historian in answer

to modern criticism would say, probably, that these fictitious speeches

were in reality more truthful than the actual ones, just as Aristotle

claimed for poetry a higher degree of truth in comparison to history.

The whole point is interesting as showing how far in advance of his age

Polybius may be said to have been.

The last scientific historian, it is possible to gather from his writings

what he considered were the characteristics of the ideal writer of

history; and no small light will be thrown on the progress of historical

criticism if we strive to collect and analyse what in Polybius are more

or less scattered expressions. The ideal historian must be contemporary

with the events he describes, or removed from them by one generation

only. Where it is possible, he is to be an eye-witness of what he writes

of; where that is out of his power he is to test all traditions and

stories carefully and not to be ready to accept what is plausible in

place of what is true. He is to be no bookworm living aloof from the

experiences of the world in the artificial isolation of a university

town, but a politician, a soldier, and a traveller, a man not merely of

thought but of action, one who can do great things as well as write of

them, who in the sphere of history could be what Byron and Æschylus were

in the sphere of poetry, at once _le chantre et le héros_.

He is to keep before his eyes the fact that chance is merely a synonym

for our ignorance; that the reign of law pervades the domain of history

as much as it does that of political science. He is to accustom himself

to look on all occasions for rational and natural causes. And while he

is to recognise the practical utility of the supernatural, in an

educational point of view, he is not himself to indulge in such

intellectual beating of the air as to admit the possibility of the

violation of inviolable laws, or to argue in a sphere wherein argument is

_a priori_ annihilated. He is to be free from all bias towards friend

and country; he is to be courteous and gentle in criticism; he is not to

regard history as a mere opportunity for splendid and tragic writing; nor

is he to falsify truth for the sake of a paradox or an epigram.

While acknowledging the importance of particular facts as samples of

higher truths, he is to take a broad and general view of humanity. He is

to deal with the whole race and with the world, not with particular

tribes or separate countries. He is to bear in mind that the world is

really an organism wherein no one part can be moved without the others

being affected also. He is to distinguish between cause and occasion,

between the influence of general laws and particular fancies, and he is

to remember that the greatest lessons of the world are contained in

history and that it is the historian’s duty to manifest them so as to

save nations from following those unwise policies which always lead to

dishonour and ruin, and to teach individuals to apprehend by the

intellectual culture of history those truths which else they would have

to learn in the bitter school of experience.

Now, as regards his theory of the necessity of the historian’s being

contemporary with the events he describes, so far as the historian is a

mere narrator the remark is undoubtedly true. But to appreciate the

harmony and rational position of the facts of a great epoch, to discover

its laws, the causes which produced it and the effects which it

generates, the scene must be viewed from a certain height and distance to

be completely apprehended. A thoroughly contemporary historian such as

Lord Clarendon or Thucydides is in reality part of the history he

criticises; and, in the case of such contemporary historians as Fabius

and Philistus, Polybius in compelled to acknowledge that they are misled

by patriotic and other considerations. Against Polybius himself no such

accusation can be made. He indeed of all men is able, as from some lofty

tower, to discern the whole tendency of the ancient world, the triumph of

Roman institutions and of Greek thought which is the last message of the

old world and, in a more spiritual sense, has become the Gospel of the

new.

One thing indeed he did not see, or if he saw it, he thought but little

of it—how from the East there was spreading over the world, as a wave

spreads, a spiritual inroad of new religions from the time when the

Pessinuntine mother of the gods, a shapeless mass of stone, was brought

to the eternal city by her holiest citizen, to the day when the ship

_Castor and Pollux_ stood in at Puteoli, and St. Paul turned his face

towards martyrdom and victory at Rome. Polybius was able to predict,

from his knowledge of the causes of revolutions and the tendencies of the

various forms of governments, the uprising of that democratic tone of

thought which, as soon as a seed is sown in the murder of the Gracchi and

the exile of Marius, culminated as all democratic movements do culminate,

in the supreme authority of one man, the lordship of the world under the

world’s rightful lord, Caius Julius Cæsar. This, indeed, he saw in no

uncertain way. But the turning of all men’s hearts to the East, the

first glimmering of that splendid dawn which broke over the hills of

Galilee and flooded the earth like wine, was hidden from his eyes.

There are many points in the description of the ideal historian which one

may compare to the picture which Plato has given us of the ideal

philosopher. They are both ‘spectators of all time and all existence.’

Nothing is contemptible in their eyes, for all things have a meaning, and

they both walk in august reasonableness before all men, conscious of the

workings of God yet free from all terror of mendicant priest or vagrant

miracle-worker. But the parallel ends here. For the one stands aloof

from the world-storm of sleet and hail, his eyes fixed on distant and

sunlit heights, loving knowledge for the sake of knowledge and wisdom for

the joy of wisdom, while the other is an eager actor in the world ever

seeking to apply his knowledge to useful things. Both equally desire

truth, but the one because of its utility, the other for its beauty. The

historian regards it as the rational principle of all true history, and

no more. To the other it comes as an all-pervading and mystic

enthusiasm, ‘like the desire of strong wine, the craving of ambition, the

passionate love of what is beautiful.’

Still, though we miss in the historian those higher and more spiritual

qualities which the philosopher of the Academe alone of all men

possessed, we must not blind ourselves to the merits of that great

rationalist who seems to have anticipated the very latest words of modern

science. Nor yet is he to be regarded merely in the narrow light in

which he is estimated by most modern critics, as the explicit champion of

rationalism and nothing more. For he is connected with another idea, the

course of which is as the course of that great river of his native

Arcadia which, springing from some arid and sun-bleached rock, gathers

strength and beauty as it flows till it reaches the asphodel meadows of

Olympia and the light and laughter of Ionian waters.

For in him we can discern the first notes of that great cult of the

seven-hilled city which made Virgil write his epic and Livy his history,

which found in Dante its highest exponent, which dreamed of an Empire

where the Emperor would care for the bodies and the Pope for the souls of

men, and so has passed into the conception of God’s spiritual empire and

the universal brotherhood of man and widened into the huge ocean of

universal thought as the Peneus loses itself in the sea.

Polybius is the last scientific historian of Greece. The writer who

seems fittingly to complete the progress of thought is a writer of

biographies only. I will not here touch on Plutarch’s employment of the

inductive method as shown in his constant use of inscription and statue,

of public document and building and the like, because it involves no new

method. It is his attitude towards miracles of which I desire to treat.

Plutarch is philosophic enough to see that in the sense of a violation of

the laws of nature a miracle is impossible. It is absurd, he says, to

imagine that the statue of a saint can speak, and that an inanimate

object not possessing the vocal organs should be able to utter an

articulate sound. Upon the other hand, he protests against science

imagining that, by explaining the natural causes of things, it has

explained away their transcendental meaning. ‘When the tears on the

cheek of some holy statue have been analysed into the moisture which

certain temperatures produce on wood and marble, it yet by no means

follows that they were not a sign of grief and mourning set there by God

Himself.’ When Lampon saw in the prodigy of the one-horned ram the omen

of the supreme rule of Pericles, and when Anaxagoras showed that the

abnormal development was the rational resultant of the peculiar formation

of the skull, the dreamer and the man of science were both right; it was

the business of the latter to consider how the prodigy came about, of the

former to show why it was so formed and what it so portended. The

progression of thought is exemplified in all particulars. Herodotus had

a glimmering sense of the impossibility of a violation of nature.

Thucydides ignored the supernatural. Polybius rationalised it. Plutarch

raises it to its mystical heights again, though he bases it on law. In a

word, Plutarch felt that while science brings the supernatural down to

the natural, yet ultimately all that is natural is really supernatural.

To him, as to many of our own day, religion was that transcendental

attitude of the mind which, contemplating a world resting on inviolable

law, is yet comforted and seeks to worship God not in the violation but

in the fulfilment of nature.

It may seem paradoxical to quote in connection with the priest of

Chæronea such a pure rationalist as Mr. Herbert Spencer; yet when we read

as the last message of modern science that ‘when the equation of life has

been reduced to its lowest terms the symbols are symbols still,’ mere

signs, that is, of that unknown reality which underlies all matter and

all spirit, we may feel how over the wide strait of centuries thought

calls to thought and how Plutarch has a higher position than is usually

claimed for him in the progress of the Greek intellect.

And, indeed, it seems that not merely the importance of Plutarch himself

but also that of the land of his birth in the evolution of Greek

civilisation has been passed over by modern critics. To us, indeed, the

bare rock to which the Parthenon serves as a crown, and which lies

between Colonus and Attica’s violet hills, will always be the holiest

spot in the land of Greece: and Delphi will come next, and then the

meadows of Eurotas where that noble people lived who represented in

Hellenic thought the reaction of the law of duty against the law of

beauty, the opposition of conduct to culture. Yet, as one stands on the

_σχιστὴ ὁδός_ of Cithæron and looks out on the great double plain of

Boeotia, the enormous importance of the division of Hellas comes to one’s

mind with great force. To the north are Orchomenus and the Minyan

treasure-house, seat of those merchant princes of Phoenicia who brought

to Greece the knowledge of letters and the art of working in gold.

Thebes is at our feet with the gloom of the terrible legends of Greek

tragedy still lingering about it, the birthplace of Pindar, the nurse of

Epaminondas and the Sacred Band.

And from out of the plain where ‘Mars loved to dance,’ rises the Muses’

haunt, Helicon, by whose silver streams Corinna and Hesiod sang; while

far away under the white ægis of those snow-capped mountains lies

Chæronea and the Lion plain where with vain chivalry the Greeks strove to

check Macedon first and afterwards Rome; Chæronea, where in the Martinmas

summer of Greek civilisation Plutarch rose from the drear waste of a

dying religion as the aftermath rises when the mowers think they have

left the field bare.

Greek philosophy began and ended in scepticism: the first and the last

word of Greek history was Faith.

Splendid thus in its death, like winter sunsets, the Greek religion

passed away into the horror of night. For the Cimmerian darkness was at

hand, and when the schools of Athens were closed and the statue of Athena

broken, the Greek spirit passed from the gods and the history of its own

land to the subtleties of defining the doctrine of the Trinity and the

mystical attempts to bring Plato into harmony with Christ and to

reconcile Gethsemane and the Sermon on the Mount with the Athenian prison

and the discussion in the woods of Colonus. The Greek spirit slept for

wellnigh a thousand years. When it woke again, like Antæus it had

gathered strength from the earth where it lay; like Apollo it had lost

none of its divinity through its long servitude.

In the history of Roman thought we nowhere find any of those

characteristics of the Greek Illumination which I have pointed out are

the necessary concomitants of the rise of historical criticism. The

conservative respect for tradition which made the Roman people delight in

the ritual and formulas of law, and is as apparent in their politics as

in their religion, was fatal to any rise of that spirit of revolt against

authority the importance of which, as a factor in intellectual progress,

we have already seen.

The whitened tables of the Pontifices preserved carefully the records of

the eclipses and other atmospherical phenomena, and what we call the art

of verifying dates was known to them at an early time; but there was no

spontaneous rise of physical science to suggest by its analogies of law

and order a new method of research, nor any natural springing up of the

questioning spirit of philosophy with its unification of all phenomena

and all knowledge. At the very time when the whole tide of Eastern

superstition was sweeping into the heart of the Capital the Senate

banished the Greek philosophers from Rome. And of the three systems

which did at length take some root in the city, those of Zeno and

Epicurus were used merely as the rule for the ordering of life, while the

dogmatic scepticism of Carneades, by its very principles, annihilated the

possibility of argument and encouraged a perfect indifference to

research.

Nor were the Romans ever fortunate enough like the Greeks to have to face

the incubus of any dogmatic system of legends and myths, the immoralities

and absurdities of which might excite a revolutionary outbreak of

sceptical criticism. For the Roman religion became as it were

crystallised and isolated from progress at an early period of its

evolution. Their gods remained mere abstractions of commonplace virtues

or uninteresting personifications of the useful things of life. The old

primitive creed was indeed always upheld as a state institution on

account of the enormous facilities it offered for cheating in politics,

but as a spiritual system of belief it was unanimously rejected at a very

early period both by the common people and the educated classes, for the

sensible reason that it was so extremely dull. The former took refuge in

the mystic sensualities of the worship of Isis, the latter in the Stoical

rules of life. The Romans classified their gods carefully in their order

of precedence, analysed their genealogies in the laborious spirit of

modern heraldry, fenced them round with a ritual as intricate as their

law, but never quite cared enough about them to believe in them. So it

was of no account with them when the philosophers announced that Minerva

was merely memory. She had never been much else. Nor did they protest

when Lucretius dared to say of Ceres and of Liber that they were only the

corn of the field and the fruit of the vine. For they had never mourned

for the daughter of Demeter in the asphodel meadows of Sicily, nor

traversed the glades of Cithæron with fawn-skin and with spear.

This brief sketch of the condition of Roman thought will serve to prepare

us for the almost total want of scientific historical criticism which we

shall discern in their literature, and has, besides, afforded fresh

corroboration of the conditions essential to the rise of this spirit, and

of the modes of thought which it reflects and in which it is always to be

found. Roman historical composition had its origin in the pontifical

college of ecclesiastical lawyers, and preserved to its close the

uncritical spirit which characterised its fountain-head. It possessed

from the outset a most voluminous collection of the materials of history,

which, however, produced merely antiquarians, not historians. It is so

hard to use facts, so easy to accumulate them.

Wearied of the dull monotony of the pontifical annals, which dwelt on

little else but the rise and fall in provisions and the eclipses of the

sun, Cato wrote out a history with his own hand for the instruction of

his child, to which he gave the name of Origines, and before his time

some aristocratic families had written histories in Greek much in the

same spirit in which the Germans of the eighteenth century used French as

the literary language. But the first regular Roman historian is Sallust.

Between the extravagant eulogies passed on this author by the French

(such as De Closset), and Dr. Mommsen’s view of him as merely a political

pamphleteer, it is perhaps difficult to reach the _via media_ of

unbiassed appreciation. He has, at any rate, the credit of being a

purely rationalistic historian, perhaps the only one in Roman literature.

Cicero had a good many qualifications for a scientific historian, and (as

he usually did) thought very highly of his own powers. On passages of

ancient legend, however, he is rather unsatisfactory, for while he is too

sensible to believe them he is too patriotic to reject them. And this is

really the attitude of Livy, who claims for early Roman legend a certain

uncritical homage from the rest of the subject world. His view in his

history is that it is not worth while to examine the truth of these

stories.

In his hands the history of Rome unrolls before our eyes like some

gorgeous tapestry, where victory succeeds victory, where triumph treads

on the heels of triumph, and the line of heroes seems never to end. It

is not till we pass behind the canvas and see the slight means by which

the effect is produced that we apprehend the fact that like most

picturesque writers Livy is an indifferent critic. As regards his

attitude towards the credibility of early Roman history he is quite as

conscious as we are of its mythical and unsound nature. He will not, for

instance, decide whether the Horatii were Albans or Romans; who was the

first dictator; how many tribunes there were, and the like. His method,

as a rule, is merely to mention all the accounts and sometimes to decide

in favour of the most probable, but usually not to decide at all. No

canons of historical criticism will ever discover whether the Roman women

interviewed the mother of Coriolanus of their own accord or at the

suggestion of the senate; whether Remus was killed for jumping over his

brother’s wall or because they quarrelled about birds; whether the

ambassadors found Cincinnatus ploughing or only mending a hedge. Livy

suspends his judgment over these important facts and history when

questioned on their truth is dumb. If he does select between two

historians he chooses the one who is nearer to the facts he describes.

But he is no critic, only a conscientious writer. It is mere vain waste

to dwell on his critical powers, for they do not exist.

* * * * *

In the case of Tacitus imagination has taken the place of history. The

past lives again in his pages, but through no laborious criticism; rather

through a dramatic and psychological faculty which he specially

possessed.

In the philosophy of history he has no belief. He can never make up his

mind what to believe as regards God’s government of the world. There is

no method in him and none elsewhere in Roman literature.

Nations may not have missions but they certainly have functions. And the

function of ancient Italy was not merely to give us what is statical in

our institutions and rational in our law, but to blend into one elemental

creed the spiritual aspirations of Aryan and of Semite. Italy was not a

pioneer in intellectual progress, nor a motive power in the evolution of

thought. The owl of the goddess of Wisdom traversed over the whole land

and found nowhere a resting-place. The dove, which is the bird of

Christ, flew straight to the city of Rome and the new reign began. It

was the fashion of early Italian painters to represent in mediæval

costume the soldiers who watched over the tomb of Christ, and this, which

was the result of the frank anachronism of all true art, may serve to us

as an allegory. For it was in vain that the Middle Ages strove to guard

the buried spirit of progress. When the dawn of the Greek spirit arose,

the sepulchre was empty, the grave-clothes laid aside. Humanity had

risen from the dead.

The study of Greek, it has been well said, implies the birth of

criticism, comparison and research. At the opening of that education of

modern by ancient thought which we call the Renaissance, it was the words

of Aristotle which sent Columbus sailing to the New World, while a

fragment of Pythagorean astronomy set Copernicus thinking on that train

of reasoning which has revolutionised the whole position of our planet in

the universe. Then it was seen that the only meaning of progress is a

return to Greek modes of thought. The monkish hymns which obscured the

pages of Greek manuscripts were blotted out, the splendours of a new

method were unfolded to the world, and out of the melancholy sea of

mediævalism rose the free spirit of man in all that splendour of glad

adolescence, when the bodily powers seem quickened by a new vitality,

when the eye sees more clearly than its wont and the mind apprehends what

was beforetime hidden from it. To herald the opening of the sixteenth

century, from the little Venetian printing press came forth all the great

authors of antiquity, each bearing on the title-page the words _Ἅλδος ὁ

Μανούτιος Ῥωμαῖος καὶ Φιλέλλην_; words which may serve to remind us with

what wondrous prescience Polybius saw the world’s fate when he foretold

the material sovereignty of Roman institutions and exemplified in himself

the intellectual empire of Greece.

The course of the study of the spirit of historical criticism has not

been a profitless investigation into modes and forms of thought now

antiquated and of no account. The only spirit which is entirely removed

from us is the mediæval; the Greek spirit is essentially modern. The

introduction of the comparative method of research which has forced

history to disclose its secrets belongs in a measure to us. Ours, too,

is a more scientific knowledge of philology and the method of survival.

Nor did the ancients know anything of the doctrine of averages or of

crucial instances, both of which methods have proved of such importance

in modern criticism, the one adding a most important proof of the

statical elements of history, and exemplifying the influences of all

physical surroundings on the life of man; the other, as in the single

instance of the Moulin Quignon skull, serving to create a whole new

science of prehistoric archæology and to bring us back to a time when man

was coeval with the stone age, the mammoth and the woolly rhinoceros.

But, except these, we have added no new canon or method to the science of

historical criticism. Across the drear waste of a thousand years the

Greek and the modern spirit join hands.

In the torch race which the Greek boys ran from the Cerameician field of

death to the home of the goddess of Wisdom, not merely he who first

reached the goal but he also who first started with the torch aflame

received a prize. In the Lampadephoria of civilisation and free thought

let us not forget to render due meed of honour to those who first lit

that sacred flame, the increasing splendour of which lights our footsteps

to the far-off divine event of the attainment of perfect truth.