The Historians' History of the World 01

Only two or three other writers of the entire classical period whose works have come down to us followed Thucydides with any considerable measure of success in this attempt to write history philosophically; the two most prominent exponents of this method being the Greek Polybius, who told the story of Rome’s rise to world power, and Tacitus, the famous author of the Roman Annals and of the earliest history of the German people. These three examples—Thucydides, Polybius, and Tacitus—stand out at once in refutation of a claim which might otherwise be made that philosophical, or, if one prefers, didactic, historical composition is essentially a modern product. But for these exceptions one might be disposed to make a sweeping generalisation to the effect that the old-time history was a collection of tales intended to entertain the reader, and that the strictly modern historical method aims at instruction rather than at entertainment. Such generalisations, however, assuming, as they do, that the entire trend of human thought has fundamentally changed within historical times, are sure to be faulty. Quite possibly it may be true to say that the earliest historians tended as a class to write entertaining narratives rather than philosophical histories; and to say, on the other hand, that nineteenth century historians as a class have reversed the order of motives: but it must not be forgotten that our judgment here is based upon a mere fragment of the entire output of ancient historians. We have already noticed, in another connection, that the names of some hundreds of Greek writers have been preserved to us solely through a single anthological collection or two; and now, speaking of the historical works, it must be remembered that a vast number of these have perished altogether. Whole companies of historians are known to us only by name, and there is every reason to suppose that considerable other companies that once existed and wrote works of greater or less importance have not left us even this memento. The scattered fragments of Greek historical works that have come down to us, dissociated from any considerable part of their original context, fill three large volumes of the famous Didot collection of Greek classics, as edited by K. O. Müller; some hundreds of authors being represented.

We have noted that all the predecessors of Herodotus were blotted out, chiefly, perhaps, by the excellence of the work of Herodotus himself. Similarly the entire histories of Alexander the Great, written by his associates and contemporaries and his successors of the ensuing century, have without exception perished utterly.

Doubtless the excellence of the work of Arrian, which summarised and attempted to harmonise the contents of the more important preceding histories of Alexander, was responsible for the final elimination of the latter. One can hardly refer too often to that intellectual gantlet of the middle ages, which all classical literature was called upon to pass, and from which only here and there a work emerged. It is almost pathetic to consider the number of works that made their way heroically almost through this gantlet, only to succumb just before achieving the goal. One knows, for example, that there was a work of Theopompus on later Grecian affairs, in fifty odd books, which was extant in the ninth century, as proved by the summary of its contents made then by a monk, but of which no single line is in existence to-day. Even the works that have come down to us in a less fragmentary condition have not usually been preserved entire in any single manuscript, but, as presented to us now, are patched together from various fragments, preserved often in widely separated collections. The explanation is that the copying of a manuscript of great length was a somewhat heroic task, and that hence the copyist would often content himself with excerpting a single book from a work which he would gladly have reproduced entire but for the labour involved.