Subject: Herodotus, Thucydides, Livy, Tacitus, Plutarch, Bede, Joinville, Froissart – and the historians of earlier ages in general.
he stalest philosophies are those that claim to be freshest, and the surest opinions are those that have been found wanting.
his seems to me not only true, but in fact very clear. The philosophies that circulate most frequently through our ears are not those that have been around since Plato’s time, but those that have been around since yesterday; they are modern, some times even purely contemporary, not universal. They are things like “be the person you naturally are”, not, “put to death the natural man”. They are things like, “all people have a right to do what they choose and not to be persecuted,” where so many people of the past have accepted earthly sufferings as inescapable facts and worked around them. I do not mean that there is a single set of beliefs that defines the past, let alone that, if there were such a uniformity, it would be uniformly opposed to present beliefs. I do not mean that the current fashions are wrong and those of the past are right. No; but just as each person hears the sound of their own voice louder than they hear the beating of their heart or rhythm of their lungs, which they hold in common with the rest of mankind, so each age hears most clearly its own voice and the pulse and breath which it shares with previous ages is drowned out. At worst, it so cuts itself off from the past that it refuses to breath altogether.
he good historian, more than anyone else, ought to recognise this. They might believe modern principles, but they have no reason to limit themselves to modern principles. The Comte de Tocqueville is, in a sense, a modern historian par excellence: he believed in modern democratic values, but cultivated, in his own attitudes, the best of his aristocratic heritage. As for us, we might expect to be treated in a democratic manner, and have our ‘rights’ recognised, but we ought not think it these political rights are inalienable or part of our proper nature. Chance or the will of God has put us in this age where we have such rights as we do, though, as we see that democracy, in our own day, is good for people, we ought to champion it.
ore importantly, I think our philosophical ideas ought to come at least as much from history as from the present. When I want scientific facts, I will read the most up-to-date books I might find. When I want the facts of history, I do the same. When, however, I want moral, philosophical, theological, artistic, literary knowledge – when I want to find those facts that lie equally within reach, and equally out of reach, for people of all ages, I care not whether my books are as old as the seas or as new as the hair on my head: the seas are unreliable, my hair is undependable, and people are not more trustworthy or clever today than they ever have been.
hristianity – and, in fact, all religions to a greater or lesser extent – besides its primary claim to our attention, preserves the attitudes of the past, and claims to preserve the important attitudes of the past: those that God put there himself. Philosophy, to a far lesser extent, and only among some philosophers, also preserves past attitudes and beliefs against the storms of intellectual fashion.
hat is reason why I, at any rate, am an historian: because I was first a philosopher.
he historian, however, is interested in more than merely the beliefs and literature of the past. There are the annals of kings and rulers, there are the records of battles and revolutions. The observation I intend to make about these things is personal and perhaps subjective, but I hope it may be found, nonetheless, applicable to many others.
university-level course in ancient or medieval history will often prescribe two textbooks: for one, the major primary source, or a collection of primary sources; for the other, a piece of or collection of modern scholarship. For instance, a translation of Herodotus might be paired with a modern study of archaic Greece. The rationale behind this is, of course, that all our knowledge of the past comes from the primary sources, but all our conclusions about the primary sources are recorded in the secondary sources. The idea is that the history student must read both alike, and often the reading schedule will require students to read them simultaneously.
ow my observation is this: very often I tend to break the reading schedule and, ahead of time, read through the primary sources whole and with great avidity, and only after that am I able to find sufficient interest in the modern scholarship. The reasons why the primary sources should be more interesting are many, I think; but the fact is, in most cases they are. Further, the best works of modern scholarship are precisely the ones that cannot be used for textbooks. They are the ones that do not offer quite all the facts, or the most debated or ‘significant’ facts, but offer deep and powerful interpretations of the topic that concerns them. We love narrative, and they give us narrative; we love to see good and evil and all the shades in between, and they show them to us; we love to be sure we are learning something significant, and they assure us we are. Even the worst of old histories give us these things: even those that are mediocre, inaccurate, suspect. Thus far I have been referring, in particular, to literary primary sources, but my argument applies to nearly all varieties of primary sources. To my mind, they are not only the source of all our information about the past, but also the source of a great deal of our interest in the past.
have said that the reasons are many why histories written in the ancient and medieval world interest me more than more accurate modern histories of those periods. One of them, far from the least, is that for the most part the histories which have survived from these periods do offer engaging interpretations of the information, instead of concerning themselves with finding all the verifiable facts and verifying all possible facts. There is an immense variety: Thucydides sought out the nature of humanity in his history of the Peloponnesian War; Tacitus aptly conveyed the sinister quality of the early Roman Principate; Froissart, if I am not mistaken, gave an accurate picture of how the last chivalrous knights saw their wars and tourneys.
ery often these old authors had no philosophical intent. Indeed, even the historians of our own day who least suspect themselves of a philosophical agenda will be found soaked in contemporary philosophies. One mark of difference is that the old historians who are preserved – Herodotus, Plutarch, Geoffrey of Monmouth (that greatest of pseudo-historians) – are often preserved largely because their attitudes and art are vigorous and durable. But the greatest reason why such books of outmoded attitudes appeal to us is that precisely because their attitudes are outmoded, they are not stale to our ears; and in consequence, they may actually teach us something we would not otherwise have thought of.
his is one reason, but there are many, for the commendation I wish to end on: it is that those who wish to enjoy old history, the Ancient, the Medieval, the Oriental, would do very well to start with the best of old primary sources.
theparsnipoftime 