HISTORY 



4007 



HISTORY 



form in which we have them, they 

 are derived in part from docu- 

 ments which must have been in 

 existence some fifteen hundred 

 years before the Christian era. In 

 this sense they are the earliest corf- 

 secutive narrative consciously con- 

 structed as a story of the develop- 

 ment of an organized community. 

 The things elsewhere written or 

 depicted at an earlier date were 

 either symbolical or were presenta- 

 tions of contemporary episodes, or 

 were not made with the intention 

 of recording events, though of great 

 value to students endeavouring to 

 reconstruct the past. Such were 

 the legal code of Hammurabi, king 

 of Babylon, the Amraphel of whom 

 we read in the book of Genesis as 

 the contemporary of Abraham, 

 diplomatic correspondence like the 

 Tell el-Amarna Letters, discovered 

 in Egypt in 1888, and various 

 other documents and monuments. 



In the 7th and 6th centuries, 

 Babylonia and Assyria began to 

 produce official annalists. In 

 Egypt, too, the priestly caste had 

 preserved historical records from 

 which a scanty information was 

 presently to be derived by lay 

 inquirers. In the remote East, the 

 Chinese, a very advanced people, 

 compiled their own records, as also 

 did the Aryan invaders of India. 

 But it was in the 5th century B.C., 

 when Greek literature burst into 

 full blossom, that history perma- 

 nently established itself as a 

 branch of literary art and of 

 political science. Apart from the 

 Hebrew chronicles, the world 

 before the 5th century provided 

 materials for historical investi- 

 gation, but it did not provide 

 historians. 



The historian first reveals him- 

 self in literature as the child of the 

 epic poet. He is a man with a great 

 story to tell, a drama vivid with 

 human life, only his medium is not 

 verse but prose ; and, whereas to 

 the poet it is a matter of indiffer- 

 ence whether things actually hap- 

 pened as he relates them, whether 

 his story is fact or fiction, or blend 

 of fact with fiction, the historian 

 intends his story to be one of actual 

 fact duly verified. As with the 

 epic poet, his work must be on the 

 heroic side, but his characters are 

 real, not imaginary kings, captains 

 and statesmen, leaders of men. 

 The Father of History 



So it was with the Hebrew 

 chroniclers ; so it was with the 

 Greek Herodotus, who is called 

 " the Father of history," who told 

 the immortal story of the mighty 

 contest wherein Greece in the days 

 of her glory did battle for the cause 

 of freedom and rolled back the 

 flood of Orientalism. Incidentally 



he collected and set forth much 

 information, not without a legend- 

 ary element, concerning the rise of 

 the Persian empire and the antiqui- 

 ties of Egypt. A generation later 

 the scientific element was intro- 

 duced by Thucydides, who chose 

 for his theme contemporary history 

 the struggle for supremacy be- 

 tween the two leading States of the 

 Hellenic world, wherein he himself 

 played a minor part. It might be 

 said that Herodotus and Thucy- 

 dides, two of the greatest among 

 all literary artists, set between 

 them the models which have been 

 followed by all the great literary 

 historians, from Livy and Tacitus 

 through Froissart to Hume and 

 Gibbon, Macaulay, Carlyle, and 

 Mommsen. The extraordinary 

 merits of Thucydides have given 

 to his subject, the contest between 

 Athens and Sparta, a historical 

 prominence out of proportion to its 

 intrinsic importance, by reason of 

 the masterly treatment it received, 

 which enhances its interest to the 

 student of political science. 



From the time of Thucydides 

 onwards there was among the 

 Greeks no lack of historians, though 

 none can be named as of the first 

 rank; their work is for the most 

 part valuable only so far as it 

 relates to contemporary events. 

 They provide the modern inquirer 

 with little more than outlines to be 

 filled in from other sources, such as 

 the recorded speeches of political 

 orators or the discussions of 

 political theory by philosophers. 

 The Roman Era 



Historical writing again comes 

 to the forefront in the great literary 

 era of Rome, which begins in the 

 days of Julius Caesar and ends 

 some century and a half after his 

 death. Caesar himself appears as 

 a historian in the record of his 

 campaigns in Gaul. Livy, in a 

 brilliant narrative, relates all that 

 either traditions or authoritative 

 records have to tell of Rome's 

 past. Tacitus gives a masterly 

 though extremely biased picture 

 of political conditions, persons, and 

 events at the moment when 

 Republican Rome had transformed 

 itself into Imperial Rome. And 

 still the modern investigator finds 

 even more guidance in the works of 

 men of letters who were not pro- 

 fessed historians, in the satires of 

 the poets, and in the semi-philoso- 

 phical discourses, the public ora- 

 tions, and the private epistles of 

 Cicero, while the art of historical 

 portraiture was perfected by the 

 pen of Plutarch. 



The age of the Antonines, great in 

 many ways, was unproductive. An 

 intellectual stupor took possession 

 of the Roman Empire ; in the west 



it was overwhelmed by the bar- 

 barian flood, against which in the 

 east it maintained only a pre- 

 carious existence. The records of 

 the early Middle Ages were com- 

 piled mainly in the extremely un- 

 critical and secluded atmosphere 

 of the cloister. Though literature 

 was smothered in the outer turmoil, 

 in the cloister records were pre- 

 served, such as the Anglo-Saxon 

 Chronicle. Apart from the official 

 chroniclers of contemporary evente, 

 although so-called histories were 

 written, little serious attempt 

 was made to distinguish between 

 fact and fiction ; picturesque legend 

 absolutely incredible was allowed 

 to pass for history at least as con- 

 cerned the past. But in the 13th 

 century a new literary era was 

 dawning ; in the 14th it had 

 dawned. The art of writing con- 

 temporary history revived with 

 Froissart, though to him it was 

 still only the painting of its 

 gorgeous pageantry. 



Froissart and Raleigh 



With the sixteenth century, the 

 revival of letters, already active in 

 Italy for two centuries, but only 

 sporadic elsewhere, expanded all 

 over western Europe at the 

 moment when letters had been 

 finally extirpated in the east. 

 Thenceforth the recording of con- 

 temporary history became general ; 

 later medieval history was treated 

 in the spirit of Froissart, and what 

 may be called the authorised 

 histories of Greece and Rome were 

 studied as a necessary part of 

 polite culture, the outcome of the 

 discovery of the classical literature 

 of Rome and Greece. At the same 

 time history again began to be 

 treated as a branch of political 

 science, the Florentine Machiavelli 

 leading the way. 



From the beginning of the six- 

 teenth century, then, there is an 

 abundance of literary records ready 

 to the hand of the modern inquirer. 

 Through the Tudor period vigor- 

 ous and picturesque narrative is 

 characteristic of the English and 

 Scottish writers, whether they are 

 dealing trenchantly with the story 

 of the Reformation, like Jolm 

 Knox, or Foxe in the Book of Mar- 

 tyrs, or telling the sagas of the Eliza- 

 bethan seamen, as in Hakluyt's 

 Voyages and the soul-stirring 

 narratives of Sir Walter Raleigh. 

 Raleigh travelled into a still more 

 remote past ; for when he lay a 

 prisoner in the Tower he set about 

 writing a History of the World, 

 which Oliver Cromwell ranked next 

 to his Bible. We do not now read 

 Raleigh's History of the World, any 

 more than we use Elizabethan maps 

 for the study of geography. Its 

 value as conveying a knowledge of j 



