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ALTHOUGH Polybius may justly rank as the last of the great Greek historians, his name is by no means the last in Greek historiography. There were many historians, of varying degrees of importance, among those Greek scholars who became the teachers of the Roman world, and while individually their achievement is perhaps not such as to warrant any detailed examination of it here, yet, taken as a whole, it offers some striking generalizations.
In the first place the incentive to history-writing was no longer connected with that first stimulus which produced it, patriotism or national sentiment. The transplanted scholar, living an exile in foreign lands, could hardly take his own antiquity along; and if he did, few would care to know about it. On the other hand he could not acquire the antiquities of the country of his residence with the same sentimental appreciation of their bearing upon history as if he had been born to their inheritance. The result was a certain detachment, upon the part of later Greek scholars, which in some cases seems to have made for indifference as to those movements of cause and effect that so intrigued the keen intelligence of Polybius and left them rather dilettanti antiquarians, and on the other hand made for an enlargement of view that carried the better minds beyond the narrow confines of purely Roman patriotism and gave them a glimpse of world history.
It is hard to say why the obvious advantages of such a detached position were not exploited more. The Hellenic Greek could view many of the historical problems of antiquity with much the same kind of aloofness as that which the modern scholar brings to the study of the Middle Ages. One might even expect that the economic stimulus of earning a living by one’s wits would have stirred the Greek intellectuals, who graced the households of the masters of the world as slaves, freedmen or dependents, to notable 203 achievement in that kind of research which leads to systematic results along scientific lines. But rhetoric on the one hand, and philosophy on the other proved to be the winning rivals.
Mention of Greek philosophy in this connection recalls the fact that we have hardly spoken of it before. Rhetoric and the influence of Isocrates have come very largely to the fore; but what of the influence of philosophy upon Greek historiography? Plato has so far escaped any but casual mention, and Aristotle has come within our survey only in a footnote! Yet the greatest creations of Greek thought could not but affect the outlook of historians, even if they contributed little directly. Truth was an ideal of philosophy as of history, and in the recognition of social virtues as historic forces, or even in the whole pragmatic quality of such a work as that of Polybius, there may be as much an index of Stoic influence upon the writer’s trend of thought as of his direct power of observation.1 The lessons which history supplies to one trained in the principles of such a philosophy are not the same as those which it would bring to a Herodotus.
To follow these suggestions would lead one into intricate fields of scholarship, far beyond our bounds. The history of the philosophy of Greek historiography may best be left for the specialist. This, of course, implies that the contribution of philosophy to history was a limited one. For while it offered points of view to historians, it failed to provide that apparatus of criticism which is the basis of science. Aristotle, it is true, made a beginning; but the influence of Plato told in the other direction. Although it was a great thing to have justified the supremacy of reason, as he did, and to have insisted upon the identity of truth and good, the abstract tendency of his speculation unified that assemblage of data, which is the investigator’s universe, by means of the most unhistorical line of thought imaginable, his theory of ideas. Metaphysics and history have not much in common.
But the interest of thinkers in ideas rather than in facts was less responsible for the limited progress of antique historiography than the failure to recognize the value of mechanism. There is a striking 204 passage in Phædrus in which, according to Plato, Socrates laments the passing of that time when the only known facts about the past were those treasured in memory and the coming of that degenerate age when people no longer bother remembering things they can read in books.2 He deprecates above all the invention of writing. Reliance on such devices lessens the capacities of the user for distinguishing truth from its semblance. It is a specious argument; and one might think that his pupil Plato, recording it — in writing — might do so with a sense of humor of the situation. But there is no sign of it. For, as a matter of fact, this objection of Socrates to alphabets was but a single expression of something reaching deeply through the whole trend of Plato’s mind. That mind was fundamentally poetic. It recoiled against mechanism temperamentally. It felt instinctively that making black marks on papyrus from Egypt or skins from Asia — those skins the merchants of Pergamum later made into parchments — is an inferior operation to reciting an epic. It is the same kind of protest that we have today on the part of those who prefer hand labor to machinery. Socrates, one supposes, would have preferred to tell the time by a guess at the lengthening shadow on the square rather than by using a watch. By ignoring inventions one keeps “close to nature.”
This is an attitude to be found through the whole history of culture. Its most earnest advocates have been the artists, of every kind of expression, impatient of anything interposed between nature and the individual. It partly springs from the concentration of a creator on his creation — that concentration which is joy, — leaving him relatively indifferent as to its preservation. Idealism, drawn to this romantic sentiment, has often denied itself the means of achievement, by holding aloof from the processes by which ideas are realized. It is curious how short-sighted it has been. For, in the larger view, mechanism itself is an art-creation. The invention of an alphabet is a work of art to rank beside poetry. In its use it is part of the clothing of thought, like the words themselves; and shares the immortality which it assures. Even machinery, which supplants the motions of the hand of the worker, incorporates thought in its materials, just as marble bears the impress of a sculptor’s imagination or the massing of pigment on 205 a painter’s canvas preserves the suggestion of nature. Being a social rather than an individual creation, however, the appreciation of it is more difficult.
Greek philosophy missed the great point that the power of ideas works itself out in a grimy world, the world of daily life. History depends upon that mechanism which transfers thought from brains to material substances, and so enables thought to endure while thinkers come and go. It is rather sobering to recall how much depends upon the substance. We know, for instance, that the burning of the library at Alexandria blotted out for all time much of the culture of that distant antiquity which it had gathered in the papyri on its shelves. We know, as well, that the last classics of Greece and Rome perished in the mouldy rolls of papyrus which could not last in the climate of the northern Mediterranean. The book trade of the ancients was careless of the future, — as ours is today. But had it not been for papyrus rolls dealt in by those astute traders who brought their goods to the wharves of the Peiræus and Ostia, it is doubtful if the literature of classic Greece and Rome would have been produced at all. Had there been nothing better than clay tablets to scratch, how would the Augustan age have achieved what it did? Imagine Polybius or Livy accumulating the mud cylinders necessary for their histories! Or, to bring the matter down to our own time, what would our modern literature and journalism amount to if the art of making paper had not been brought to Europe by the Arabs? A printing press without paper is unthinkable; and modern literature cannot exist without them both. We need a Sartor Resartus in the history of literature to show us how naked and helplessly limited is thought except when provided with mechanism.
There have been two great creative epochs in the history of our civilization; that of ancient Greece and that of today. The one produced critical thought; the other applied it to invent machines. Beside these two contributions to secular society, all others rank as minor. The one stirred into activity that critical intelligence, upon which rests our whole apparatus of knowledge; the other made nature our ally not merely by applying its power to do our work, but also by supplying the means for extending knowledge itself, almost to the infinite. And the point to which this history returns 206 again and again, is that even the genus of a Plato could hardly anticipate the merest fraction of the results to be obtained by the slow, minute processes of the mechanism of science.
It is perhaps fortunate for us that we are spared the temptation of tracing these suggestions in subsequent Hellenic historians, by the fragmentary character of the literary remains of most of those who might offer themselves for such a study. We shall have it before us, however, as we turn to Rome. It remains now for us merely to pass in rapid review the work of the more outstanding figures among those gifted Greeks who supplied the cultured world of their time with the kind of histories it demanded.
The history of Polybius was continued by the Stoic Posidonius, who applied himself to the task with somewhat the same appreciation of the distortions of narrative due to rhetorical adornment as Polybius himself. He had also, like Polybius, travelled widely on the outskirts of the known world, from Spain to Rhodes and Syria and wrote voluminously on all kinds of topics. His Geography and his History are the only works of interest here. The latter was begun in 74 B.C. and continued the universal history of Polybius, in fifty-two books, from 144 B.C. to the Dictatorship of Sulla in 82 B.C. It was a notable performance, and although Posidonius does not belong with the rhetoricians, but in the succession of Timæus and Polybius, Cicero deferred to him as to a master of style, when trying himself to write the account of his own consulate in Greek. The modern critic has not less praise for this Stoic historian, his learning, and his critical capacity.3
Strabo (c. 64 B.C.-19 A.D.), the great geographer, was also a continuator of Polybius, and wrote as well some Historical Memoirs which included a treatment of the deeds of Alexander. The Geography, too, had a historical introduction covering the history of geography and the work of geographers to his own day, — almost our only source for such important figures as Eratosthenes. Moreover, historians are so much in evidence as authorities in the Geography that it may almost be said to embody the descriptive phase of antique historiography, that phase so evident in the excursus of 207 Herodotus. But Strabo has a further interest for us. His method, in line with the traditions we have just seen maintained by Posidonius, was to cite largely from his authorities and so preserve fragments of them for his less scholarly readers and, in part, for us. A travelled Greek, he also knew Rome, and is an outstanding example of those “philosophers,” — for so he is termed by Plutarch, — who held to the saner lines of criticism and respected facts. He was more a scholar than a historian, as his predilection for geography indicates. The events of history require an added dimension. It is easier to describe the world in space than in time,4 and for that great synthesis which recreates in intelligence the happenings of chance he lacked the full stature of genius. On the other hand it was to his credit that he did not try to reach that synthesis by the facile use of words and phrases, to which a rhetorician would have yielded.
It was just this synthesis, in the widest possible sense, which Diodorus Siculus) (c. 80-29 B.C.), Strabo’s older contemporary, had tried to reach in his general history (Bibliotheca Historica) in forty books; tried and failed, for the chief value of his work to us is in the fragments of sources which he built into it, not the bold unifying conception of which he was chiefly proud. He began with the mythical accounts of ancient Egypt and the Orient, and carried the story of Greece and Sicily down to the close. But — fortunately for the preservation of his sources — he did not see the interconnection of events and simply made a sort of world-chronicle out of a series of chronicles of different countries, cutting and trimming the authorities to meet the exigencies, but still leaving them to substantiate the narrative. To this clumsy, but imposing, monument of erudition Diodorus added some of the unrealities of rhetoric; and it is hardly to be wondered at if he failed to receive the attention of those of his day for whom he wrote. It was only later, when Christian scholars in the third century began to look 208 back across the pagan past for an account of the whole world, and not of Rome merely, that Diodorus proved to be of enough importance to secure the preservation of part of his world history.
It was in the line of these great world histories that Nicholas of Damascus wrote the one hundred forty-four books of universal history to which reference has been made above in the chapter on Josephus. The favorite of Herod the Great knew how to win as well the favor of Augustus, and his detailed account of contemporary events was apparently not lacking in rhetorical polish. But his work was more a compilation, like that of Diodorus, than an independent history.
By a strange coincidence it was the city of Herodotus which produced the historian who most vitiated the scientific possibilities of this kind of scholarship by acceptance of the standards of rhetoric. Dionysius of Halicarnassus, born about the middle of the first century B.C., came to Rome in the year 30 B.C., and as he proudly relates in the introduction to his Archæologia spent twenty-two years in preparation for his great work, which was published in the year 7 A.D. He moved in the best circles of Rome, and it was his ambition to rival Livy by the wealth of his detailed information concerning the Roman antiquities. In addition, he tried to satisfy Greek pride by making much of the Greek origins of Rome. Two such divergent purposes could be welded into a single history only by the greatest creative capacity upon the part of the historian; and instead of this, Dionysius brought a mediocre talent and the devices of rhetoric. Even these devices were not all his own; for he embodied expressions from the Greek classics, where they could aptly apply to his narrative, seeking effect above all, and, as is generally the case in such instance, failing to achieve it.
Under the Roman Empire, Greek scholarship continued at its various tasks; and after the golden age of Latin literature was over, Greek became once more, under the Antonines, the medium for culture. Into the details of this story we shall not enter; but we should at least recall in passing the lasting importance to history of Plutarch’s Lives. Few books have done more to determine the reputation of historical characters for subsequent ages. The 209 forty-six Parallel Lives are arranged in pairs, mainly Roman and Greek, and the personalities they depict are typical of the times and customs of their environment or of their own professions and careers. There are generals and statesmen, patriots and lawgivers; a gallery of the great figures whose names were already more or less legendary and who now became fixed in the imagination of the world as real, living characters. Plutarch was a native of Bœotia, and, although he travelled widely, he seems to have written his biographies after his return to the little town of Chæronea where he was born. It is a striking fact that, writing as he does in this isolated village, he shows a larger and more catholic mind than his brilliant contemporary, Tacitus, writing at Rome. This is a point to which we shall revert later, when we come to see the influences which made for provincialism at Rome under the Cæsars; but it is well to recognize here that in Plutarch we have a genuine “historian” in the first sense of the word, an inquirer on the paths of truth, — as interested in comparative religion as in morals, and lacking only in the social and political interests which bind these elements of personality and mystery into the complex processes of society, and so make history.
Finally, passing by such notable figures as Appian of Alexandria, of whose accounts of the various provinces of the Empire in twenty-four books, written under Trajan and Hadrian, almost the half has been preserved, or Arrian of Bithynia, the favorite of Hadrian and the Antonines, the worthy disciple of Epictetus and historian of the Persian wars, we come to the last of the list in Cassius Dio Coccejanus, the historian of Rome of the third century. He was born in Nicæa in Bithynia about 155 A.D., and passed a long life in high offices of state, consul, proconsul of Africa, legate to Dalmatia and Pannonia. He died about the year 235. His history of Rome, in eighty books, was divided into decades after the manner in which Livy’s was then preserved, and it stretched over the whole field from the arrival of Æneas in Italy to the reign of Alexander Severus. It was a work of long researches, ten years spent in collecting the materials, twelve more in composition, and was to the Greek-speaking East much what Livy was to the Latin West.5 It expounded the great theme of Roman 210 history in the spirit of a Roman official. At the close, therefore, Greek historiography fused and lost itself in that theme of empire which was to perpetuate its outlook, however changed and dimmed, in a new state creation at Byzantium.
The fragments of Posidonius are to be found in C. Müller, Fragmenta Historicorum Græcorum, (5 vol., 1841-1873), Vol. III, pp. 245-296. The most recent Teubner text of Strabo’s Geographica is that of A. Meineke (3 vols., 1904-1909). The translation in the Loeb Classical Library is by H. L. Jones (8 vols., Vol. I, 1917). There is an edition of Diodorus Siculus by F. Vogel and C. T. Fischer (5 vols., Teubner, 1888-1906); a translation by J. Fox has been promised by the Loeb Classical Library. The fragments of Nicholas of Damascus are preserved in C. Müller, Fragmenta Historicorum Græcorum, Vol. III, pp. 343-464; Vol. IV, pp. 661-668, and in L. Dindorf, Historici Græci Minores (2 vols., 1870-1871), Vol. I, pp. 1-153. The text of Dionysius of Halicarnassus has been edited by C. Jacoby, H. Usener and L. Radermacher (6 vols., Teubner, 1885-1905); a translation of Dionysius’ treatise, On Literary Composition, has been made by W. R. Roberts (1910).
There are editions of Plutarch’s Vitae Parallelae by C. Sintenis (4 vols., 1839-1846; 5 vols., Teubner, 1875-1875) and by C. Lindskog and K. Ziegler (Teubner, Vols. I-III, 1914-1915). The “Dryden Plutarch” revised by A. H. Clough is the version used in Everyman’s Library (3 vols., 1910). There is also the translation of Plutarch’s works by W. Goodwin and A. H. Clough (10 vols., 1914-1921). Naturally there is more literature on Plutarch than can be noted here.
The Teubner editions of Appian are by I. Bekker (2 vols., 1852-1853), and L. Mendelssohn (2 vols., 1879-1881); there is a partial edition by P. Viereck (Vol. II, 1905). Translations of the text are by J. L. Strachan-Davidson, Appian’s Civil Wars (Bk. I, 1902) and by H. White, Appian’s Roman History, in the Loeb Classical Library (4 vols., 1912-1913).
For the text of Arrian there is the edition by A.G. Roos (ed. maior, Vol. I, 1907). There is a translation, The Anabasis of Alexander and Indica, by E. J. Chinnock (1893). The text of Dio Cassius is edited by J. Melber (2 vols., Teubner, 1890-1894) and by U. P. Boissevain (3 vols., 1895-1901). A lengthy list of publications on Dio accompanies H. B. Foster’s translation, Dio’s Rome; an Historical Narrative . . . (6 vols., 1905-1906), which formed the basis for the edition by E. Cary in the Loeb Classical Library (9 vols., Vols. I-VI, 1914-1917).
1 An excellent short account of this subject is to be found in H. Peter, Wahrheit und Kunst, Chap. VII (Die Stoa, Polybios, Poseidonios und Strabon).
2 Phædrus. 274-275 D.
3 Cf. Cicero, Epistularum Ad Atticum Liber Secundus, Letter I, Sects. 1 and 2; H. Peter, Wahrheit und Kunst, pp. 265-270.
4 In this connection mention should be made of those Greek chronographers who drew together comparative lists of events in world chronicles. The basis of chronology, laid by Eratosthenes of Alexandria in the third century B.C., was built upon by Apollodorus of Athens, whose four books of chronicles reached down to 119 B.C. Then Castor of Rhodes gathered the threads together into a synchronistic table or “canon,” ending with the year 61 B.C. Castor’s chronicle was destined to prove of great importance later to the Christian chronologies. He is plentifully in evidence in Eusebius.
5 H. Peter, Wahrheit und Kunst, p. 396.
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