III

Let us now go back to the questions of method in Ancient History, which we had to put on one side, in order to survey the field of its operations, and fix its position both in universal history and in relation to ourselves.

We saw that in all historical work, some of the materials are transmitted to the historian directly, and another part through the medium of previous historian; more or less worthy of the name. But the ratio of the matter from the one source, to that supplied by the other, may vary almost infinitely. Here we strike upon one marked contrast between the two great departments which we call 'ancient' and 'modern': namely, that the balance which exists, in all history, between its two aspects, between the direct writing of history, and the critical appreciation of history already written, is quite differently adjusted in each of them.

In almost all modern history, it is still possible to go behind the work of previous historians; to begin approximately where they began, and to repeat, in our own persons, experiences like theirs. The materials for history are still there; perhaps less copiously, perhaps through some accident more copiously, than when our page 15 predecessors sat down to write; but it is from materials, not from our predecessors' work, that we set out; and it is in the light of our knowledge of the materials themselves, that we permit our own judgment to be guided, if at all, by that of other historians, whom we have learned, by this method, to respect.

In ancient history, it was long quite otherwise; and because it is inevitably otherwise, ancient history is still sometimes felt to be of a different quality from modern, and is assigned a different place in our systems of knowledge. It is an obvious example of this feeling, that whereas we have in Oxford a separate Final Honours School of Modern History, Ancient History forms only one section of the composite School of Literae Humaniores, in which a large part of your time is devoted to the systematic study of philosophy, and another large part to the literary criticism of certain ancient authors. The only reason for this which will make any appeal to historians is that in ancient history a very large part of the work actually done consists simply in the attempt to rediscover from the historians themselves, what were the materials upon which they were working, irrespective of the further questions, first, how far these materials of theirs represented, at all adequately, the real state of the case; and then, how far the periods or topics about which these authors write were the only periods or topics worth studying, or even the most important. Thucy-dides, for example, believed that the Peloponnesian War was àξιoλoγώτατoν τω∘ν πρíν, best worth expounding,—Herodotus would I think, have said, àξιαπηγντóτατoν best worth the telling; what we on our part are concerned in the very first place to discover, is whether, and in what sense, the Peloponnesian War deserved this high estimate; and what grounds Thucydides had for making it.

This interpretation of ancient historians we have for long been accustomed to effect in the light of two main classes of evidence. In the first place, we have the page 16 internal evidence of the historians themselves, and, closely allied to this, the witness of one historian for or against another. In the second place, we have a fragmentary collection of literary materials for history, over and above the statements of any historian in the stricter sense of the word. It is all that has been saved, piecemeal, from the wreck of the old world; it is of all degrees of historical, that is, of critical, human interest; much of it, also, comes to us from the hands of men whose outstanding service was that they knew so little of history-writing, as the great masters conceive it, that they left standing on their pages whole paragraphs and chapters which Thucydides would surely have excised. With such materials for history, and such only, at our command, it would clearly be lost labour to apply the methods of the historian of modern times. Glimpses of ancient history they might give us, here and there; but they are quite insufficient for any reconstruction of antiquity, as history, such as is presented to us, for example, by Thucydides.

This again is the only reason, which will at all move the historian, for the local cult of prescribed periods and 'set books.' It explains the close interdependence of periods and texts, and the very subordinate part which is commonly assigned, even within a prescribed period, to episodes or phases which the 'set books' omit or neglect. Examples of all kinds of limitation will come before you, soon and often, in your 'Greats' reading; and it is well that you should be prepared for them from the outset: otherwise you may think you have 'covered the ground,' when you have only crossed it on a few well-worn stepping-stones. You may not have time or inclination to plunge into these dark corners of your subject, but it is well for your own mental honesty, that you should know under what limitations you are working; the first step to knowledge is to realise that there are things, even within your 'period,' which you have not tried to know.

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Now, as long as it was really the case that a few very great historians, themselves ancient, were your only sources, this handling of ancient history as a branch of ancient literature—for it really amounts to no less—was defensible in the main; and if we consider for a moment that those ancient historians included Herodotus, Thucydides, and Tacitus, we can see that the inherent defects of it were minimised. The practical exclusion of Polybius, because either he wrote a century too soon, or Tacitus a century too late, suggests less gracious thoughts, and the consolation that if you may not read an author for 'the Schools,' you are at all events masters of your leisure.

It is seldom safe for a historian to say that anything is out of date; but he is not going beyond his business if he points out that circumstances alter cases. Even when Grote was writing, in the forties and fifties of the last century, the first-fruits were already being gathered of the great harvest of inscriptions: the stores of coin lore which had been amassed by Eckhel and Mionnet were beginning to be supplemented copiously; and, what is more, were being used intelligently, since the economic researches of Boeckh. Grote himself, it is true, did not think it necessary to go to Syracuse, before writing about Epipclae and the Great Harbour; but Leake and Gell had already laid new foundations for classical topography, and Curtius was applying to Mediterranean lands the geographical methods of Ritter and the Humboldts. Ludwig Ross had navigated the Cyclades; Pashley (in default of our own Liddell) had traversed Crete; Penrose was at work on the Parthenon; and Cockerell was applying, to the construction of our University Galleries, lessons learned on the spot at Athens, Aegina, and Phigaleia.

The movement of which these were symptoms had its origin, as we all know, outside the circle of the Humanities; but I do not think we can fairly say that the Humanities responded less promptly than Natural page 18 History to the new call when it came. Ancient history which for long had been but little else than a branch of ancient literature, or at best a large department of classical studies, broke out, in fact, in the middle of the last century, into a wide group of 'historical sciences,' all alike concerned with the collection and arrangement of new classes of materials for history; the significance, and in some cases even the existence, of which had been little appreciated before. The new harvest has been copious in all fields. It has been abundant, as you will see soon enough, in the periods which are prescribed for special study in Oxford; but it is in some of those which are not, that the growth of knowledge has been greatest. Consequently, it is now far more nearly possible than it was, to attempt historical reconstruction of periods and aspects of the Ancient World, which have not had a Thucydides or a Polybius. At the same time, it has become more probable—if indeed it had ever been really doubtful—that no presentation of the ancient world, not even the Thucydidean or the Polybian, can ever be final; that old problems are open still for discussion and new research; that new problems emerge, which have been unsuspected before; and that new materials, still coming to hand, are copious enough, and of sufficiently historical interest, to justify fresh solutions.

Above all, the ancient historians, who for so long had been regarded mainly, if not wholly, as the artists of our picture of the old world, are being steadily pushed back themselves into the picture. Instead of viewing ancient history by their light, we come to study them in the light of ancient history; and thereupon the distinction, formerly perceptible between Ancient and Modern History, begins to collapse and disappear. At best it was a provisional one; a confession of our impotence, never the resignation of our beliefs an hopes.