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The Pamphlet Collection of Sir Robert Stout: Volume 80

II

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II

So much for that general conception of what history is, and of its value, with which, I think, we shall come most safely to the study of it. All that I have said so far, however, has been intended to be equally applicable to all history—ancient and modern alike—and if, later on, I have occasion to contrast our actual methods of dealing with different periods of history, it must needs be either to regret anomalies, or to justify their existence.

But now we come to more special considerations. The terms ancient and modern history do, after all, stand for a very real distinction. Ancient history does not merely deal with an earlier period in the general history of mankind; it has to discover and verify its facts under conditions of study which are peculiar; and the facts, when discovered, turn out to belong, for the most part, to rather special classes. Consequently 'ancient' historians are under strong temptation to fill the gaps in their knowledge, which they are every day more free to admit, from adjacent sources of learning, and consequently also, it is essential for students of ancient history to start with clear ideas of the functions of History itself, and also of its frontier lines towards these neighbouring fields of knowledge.

But we must go further than this. Ancient history does not merely deal with facts of a special kind, ascertained under special conditions, and belonging to a special period of time. Not all the facts belonging to this period are included in its domain at ah; and those which are included are defined and characterised quite as precisely by the place as by the time of their occurrence. There is a good reason, which it is for the historian to discover, why Greek history falls within the particular centuries which it fills; but there is equally good reason why it falls in the Mediterranean region, and round the shores of the Aegean Sea. Even if we knew the history of the Mississippi as we know that of the Nile, it could page 12 never rank in the same sense as ancient history; but would remain, as now, a matter of indifference to historians. In reality, the geographical area within which events count as historic during the periods which are claimed by ancient history, is very narrowly and very precisely limited; nor is it easy to conceive in what way these geographical limits can ever be seriously challenged. So rigid is the control which nature has imposed upon the most successful enterprises even of an animal so migratory and intrusive as Man. Let me explain very briefly what I mean.

The main current of human history has passed (from the point where we can first trace it) through three principal phases, and is now, I think, entering upon a fourth; and each of these phases stands intimately related to distinct geographical surroundings.*

The first stage is one in which the sole centres of advancement are provided, and defined, by great river valleys, with alluvial irrigable soil. The precise course of events in Mesopotamia and in Egypt has depended, in detail, upon external factors; but the common character of what the historians group together as the Ancient East, is that of detached riparian and agricultural civilizations, in recurrent peril from the men of the desert and the mountain, and only in intermittent touch with each other.

Each of these self-centred and almost self-sufficient worlds has its own special type of civilization adapted to the local conditions; but each is in its essentials the duplicate of the other. Outside these twin sources of light lie for the most part darkness or satellites.

The second phase of history opened when the dwellers round the shores of a Midland Sea, and above all, on the islands secluded within one gulf of it, began to make interchange of commodities, and thereby grew up to the conception of the habitable world as a π∊ρíoóoí page 13 γη∘í, an Orbis Terrarum, a ring of countries convergent about a single basin of water; adjacent indeed to the Ancient East, but essentially averted from it- That this conception of a ring of lands lasted so persistently and produced in Greek and Roman life the practical consequences which it did, is due to the fact that it did actually represent the geographical conditions in which Greeks and Romans lived; for if we look at the great civilisation which grew up in the Mediterranean lands, I think we shall see that each principal phase of that civilisation was obviously and emphatically a Mediterranean one; and that it owed its greatness to its conformity to Mediterranean conditions. The empires of Minos, of Athens, and of Rome are but three attempts to realise a civilised Orbis Terrarum, convergent round the margin of a single water-basin. The momentary efforts of Alexander, of Augustus, and of Trajan, to transcend these limits, die with their authors, or before them. Only the genius of Caesar could see that when he crossed the Rhone and created the New World called Europe, he was discovering a world which faced not towards the Elbe, but towards the Atlantic: vergit ad ssptem triones.

The third phase opens, then, when Caesar's galleys with oars, pine-built, from the Midland Sea, met the oaken sail-craft of the ocean-going Veneti. It passes by long transition of northern sea-powers in strife with southern, Northway against Midgard, to the point where northern and southern sea-powers, in league and rivalry, demonstrate simultaneously, by their discovery and colonization of the Americas, that the Atlantic, like the Mediterranean and the old Aegean, is no Outland Sea, but an Inter-continental Gulf, between the 'United' and the 'Dis-united' States; that the Circumambient Ocean of an earlier age is itself in turn the avenue, beyond its own Pillars of Heracles, the Gates of Horn and of Good Hope, into what might well seem at last to be a real Ocean.

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A fourth phase into which the world is now again passing, with the occupation of Australia and the westward coasts of America, and with the introduction of Western thought into India, Japan, and China, raises anew the question: Is not, after all, what seemed to Nelson and Washington to be an Outer Sea, itself landlocked like its prototypes? Have not the Eastern and the Western halves of our Mercator's projection served their turn long enough as coasts of a Midland Atlantic? Ought they not now, in fact, to be transposed, to be the inward-facing shores of a Pacific World?

* The paragraphs which follow are abbreviated from § iv of a paper on the Place of Classical Geography in a Classical Curriculum, read in 1999 at a meeting of the Classical Association of Scotland.