CHAPTER II

MATERIALS FOR THE WRITING OF HISTORY

It is obvious that the materials for the writing of history consist for the most part of written records. It is true that all manner of monuments, including the ruins of buried cities, remains of ancient walls and highways, and all other traces of a former civilisation, must be allotted their share as records to guide the investigator in his attempt to reconstruct past conditions. But for anything like a definite presentation of the events of by-gone days, it is absolutely essential, as Sir George Cornewall Lewis pointed out in great detail, to have access to contemporary written records, either at first hand, or through the medium of copyists, in case the original records themselves have been destroyed. Lewis reached the conclusion, as the result of his exhaustive examination of the credibility of early Roman history, that a tradition of a past event is hardly transmitted orally from generation to generation with anything like accuracy of detail for more than a century.

Theoretically, then, no accurate history could ever be constructed of events covering a longer period than about four generations before the introduction of writing. In actual practice the scope of the strictly historic view of man’s progress is confined to very much narrower limits than this, for the simple reason that the earliest written records that might otherwise serve to give us glimpses of remote history have very rarely been preserved. The destruction of ancient inscriptions with the lapse of centuries has led to a great deal of difference of opinion as to the time when the art of writing was introduced among various nations. In reference to the Greeks in particular, the dispute has been ardently waged, many scholars contending that the art of writing was little practised in Greece until the sixth century B.C.

Later discoveries, in particular a knowledge of the inscription on the statue of Ramses at Abu Simbel, have made it clear that the earlier estimates were much too conservative, and it now seems probable that the Greeks had been acquainted with the art of writing for several, or perhaps many, centuries before the one previously fixed upon. It is not to be supposed, however, that the practice of the art of writing was universal in that early day. On the other hand, it was doubtless very exceptional indeed for the average individual to be able to write, and such difficulties as the lack of writing material stood in the way of composition until a relatively late period. But whether the art of writing was much or little practised in the early days does not greatly matter so far as the present-day historian is concerned, since practically all specimens of early writing in Greece disappeared in the course of succeeding ages. No fragment of any book proper, no scrap of parchment or papyrus, no single waxen tablet, from the soil of classic Greece has been preserved to us.

The Greek authors are known to us only through the efforts of successive generations of copyists; and, with the exception of a comparatively small number of Egyptian papyri, there is almost nothing in existence representing the literature of classical Greece that is older than the middle ages. There are, to be sure, considerable numbers of monumental inscriptions dating from classical times. These have the highest interest for the archæologist, but in the aggregate they give but meagre glimpses into the history of antiquity. If we were dependent upon these records for all that we know of Greek history, the entire story of that people might be told, as far as we could ever hope to learn it, in a few pages.

The case is somewhat different with Egypt and with Mesopotamia, since the climate of the former and the resistant character of the writing materials employed by the latter have permitted the modern world to receive direct messages that, under other circumstances, must inevitably have been lost. But even here the historical records are neither so abundant nor so comprehensive in their scope as might have been hoped. History-writing, in anything like a comprehensive meaning of the words, is a relatively modern art. The nearest approach to it among the nations of remote antiquity got no farther than the recording of the personal deeds of individual kings. Such records, indeed, are excellent materials for history, but they hardly constitute history by themselves. The entire lists of Egyptian inscriptions, so far as known, suffice merely to give glimpses of Egyptian history; and if the Mesopotamian records are, in this regard, somewhat more satisfactory, it is only in reference to a comparatively brief period of later Assyrian history that they can be said to have anything like comprehensiveness. As to the other nations of Oriental antiquity,--Indians, Persians, Syrians, the inhabitants of Asia Minor,--the entire sum of the monumental records that have been transmitted to us amounts to nothing more than a scattered series of vague suggestions.

In the classical world Rome is but little better off than Greece in this regard. As to both these countries, we depend for our knowledge almost exclusively upon the works of historians of a relatively late period. Before Herodotus, who lived in the fifth century B.C., there is almost no consecutive history proper of Greece; and despite all the efforts of archæologists, records of Roman progress scarcely suffice to push back the prehistoric veil beyond the time of the banishment of the kings. Indeed, even for a century or two after this event transpired, the would-be historian finds himself still on very treacherous ground. The reason for this is that there were no contemporary historians in Rome in this early period; and until such contemporary chroniclers appear, no secure record of history is possible.

Once it became the fashion to write chronicles of events, the custom rapidly spread and took a fixed hold upon the people. From the day of Herodotus there was no dearth of Greek historians, and after Polybius there is an unbroken series of Roman chroniclers.

Had all the writings of these various workers been preserved to us, we should have abundant material for reconstructing the history of the entire later classical epoch in much detail; but, unfortunately, the historian worked with perishable materials. An individual papyrus or parchment roll could hardly be expected on the average to be preserved for more than a few generations, and unless copies had been made of it in the meantime, the record that it contained must inevitably be lost. Such has been the fate of the great mass of historical writings, no less than of productions in other fields of literature.

Many of the fragments of ancient writers have come down to us through rather curious channels. In the later age of Rome it became the fashion to make anthologies and compilations, and it is through such collections that the majority of classical authors are known. One of the most curious of these anthologies is that made by Athenæus about the beginning of the third century A.D. This author called his work _Deipnosophistæ_, or the _Feast of the Learned_. He attempted to give it a somewhat artistic form, making it ostensibly a dialogue in which the sayings of a company of diners were related to a friend who was not present at the banquet. The diners were supposed to have introduced quotations from the classical writers, so that the book is chiefly made up of such quotations. The work has not come down to us quite in its entirety, but, even so, no fewer than eight hundred authors and twenty-five hundred different works are represented in the anthology. Of these authors about seven hundred are known exclusively through the excerpts of Athenæus.

Two or three centuries later another Greek named Stobæus compiled a set of extracts from the Greek writers of all accessible periods prior to his own. The number of authors quoted in this anthology is more than five hundred, and here again the major part of them are quite unknown to us except through this single source. Yet another collection of excerpts was made in the latter part of the ninth century by Photius, patriarch of Constantinople, who made excerpts from about 280 authors with whose works he had familiarised himself through miscellaneous reading. In addition to these works of individual compilers there were two or three anthologies compiled in the Byzantine period, including an important collection of fragments of the Greek poets which is still extant under the title of _The Greek Anthology_, and the elaborate set of encyclopædias made under the direction of Constantine Porphyrogenitus. But for such collections as these, supplemented by the biographical notices of such workers as Suidas, and by fragments that have come to us through a few other channels, it would scarcely have been conceived that so many authors had written in the entire period of Grecian activity, since only a fraction of this number are represented by complete works that have come down to us. Such facts as these give an inkling as to the mental activity of the old-time author, while pointing a useful lesson as to the perishability of human works. In this age of easy multiplying of books through printing, one is prone to forget how precarious must have been the existence of a manuscript of the elder day. It was a long, laborious task to produce an edition of a single copy of any extended work, and each successive duplication was precisely as slow and as difficult as the first. Under these circumstances no doubt a very considerable proportion of books were never duplicated at all, and the circulation of a very large additional number most likely was limited to two or three copies. It was only works which were early recognised as having an unusual intrinsic interest or value that stood any reasonable chance of being copied often enough to insure preservation through many succeeding generations.

As one considers the field of extant manuscripts, one is led naturally to reflect on the quality of work that was likely thus to insure perpetuity, and the more we consider the subject, limiting the view for our present purpose to historical compositions, the more clear it becomes that the one prime quality that gave a lease of life to the composition of an author was the quality of human interest. In other words, such historical compositions as were works of art, rather than such as depended upon other merits, were the ones which successive generations of copyists reproduced, and which ultimately were enabled to pass the final ordeal imposed by the monks of the middle ages, who made palimpsests of many an author deserving a better fate. The upshot of this process of the survival of the fittest was that all Greek would-be historians prior to Herodotus were allowed to sink into oblivion, causing Herodotus himself to stand out as apparently the absolute creator of a new art. In point of fact, could we know the whole truth, it would doubtless appear that there was no real revolution of method effected by the writings of Herodotus. He surpassed all of his predecessors in such a measure that the future copyist saw no necessity for preserving any work but the one, since this one practically covered the field of all the rest. It is, perhaps, an ill method of phrasing, to say that these copyists saw no reason for preserving those earlier manuscripts. There was no thought in their minds of the preservation of one book and the destruction of another; they merely copied the work which interested them, or which they believed would interest the book-buying public. The disappearance of the works not copied was a mere negative result, about which no one directly concerned himself.

The proof of the value of the work of Herodotus is found in the fact that it has come down to us entire in numerous copies, something that can be said of only three or four other considerable historical compositions of the entire classical period; two others of this select company being Thucydides and Xenophon, both of whom were contemporaries of Herodotus, though considerably younger, and therefore, properly enough, counted as belonging to the next generation. Of the other Greek historians, the biographical works of Plutarch, the works of Strabo and Pausanius, which are geographical rather than strictly historical, and the _Life of Alexander the Great_ by Arrian, are the sole ones of the large number undoubtedly written that have come down to us intact. A survey of the Roman historians furnishes an even more striking illustration, for here no one of the great historical works has been preserved in its entirety. Livy’s monumental work is entire as to the earlier books, which treat of the mythical and half-mythical period of Roman development; but the parts of it that treated of later Roman history, concerning which the author could have spoken, and probably did speak, with first-hand knowledge, are almost entirely lost. In other words, the copyists of the middle ages preserved the least valuable portion of Livy, doubtless because they found the hero tales of mythical Rome more interesting than the matter-of-fact recitals of the events of the later republic and the early empire. We can hardly suppose that Livy detailed the events of the later period with less art than characterised his earlier work, but different conditions were imposed upon him. He had now to deal with much fuller records than hitherto, and no doubt he treated many subjects that seemed important to him, simply because they were near at hand, but which another generation found tiresome and not worth the trouble of copying. Thus we see emphasised again the salient point that the interesting story rather than the important historical narrative proved itself most fit for preservation in the estimate of posterity.

Of the other great historians of Rome, Tacitus, Dionysius, Dion Cassius, Polybius, have all fared rather worse than Livy, although a few briefer masterpieces, like the two histories of Sallust and the _Gallic Wars_ of Cæsar, and such biographies as the “Lives” of Suetonius and Cornelius Nepos, were able to fight their way through the middle ages and gain the safe shelter of the printing-press without material loss.

But perhaps the most suggestive example of all is furnished by the brief world history of Justin, which, if not quite entire, has been preserved as to its main structure in various manuscripts. This work is an artistic epitome of a large, and in its day authoritative, history of the world, written by Trogus Pompeius. Justin, when a student in Rome in the day of the early Cæsars, was led to make an epitome of this work, seemingly as proof to his friends in the provinces that he was not wasting his time. He did his task so well that future generations saw no reason to trouble themselves with the prolixities of the original work, but were content to copy and re-copy the epitome, pointing the moral that brevity, next to artistic excellence, is the surest road to permanent remembrance for the historian,--a lesson which many modern writers have overlooked to their disadvantage.