Allen Lane (2024) h/b 518pp £30.00 (ISBN 9780241360576)
For Leopold von Ranke the object of historiography was (famously) to produce an account of history ‘as it really was’ (wie es eigentlich gewesen). In this long and learned book, which occasionally takes a diversion from its main theme, besides giving us not a few items of the author’s autobiography, we shall soon see that von Ranke’s formulation is in need of considerable expansion. The book’s 20 chapters are in two parts: ‘The Muse of History’, itself in three sections (12 chapters) and ‘The Angel of History’, also in three sections (8 chapters).
‘The systematic study of Greek history began in the eighteenth century’, says M., though Thomas Hobbes had produced his translation of Thucydides about a century earlier. Early histories of Greece, by historians mostly now forgotten, centred on the rivalry between Sparta and Athens, with Plutarch’s accounts of Lycurgus and Solon as the source. Time and time again, Sparta emerges as the winner, with M. giving us several encomia of Lycurgus, whose eunomia was a key factor, whereas (for Adam Ferguson) the situation of Athens was gloomy indeed; here the people were ‘intent on profit … and always ready to resign themselves to the influence of some popular leader’ and much more to the same effect: John Dunbar, on the other hand, considered that Athenians had ‘too much liberty’.
A far more consequential scholar was Cornelius de Pauw (1739-99) who found the Spartans barbarians through obstinacy and pride, and dismissed Montesquieu, Voltaire, Adam Smith, Rousseau, and David Hume, praised democracy, and wrote that the ‘republic of Athens was formed with reflection’. He was, says M. ‘perhaps the only enlightenment writer to continue to offer the modern student of ancient Greece serious questions worthy of study.’ Even more important was John Gast, to whom M. devotes some 30 pages and whose Greeks belong to a world of Huguenot enterprise and free trade that lay at the foundation of eighteenth century mercantilism, where overt political stances are of minor importance; for that, we must await the nineteenth century, Bulwer-Lytton and George Grote, and the emergence of a politically engaged history, inspired by the Revolutions in France and America.
There now comes an intermezzo, ‘The Philhellenes and Marathon’, in which M. follows the ‘resonance of the battle of Marathon for the rise of Athens as an ideal for the modern history of Greece’, taking us from John Gast via Byron, Elizabeth Barrett Browning nineteenth century French and British art, and a very unfortunate incident in 1870, to Robert Graves in the first world war (the reviewer can take it further: in 1941, as Germany invaded Greece, Maurice Bowra composed a distich comparing the Greek army to the Marathonomachai. It appeared in JHS 1941.*)
There were no Spartans at Marathon—a battle which John Stuart Mill regarded as the most important battle in English history.
M. now introduces us to the history of Greece by William Mitford (whose model was Gibbon, and who was an original historian in terms both of historical method and the usefulness of parallels between ancient and modern history), and Bulwer-Lytton (the subject of another intermezzo), the author of the ‘earliest and most significant work of the English romantic school of history’, and the ‘most original English contribution to the continental movement that began the great age of history’. It was he who wrote ‘we yet behold the imperishable blessings we derive from the liberties of Athens and the institutions of Solon’: democracy and liberty.
Next comes Grote: M. gives a detailed appraisal of Grote, who well knew the difference between representative and ‘full’ democracy, and whose deservedly famous history is the first to appreciate and emphasise the importance of Cleisthenes in the development of Athenian democracy. (Of course, he wrote before the discovery of Aristotle’s work on the Constitution of Athens in 1891). His analysis of mythopoeia, in which each successive generation reinterprets existing body of myths in relation to its own preoccupations and interests, is attractive. He also defended the Sophists (in whose number he included Socrates). Grote, says M., perhaps wished ‘to refute the Tory interpretation of Mitford, but (assuredly) to establish the place of Greek history in the Utilitarian canon. Grote’s History of Greece remains the … most distinguished history yet provided by any philosophical school’.
M. now crosses the Channel in a section titled ‘The Triumph of Germany’ (indeed, in the nineteenth century Germany was dominant in many spheres, including the critical study of history), in which K.O. Mueller and the Dane B. G. Niebuhr were leading figures. Niebuhr visited neither Oxford nor Cambridge during his stay in England—and would not have benefited even if he had—while in London he ‘shrank from associating himself with the young men on account of their dissoluteness’, but far more importantly he liberated historians from ‘the tyranny of the ancient text as the paradigm of truth’. Thomas Arnold, headmaster and historian, commended Niebuhr for his approach to source criticism (Quellenforschung), collection of fragmentary evidence and use of Roman law to uncover the origins of Roman social history: a major advance in historiography. Of Jacob Burckhardt it is possible here to say no more than that by his work there came about the creation of a new form of history: Kulturgeschichte—despite the later attack on his work by the much younger Wilamowitz. But for M., Burckhardt’s ‘work remains the first and our best modern account of Greek culture’, just as he was also inventor of an archaic or ‘agonal’ (relating to contests; here Burckhardt was influenced by Pindar) age. (M.’s account of Burckhardt’s relationship with Nietzsche [pp. 230-1] is especially worth reading; and M. himself clearly feels a close affinity with Burckhardt).
More intermezzi: The Problem of Socrates. Who was the historical Socrates? The picture drawn by Plato is incompatible with those of Aristophanes and Xenophon. What did he actually believe in, what is his significance for the history of philosophy? Answers offered by Hegel, Kierkegaard, Burckhardt, and Nietzsche concluded that Socrates is the first Greek whom it is possible to know as a real person and so is ‘the first and indeed only Greek about whom it is possible to write a biography’.
Next, the ‘Key to All Mythologies’ (for full appreciation of this chapter, acquaintance with George Eliot’s Middlemarch is all but essential). C. G. Heyne had sought to present a more rational view (than those put forward before) of the role of mythology: however, his universalist view was challenged, on different grounds, by K. O. Mueller and Max Mueller. This is an engaging chapter, but M. concludes that the study of myth is the story of the continuing search for our own mythic origins. ‘We are condemned to the unhappy fate of Eliot’s Mr Casaubon’.
A final intermezzo—'The Repentance of Gilbert Murray’— (‘Second Thoughts’ might be more appropriate) takes us from Murray’s support for war in 1914 and denunciation of the German invasion of Belgium (his letter to The Times was signed by 52 of Britain’s leading scholars and writers, including Jane Harrison) to his later work devoted to the League of Nations—to such an extent that his neglect of his position as Regius professor of Greek led to questioning by the Vice-Chancellor and, with Murray concurring, appropriate arrangements were made.
Clio has been in the shadows for some time, but now she reemerges in the 20th century. The difficult transfer to London of Aby Warburg’s superb library (in which Raymond Klibansky, Fritz Saxl and Edgar Wind were key figures) was a coup, achieved with skill and determination. M. gives some numbers concerning costs and remunerations of the scholars saved at this time from Germany, and mainly relocated in Oxford: however, in order to translate them into 2024 equivalents, they need to be multiplied by approximately 60 (thus the annual grant to a family included in the diaspora would be £250 [£15,000], from which were deducted any other earnings). On p.281, M. names over 20 intellectual leaders who had been rescued from Germany or elsewhere (perhaps Maas and Jacoby could be added), including the youthful Momigliano, rescued, thanks to Hugh Last, from Italy.
M. tells us that he regards Ronald Syme as the UK’s greatest ancient historian of the 20th century (curiously, Syme disavowed any influence from Namier’s Structure of Politics, while necessarily accepting that Muenzer and Gelzer had been influential). M. does not hold such historians as Adcock, Charlesworth, and (unfairly?) Last in high repute, inter alia citing their low output in the 1930s (but were they not working on CAH at that time?).
The following two chapters are devoted to Momigliano (and here the reviewer feels it his duty to commend the long and superb article on him by Anthony Grafton in the Tablet, September 2020). At Oxford, Momigliano had the ‘experience of daily contact with the greatest scholarship of Europe in a context of pure research, which turned him from the learned but orthodox Italian ancient historian’ (he had worked under De Sanctis) ‘into the European polymath who took the whole classical tradition as his domain’.
Let it be said that the new realism of Syme (The Roman Revolution) had little appeal to Momigliano, who was profoundly shocked by Syme’s ‘forthrightly Machiavellian view of human nature based on self-interest and family power, not ideals’: the result was a lasting conflict, however muted, between them. In his first Cambridge lecture, in 1940 on ‘Peace and Liberty in the Ancient World’, Momigliano had to ask whether ‘the Empire represented the mere replacement of 600 lords—the Roman senators—by one lord—the Emperor—or whether it was a new form of human society. We must choose, we will choose’—perhaps echoing the famous words of the mathematician David Hilbert ‘Wir müssen wissen – wir werden wissen' about an unsolved problem.
Momigliano did not confuse the history of ideas with the history of ideologies: ‘if we ignore ideology and look at reality, or better if we give to ideology its own place, which is in hell and not in paradise, … we are left with two recent books … (one) by von Premerstein on the essence of the Roman Principate and above all the recent very important book of Mr Syme, The Roman Revolution’. For although Momigliano was on the side of the Mommsenian Last, he understood the power of Syme’s vision—but it is ‘absurd to think that the history of Rome might be in the hands of some hundreds of leading men … Political power was in their hands, but not history, which is another matter’.
The last four lectures in Momigliano’s series were devoted to the history of liberty (‘the eternal force of human activity’), and ‘the task of the historian is to recognise without any political deformation the historical forms of the problem of freedom through the centuries’. Momigliano sought to understand the methods by which one might create a true picture of the past as a model for the future historiography, not as a trivial antiquarian pursuit but as the study of historical method, the study of how historical knowledge is attained. This subject arose again in his Sather Classical Lectures of 1962, The Classical Foundations of Modern Historiography.
Momigliano (who remained in England after the war) is central to M.’s book, but there is deservedly a chapter on Fernand Braudel (‘the greatest historian of the twentieth century’): ‘with the translation of La Mediterranée (1973) Braudel became the best-known historian in the world’. This chapter (with its notes) forms a wholly admirable introduction to Braudel’s work and career: it was during his years as a prisoner of war that the concepts of l’histoire profonde, and longue durée became pivotal to his thinking. No less interesting is the chapter on L’École de Paris which introduces us to Vernant and Vidal-Naquet and ‘alterity’ (a concept which they viewed differently).
Chapter 19 ‘Dark Times: The Cold War and the Triumph of Capitalism’ reintroduces the reader to Moses Finley (‘one of the few Western scholars to maintain connections with Eastern scholars throughout his life’). M. asks whether the Republic of Letters can survive the triumph of ruthless capitalism and nationalism that is the curse of the twenty-first century? ‘Pathei mathos’ writes M. with an almost audible groan. However, thanks to an ‘alternative historiography’, at least Greek scholars in the Soviet empire became less Marxist than their corresponding ideologues of the West.
The final chapter—‘The Crisis of Theory in History’—has been described by a well-known scholar as compulsory reading. One idea is that ‘history is rhetoric’, with the aim of persuasion or the telling of a story, a concept greeted by Momigliano with justified fury. Again, M. asks whether the progress of history can be conceived as a ‘crude Darwinian selection’. This ‘positivist’ approach has attraction—thus Greek democracy expresses the essence of modern democracy despite belonging to a totally different society.
M. sets out his stance concerning ‘why we write history’ near the book’s end: is it desire for truth? To understand the present? To enable the individual to escape from the intolerableness of the present? Or to influence the present? It ends with the valedictory comment—or instruction—that the ‘true historical study will give proper attention to the varieties of theory and their functions for understanding the past and enabling history to fulfil its role as true myth, to inform rather than conform to the present’. We have come a long way from Leopold von Ranke!
Your reviewer came to admire greatly this book which has added substantially to his knowledge, and, he hopes, understanding.
Colin Leach
*οὐ Μαραθωνομάχας σέβομεν μόνον ἀλλὰ καὶ ὑμᾶς,
ὦ φίλοι, οὐ τοίων χειροτέρους πατέρων.