PART II

CONCERNING THE HISTORY OF HISTORIOGRAPHY

I

PRELIMINARY QUESTIONS

We possess many works relating to the history of historiography, both special, dealing with individual authors, and more or less general, dealing with groups of authors (histories of historiography confined to one people and to a definite period, or altogether 'universal' histories). Not only have we bibliographical works and works of erudition, but criticism, some of it excellent, especially in the case of German scientific literature, ever the most vigilant of all in not leaving unexplored any nook or cranny of the dominion of knowledge. It cannot, therefore, form part of my design to treat the theme from its foundations: but I propose to make a sort of appendix or critical annotation to the collection of books and essays that I have read upon the argument. I will not say that these are all, or even that they are all those of any importance, but they ire certainly a considerable number. By means of this annotation I shall try to establish, on the one hand, in an exact manner and in conformity with the principles explained, the method of such a history, regarding which I observe that there still exist confusion and perplexity, even among the best, which lead to errors of judgment or at least of plan, and on the other hand I shall try to outline the principal periods in a summary manner, both with the view of exemplifying the method established, and, as it were, of illustrating historically the concepts exposed in the preceding theoretical pages, which might otherwise retain here and there something of an abstract appearance.

Beginning with methodical delimitations, I shall note in the first place that in a history of historiography as such, historical writings cannot be looked upon from the point of view proper to a history of literature—that is to say, as expressions of individual sentiments, as forms of art. Doubtless they are this also, and have a perfect right to form part of histories of literature, as the treatises and systems of the philosophers, the writings of Plato and Aristotle, of Bruno, of Leibnitz, and of Hegel; but in this case both are regarded not as works of history and of philosophy, but of literature and poetry; and the empirical scale of values which constitute the different modes of history in the cases of the same authors is different, because in a history of literature the place of a Plato will always be more considerable than that of an Aristotle, that of a Bruno than that of a Leibnitz, owing to the greater amount of passion and the greater richness of artistic problems contained in the former of each pair. The fact that in many volumes of literary history such diversity of treatment is not observed, and historians are talked of historically and not in a literary manner and philosophers philosophically rather than in a literary manner, is due to the substitution in such works of incoherent compilation for work that is properly critical and scientific. But the distinction between the two aspects is important for this reason also, that erroneous judgments, praise, and censure, alike unjustified, are apt to appear, owing to the careless transference of the scale of values from one history to another. The slight esteem in which Polybius was held in antiquity and for some time after, because 'he did not write well' in comparison with the splendour of Livy or with the emotional intensity of Tacitus, is an instance of this, as is likewise in Italy the excessive praise lavished upon certain historians who were little more than correct and elegant writers of prose in comparison with others who were negligent and crude in their form, but serious students. Ulrici,[1] in his youthful book on ancient historiography, which despite its heaviness and verbosity of exposition has great merits, after having discussed the 'scientific value' of that historiography, also speaks at great length of 'artistic value'; but setting aside what of arbitrary is to be found in some of the laws that he applies to historiography as art, in conformity with the æsthetic ideas of his time, it is evident that the second subject of which he treats does not coalesce with the first and is only placed side by side with it in the same way as those sections of works dealing with historical method are not connected but simply juxtaposed, and after having studied in their own way the formation of historical thought, the collection of materials or 'heuristic,' up to final 'comprehension,' begin to discuss the form of the 'exposition,' and in so doing continue without being aware of it the method of rhetorical treatises on the art of history composed during the Renaissance. These have their chief exponent in Vossius (1623). We cannot abstain from sometimes mentioning the literary form of the works of historians, nor from according their laurels to works of remarkable literary value, while noting their unsatisfactory historiographical methods; but to touch here and there upon, to discuss, to characterize, to eliminate, is of secondary importance and does not form part of the proper function of historiography, whose object is the development of historiographical thought.

The distinction between this history and that of philology or erudition is less apparent but not less indubitable, always, be it well understood, in the sense explained, of a distinction that is not a separation. This warning should be understood in respect of other exclusions that we are about to effect, without our being obliged to repeat it at every step; for the connexion between history and philology is undeniable, not less than that between history and art, or history and practical life. But that does not prevent philology in itself being the collection, the rearrangement, the purification of material, and not history. Owing to this quality it forms a part rather of the history of culture than of that of thought. It would be impossible to disassociate it from the history of libraries, archives, museums, universities, seminaries, écoles des chartes, academical and editorial enterprises, and from other institutions and proceedings of an entirely practical nature. Fueter has therefore been right in excluding from his theme in his recent work on the history of modern historiography[2] "the history of merely philological research and criticism." This has not prevented him from taking store where apposite of the school of Biondo or of that of Maurini, or of the perfecting of the method of seeking for the sources attained by the German school in the nineteenth century. The confusion and lack of development observable in the old and solid work of Wachler[3] is perhaps due to his having failed to make this distinction, to which recourse can also be had with advantage elsewhere. Wachler's work, entitled and conceived as "history of research and of the historical art from the Renaissance of letters in Europe onward," ended by assuming the appearance of a repertory or bibliographical catalogue.

The obstacles to be encountered by the distinction between the history of historiography and that of the practical tendencies, or tendencies of the social and political spirit, are more intricate. These indeed become incorporated with or at least leave their mark upon the works of historians; but it is just because we can only with difficulty perceive the line of demarcation that it is indispensable to make it quite clear. Such tendencies, such social and political spirit, belong rather to the matter than to the theoretical form of history; they are not so much historiography as history in the act and in its fieri. Machiavelli is a historian in so far as he tries to understand the course of events; he is a politician, or at least a publicist, when he posits and desires a prince, founder of a strong national state, as his ideal, reflecting this in his history. This history, in so far as it portrays that ideal and the inspiration and teaching that accompany it, here and there becomes fable (fabula docet). Thus Machiavelli belongs partly to the history of thought in the Renaissance and partly to the history of the practice of the Renaissance. Nor does this happen solely in political and social historiography, but also in literary and artistic, because there is not perhaps a critic in the world, however unprejudiced and broad in his ideas, who does not manifest tendencies in the direction of a literary renovation of his epoch together with his actual judgments and reconstructions. Now to the extent that he does this, even if it be in the same book and on the same page or in the same period, he is no longer a critic, but a practical reformer of art. In one domain of history alone is this pacific accompaniment of interpretations and aspirations impossible—in the history of philosophy, because when, as here, there is a difference between historical interpretation and the tendency of the philosopher, the difference reveals the insufficiency of the interpretation itself: in other words, if the theory of the historian of philosophy is at war with the theories of which he claims to expound the history, his theory must be false, just because it does not avail to justify the history of the theories. But this exception does not annul the distinction in other fields; indeed, it confirms it, and is not an exception in the empirical sense, as it appears to be: thought distinguishes and is distinguished from sentiment and will, but it is not distinguished from itself, precisely because it is the principle of distinction. A methodological corollary of this distinction between history of historiography and history of practical tendencies is that the introduction into the first of considerations belonging to the second is to be held erroneous. Here I think Fueter has sinned to some extent in the book to which I have already referred, where he divides his material into humanistic, political, party, imperial, particularist, Protestant, Catholic, Jesuitic, illuministic, romanticist, erudite, lirico-subjective, national, statolatral, historiographical, and the like. Only some of the above divisions belong to, or can properly be reduced to, historiographical concepts, while the majority refer to social and political life. Hence the lack of sound organization that we observe in this book, which is yet so lively and ingenious: its divisions follow one another without sufficient logicality, continuity, and necessity, and are not the result of a single thought which posits them and develops itself through them. If, on the other hand, the genuinely historiographical portions, which have become mingled with it, should be eliminated, what remained could certainly be organized, but as social and political history, no longer as historiography, because the works of historians would be consulted only as documents showing the tendencies of the times in which they were written. Machiavelli, for instance, (to use the same example) would there figure as an Italian patriot and defender of absolute power, while Vico (a much greater historian than Machiavelli) would not be able to appear at all, or hardly at all, because his relation with the political life of his time was remote and general.

What I have been expounding may be resumed by saying that the history of historiography is neither literary history nor the history of cultural, social, political, moral doings, which are of a practical nature, but that it is certainly all these things, by reason of the unbreakable unity of history, though with it the accent does not fall upon practical facts, but rather upon historiographical thought, which is its proper subject.

Having pointed out or recalled these distinctions, which, as we have seen, are sometimes neglected with evil results, we must now utter a warning against other distinctions, employed without rational basis, which rather overcloud and trouble the history of historiography than shed light upon it.

Fueter (I cite him again, although the error is not peculiar to him) declares that he has dealt in his book with historiographical theories and with historical method only in so far as they seem to have had influence upon actual historiography. The history of historicity (here is the reason he gives for the method he has followed) is as little the history of historiography as is the history of dramatic theories the history of the drama. This he considers to be proved by the fact that theory and practice often follow different paths, as, for instance, in Lope de Vega, whose theory of the drama and actual dramatic work were two different things, to such an extent that it was said of the Spanish dramatist that although he reverenced the poetical art, when he sat down to compose "he locked up the correct rules under seven keys." This argument is without doubt specious, and I was myself formerly seduced by it; but it is fallacious, as I realized when I thought it over again, and I now affirm it to be an error with all the conviction and authority of one who criticizes an error at one time his own. The argument is founded upon a false analogy between the production of art and that of history. Art, which is the work of the imagination, can be well distinguished from the theory of art, which is the work of reflection; artistic genius produces the former, the speculative intellect the latter, and it often happens with artists that the speculative intellect is inferior to their genius, so that they do one thing and say another, or say one thing and do another, without its being possible to accuse them of logical incoherence, because the incoherence is between two discordant thoughts, never between a thought and an act of the imagination. But history and theory of history are both of them works of thought, bound to one another in the same way as thought is bound to itself, since it is one. Thus no historian but possesses in a more or less reflective way his theory of history, because, not to put too fine a point upon it, every historian implicitly or explicitly conducts a polemic against other historians (against other 'versions' and 'judgments' of a fact), and how could he ever conduct a polemic or criticize others if he did not himself possess a conception of what history is and ought to be, to which to refer, a theory of history? The artist, on the other hand, in so far as he is an artist, does not polemize or criticize, but forms. It may quite well happen that an erroneous theory of historiography is expounded, while on the contrary the history as narrated may turn out to be well constructed. This is, of course, to be incoherent, but is so neither more nor less than when progress is effected in one branch of historiography, while there is backwardness in another. There may obtain, on the contrary, an excellent theory of history, where history itself is bad; but in the same way that in one field of historiography there is the sense of and striving for a better method, while there is adherence to old methods in all the other fields. The history of historiography is the history of historical thought; and here it is impossible to distinguish theory of history from history.

Another exclusion which Fueter declares that he has made is that of the philosophy of history. He does not give the reason for this, but allows it to be understood, for he evidently holds that philosophies of history do not possess a purely scientific character and are lacking in truth. But not only are what are called 'philosophies of history' erroneous conceptions of history, but so also are the naturalistic or deterministic conceptions opposed to them, and all the various forms of pseudo-history which have been described above, philological history, poetical history, rhetorical history. I do not find that he has excluded these from his history, any more than he has really excluded the theological and transcendental conception of history (philosophy of history); indeed, he constantly refers to it. Justice and logic would insist upon all or none being excluded—all really excluded, and not merely in words. But to exclude all of them, it may be said, would be anything but intelligent, because how could the history of history ever be told in such a void? What is this history but the struggle of scientific historiography against inadequate scientific formulas? Certainly the former is the protagonist, but how could a drama be presented with a protagonist lacking antagonists? And even if historical philology be not considered directly, but referred back to philology, if poetical history be referred back to literature, rhetorical or practical to social and political history, it would nevertheless be necessary always to take account of the conversion that often occurs of those various mental constructions into assertions of reality, taken in exchange for and given the value of true and proper histories. In this sense they become in turn deterministic or transcendental conceptions of history, and both of them logical or illogical representations of all the others, and end by becoming equivalent to one another dialectically, and are always before the eyes of the historian, because the perpetual condition and the perpetual sign of the progress of historical thought reside in their movement, which passes from transcendency or false immanence to pure immanence, to return to them and enter into a more profound conception of immanency. To exclude philosophies of history from the history of historiography does not, therefore, seem to me to be justifiable, for the same reason as it seems to be unjustifiable to exclude from it historiographical theories, which are the consciousness that historiography acquires of itself: owing to their homogeneity, I say, owing indeed to their identity with history, of which they do not form accidental ingredients or material elements, but constitute the very essence. A proof of this is to be found in the Historical Philosophy of France of Flint. He proceeds from a presumption that is perhaps the opposite of that of Fueter—that is to say, he treats of the philosophy of history, and not of history, but finds it impossible to maintain the dykes between the two. His treatise, therefore, when artificial obstacles have been overcome, runs like a single river and reveals to our view the whole history of historical French thought, to which Bossuet and Rollin, Condorcet and Voltaire, Auguste Comte and Michelet or Tocqueville equally belong.

At this point it will probably be objected (although Fueter does not propound this objection, it is probable that it is at the back of his mind) that what is desired in a history of historiography is not so much a history of historical thought as a history of history in the concrete: of the Storie fiorentine of Machiavelli, of the Siècle de Louis XIV of Voltaire, or of the Römische Geschichte of Niebuhr: that would be a general history, while what is desired is a specific history. But it is well to pay close attention to the meaning of such a request and to the possibility of what is asked. If I set out to write the history of the Storie fiorentine of Machiavelli, in respect to the particular material with which it deals, I shall rewrite the history of Florence, criticizing and completing Machiavelli, and shall thus be, for instance, a Villari, a Davidsohn, or a Salvemini. If I set out to write the history of the material of Voltaire's work, I shall criticize Voltaire and outline a new Siècle de Louis XIV, as has been done, for example, by Philippson. And if I set to work to examine and rethink the work of Niebuhr in respect to its particular material, I shall be a new historian of Rome, a Mommsen or (to quote the most recent writers) a Hector Pais or a Gaetano de Sanctis. But is this what is desired? Certainly not. But if this be not desired, if the particular materials of those histories are not to be taken account of, what else remains save the 'way' in which they have been conceived, the 'mental form' by means of which they construct their narratives, and therefore their theory and their historical 'thought'?

Now, if this truth be admitted (and I do not see how it can be contested) it is not possible to reject an ulterior consequence which, although it is wont to arouse in some the sensation of a paradox, does not do so in us, for we find it altogether in accordance with the conception of the identity of history with, philosophy that we have defended. Is a thought that is not thought conceivable? Is it permissible to distinguish between the thought of the historian and the thought of the philosopher? Are there perhaps two different thoughts in the world? To persist in maintaining that the thought of the historian thinks the fact and not the theory is prevented by the preceding admission, if by nothing else: that the historian always thinks at least both the theory of history and the historical fact. But this admission entails his thinking the theory of all the things that he narrates, together with the theory of history. And indeed he could not narrate without understanding them. Fueter extols the merit of Winckelmann, who was the first to conceive a history, not of artists, but of art, of a pure spiritual activity, and that of Giannone, who was the first to attempt a history of the life of jurisprudence. But these writers made the progress they did because they had a new and more accurate conception of art and of rights, and if they went wrong as to certain points, that is because they did not always think those conceptions with equal exactitude. Winckelmann, for instance, materialized the spiritual activity of the artist when he posited an abstract, fixed material ideal of beauty, and gave an abstract history of artistic styles without regard to the temperaments, historical circumstances, and individualities of the artists themselves. Giannone failed to supersede the dualism of Church and State. Without indulging in other too particular examples, it is evident at the first glance that ancient historiography concords with the ancient conception of religion of the state, of ethic, and of the whole of reality; the medieval with Christian theology and ethic; that of the first half of the nineteenth century with the idealistic and romantic philosophy, that of the second half with naturalistic and positivistic philosophy. Thus, ex parte historicorum, there is no way of distinguishing historical and philosophical thought, which are perfectly commingled in the narratives. But there is also no possibility of maintaining such a distinction ex parte philosophorum either, because, as all know, or at least say, each period has the philosophy proper to it, which is the consciousness of that period, and as such is its history, at least in germ; or, as we have put it, philosophy and history coincide. And if they coincide, the history of philosophy and the history of historiography also coincide: the one is not only not distinguishable from the other, but is not even subordinate to the other, for it is all one with it.

The historiography of philosophy has already begun to open its arms, inviting and receiving the works of the historians. Every day it understands better that a history of Greek thought is not complete without taking count of Herodotus, Thucydides, and Polybius, nor of Roman thought without Livy and Tacitus, nor of the thought of the Renaissance without Machiavelli and Guicciardini. It must open them yet wider and clasp to its bosom even the humble medieval historiographers who noted the Gesta episcoporum or Historiolæ translationum or Vitæ sanctorum, or who bear witness to the Christian faith, according to their powers and in their own way, it is true, but not less than the great Augustine according to his powers. It must receive not only the hagiographical writers, but even obtuse philologists or sociologists who have amused us during the last decades and bear witness to the creed of positivism not other-wise than as Spencer or Haeckel in their systems. By means of this amplification of concepts and enrichment of material, the historiography of philosophy will place itself in the position of being able to show that philosophy is a force diffused throughout life, and not the particular invention and cult of certain men who are philosophers, and will obtain the means that have hitherto been lacking to effect a close conjunction with the whole historical movement.

In its turn the history of historiography will gain by the fusion, because it will find its own directive principles in philosophy, and by its means will be rendered capable of understanding both the problems of history in general and those of its various aspects as history of art and of philosophy, of economic and moral life. To seek elsewhere the criterion of explanation is vain. Fueter, who takes a glance at the most recent historiography, that posterior to 1870, at the end of his book, discerns in it the new consciousness that gives the highest place to political and military power and marks the end of the old liberalism, the strengthening of such consciousness by means of the Darwinian theories concerning the struggle for life, the influence of a more intense economical and industrial life and a greater intensity of world politics, the repercussion of Egyptian and Orientalistic discoveries, which have aided in disproving the illusion of Europe as the centre of the world, the attraction exercised by the theory of races, and so on. These observations are just, but they do not reach the heart and brain of the most recent historiography; they merely revolve round its body. The heart or brain is, as I have observed, naturalism, the ideal of historical culture inspired and to be inspired by the natural sciences. So true is this that Fueter himself burns a few grains of incense before this idol, sighing for a form of history that shall be beautiful with the beauty of a well-made machine, rivalling a book on physics such as the Theory of Tones of Helmholtz. The truth is that the ideal of the natural sciences, instead of being the perfection, is one of the many crises that historical thought has passed through and will pass through. Historical thought is dialectic of development, and not by any means a deterministic explanation by means of causes which does not explain anything because it does not develop anything. But whatever we may think of this, it is certain that naturalism—that is, the criticism of naturalism—can alone supply the clue for unravelling the web of the historiography of the last ten years; the same events and historical movements enumerated above have acted in the particular way in which they have acted owing to being constantly framed in naturalistic thought.

For the rest, nothing forbids, and it may even serve a useful purpose, that the history of philosophy and the history of historiography should receive literary treatment in different books, for altogether practical reasons, such, for instance, as the abundance of material and the different training and acquirements needed for the treatment of the different classes of material. But what is apparently disunited by practice thought really unifies; and this real unification is what I have wished to inculcate, without the pedantic idea ever passing through my mind of dictating rules for composing books, as to which it is desirable to leave all liberty of inclusion and exclusion to writers, in conformity with their various intentions.

II

GRÆCO-ROMAN HISTORIOGRAPHY

After what we have said as to the nature of periodization,[1] the usual custom, to which I too bow here, of beginning the history of historiography with that of the Greeks, and with the Greeks of the fifth or sixth century before Christ, will be taken for what it is really worth, but it must not be thought that we thus intend to announce the beginning of historiography, its first appearance in the world, when, on the contrary, all we wish to say is that our interest in the investigation of its course becomes more vivid at that point. History, like philosophy, has no historical beginning, but only an ideal or metaphysical beginning, in so far as it is an activity of thought, which is outside time. Historically speaking, it is quite clear that prior to Herodotus, prior to the logographs, prior indeed to Hesiod and to Homer, history was already, because it is impossible to conceive of men who do not think and do not narrate their deeds in some way or other. This explanation might seem to be superfluous if the confusion between historical beginning and ideal beginning had not led to the fancy of a 'first philosophical step,' made by Thales or Zeno, or by somebody else, by means of which thinking the first stone is supposed to have been laid, as it was believed that by thinking another last step the pinnacle of the edifice of philosophy was or would be attained. But Thales and Herodotus should really be called rather the 'sons' of our interest in the development of those disciplines than the 'fathers' of philosophy and history, and it is we whom those sons salute as their 'fathers.' We have not usually much interest in what occurred prior to them or among people more distant than they from our point of view, not only because there is a scarcity of surviving documents concerning them, but above all because they are forms of thought which have but little connexion with our own actual problems.

From its point of view, too, the distinction that we laid down between history and philology suggests refraining from the search hitherto made for the beginnings of Græco-Roman historiography by means of composing lists of magistrates and of adding to these brief mention of wars, treatises, embassies from colonies, religious festivities, earthquakes, inundations, and the like, in the ῷροι and in the annales pontificum, in archives and museums made in temples, or indeed in the chronological nails fixed to the walls, spoken of by Perizonius. Such things are extrinsic to historiography and form the precedent, not of it, but of chronicle and philology, which were not born for the first time in the nineteenth or seventeenth century, or at any rate during the Alexandrine period, but belong to all times, for in all times men take note of what they remember and attempt to preserve such memorials intact, to restore and to increase them. The precedent of history cannot be something different from history, but is history itself, as philosophy is the precedent of philosophy and the living of the living. Nevertheless the thought of Herodotus and of the logographs really does unite itself with religions, myths, theogonies, cosmogonies, genealogies, and with legendary and epical tales, which were not indeed poetry, or were not only poetry but also thoughts—that is to say, metaphysics and histories. The whole of later historiography developed from them by a dialectical process, for which they supplied the presuppositions—that is to say, concepts, propositions of fact and fancy mingled, and with that the stimulus better to seek out the truth and to dissipate fancies. This dissipation took place more rapidly at the time which it is usual to fix by convention as the beginning of Greek historiography.

At that time thought deserts mythological history and its ruder form, prodigious or miraculous history, and enters earthly or human history—that is to say, the general conception that is still ours, so much so that it has been possible for an illustrious living historian to propose the works of Thucydides as an example and model to the historians of our times. Certainly that exit and that entrance did not represent for the Greeks a complete breaking with the past; and since earthly history could not have been altogether wanting in the past, so it is not to be believed that the Greeks from the sixth and seventh centuries onward should have abandoned all faith in mythology and prodigies. These things persisted not only with the people and among lesser or vulgar historiographers, but also left their traces among some of the greatest. Nevertheless, looking at the whole from above, as one should look at it, it is evident that the environment is altogether changed from what it was. Even the many fables that we read in Herodotus, and which were to be read in the logographs, are rarely (as has been justly observed) put forward ingenuously, but are usually given as by one who collects what others believe, and does not for that reason accept those beliefs, even if he does not openly evince his disbelief; or he collects them because he does not know what to substitute for them, and rather as matter for reflection and inquiry: quæ nec confirmare argumentis neque refellere in animo est, as Tacitus says, when he recounts the fables of the Germans: plura transcribo quam credo, declared Quintus Curtius. Herodotus is certainly not Voltaire, nor is he indeed Thucydides (Thucydides, 'the atheist'); but certainly he is no longer Homer or Hesiod.

The following are a few examples of leading problems which ancient historians had before them, dictated by the conditions and events of Greek and Roman life; they were treated from a mental point of view, which no longer found in those facts episodes of the rivalry of Aphrodite and Hera (as formerly in the Trojan War), but varying complex human struggles, due to human interests, expressing themselves in human actions. How did the wars between the Greeks and the Persians originate and develop? What were the origins of the Peloponnesian War? of the expedition of Cyrus against Artaxerxes? How was the Roman power formed in Latium, and how did it afterward extend in Italy and in the whole world? How did the Romans succeed in depriving the Carthaginians of the hegemony of the Mediterranean? What were the political institutions developed in Athens, Rome, and Sparta, and what form did the social struggle take in those cities? What did the Athenian demos, the Roman plebs, the eupatrides, and the patres desire? What were the virtues, the dispositions, the points of view, of the various peoples which entered into conflict among themselves, Athenians, Lacedemonians, Persians, Macedonians, Romans, Gauls, and Germans? What were the characters of the great men who guided the destinies of the peoples, Themistocles, Pericles, Alexander, Hannibal, and Scipio? These problems were solved in a series of classical works by Thucydides, Xenophon, Polybius, Livy, Tacitus, etc., and they will certainly not be blamed for failing to exhaust their themes—that is, for failing to sound the bottom of the universe, because there is no sounding the bottom of the universe—nor because they solve those problems only in the terms in which they had proposed them, neither more nor less than as we solve the problems of our day in our own terms. Nor must we forget that since modern historiography is still much as it was left by the Greeks, the greater part of those events are still thought as they were by the ancients, and although something has been added and a different light illumines the whole, the work of the ancient historians is preserved in our own: a true "eternal possession," as Thucydides intended that his history should be.

And just as historical thought had become invigorated in its passage from the mythological to the human stage, so did research and philology grow. Herodotus was already travelling, asking questions, and listening to answers, distinguishing between the things that he had seen with his own eyes and those which depended upon hearsay, opinion, and conjecture; Thucydides was submitting to criticism different traditions relating to the same fact, and even inserting documents in his narrative. Later appeared legions of learned men and critics, who compiled 'antiquities' and 'libraries,' and busied themselves also with the reading of texts, with chronology and geography, thus affording great assistance to historical studies. Such a fervour of philological studies was eventually attained that it was recognized as necessary to draw a clear distinction between the 'histories of antiquaries' (of which a considerable number survive either entire or in fragments) and 'histories of historians,' and Polybius several times said that it is easy to compose history from books, because it suffices to take up one's residence in a city where there exist rich libraries, but that true history requires acquaintance with political and military affairs and direct knowledge of places and of people; and Lucian repeated that it is indispensable for the historian to have political sense, άδίδακτον φυσέως δῶρον, a gift of nature not to be learned (the maxims and practices praised as quite novel by Möser and Niebuhr are therefore by no means new). The fact is that a more profound theoretical consciousness corresponded with a more vigorous historiography, so inseparable is the theory of history from history, advancing with it. It was also known that history should not be made a simple instrument of practice, of political intrigue, or of amusement, and that its function is above all to aim at truth: ne quid falsi dicere audeat, ne quid veri non audeat. In consequence of this, partisanship, even for one's own country, was condemned (although it was recognized chat solicitude and sympathy were permissible); and quidquid Græcia mendax audet in historia was blamed. It was known that history is not chronicle (annales), which is limited to external things, recording (in the words of Asellio, the ancient Roman historian) quod factum, quoque anno gestum sit, whereas history tries to understand quo Consilio, quaque ratione gesta sint. And it was also known that history cannot set herself the same task as poetry. We find Thucydides referring with disdain to histories written with the object of gaining the prize in oratorical competitions, and to those which indulge in fables to please the vulgar. Polybius too inveighed against those who seek to emphasize moving details, and depict women dishevelled and in tears, and dreadful scenes, as though composing tragedies and as though it were their business to create the marvellous and pleasing and not impart truth and instruction. If it be a fact that rhetorical historiography (a worsening of the imaginative and poetic) abounded in antiquity and introduced its false gold even into some masterpieces, the general tendency of the better historians was to set themselves free of ornate rhetoricians and of cheap eloquence. But the ancient historians will never fail of lofty poetical power and elevation for this reason (not even the 'prosaic' Polybius, who sometimes paints most effective pictures), but will ever retain what is proper to lofty historical narrative. Cicero and Quintilian, Diogenes and Lucian, all recognize that history must adopt verba ferme poetarum, that it is proxima poetis et quodammodo carmen solutum, that scribitur ad narrandum, non ad demonstrandum, that ἔχει τι ποιητικόν, and the like. What the best historians and theorists sought at that time was not the aridity and dryness of mathematical or physical treatment (such as we often hear desired in our day), but gravity, abstention from fabulous and pleasing tales, or if not from fabulous then from frivolous tales, in fact from competition with the rhetoricians and composers of histories that were romances or gross caricatures of such. Above all they desired that history should remain faithful to real life, since it is the instrument of life, and a form of knowledge useful to the statesman and to the lover of his country, and by no means docile to the capricious requirements of the unoccupied seeking amusement.

This theory of historiography, which may be found here and there in a good many special treatises and in general treatises on the art of speech, finds nowhere such complete and conscious expression as in the frequent polemical interludes of Polybius in his Histories, where the polemic itself endows it with precision, concreteness, and savour. Polybius is the Aristotle of ancient historiography: an Aristotle who is both historical and theoretical, completing the Stagirite, who in the vast expanse of his work had taken but little interest in history properly so called. And since so great a part of the ancient narratives lives in our own, so there is not one of the propositions recorded that has not been included and has not been worthy of being included in our treatises. And if, for example, the maxim that history should be narrated by men of the world and not by the simply erudite or by philologists, that it is born of practice and assists in practice, has been often neglected, the blame falls on those who neglect it. A further blunder committed by such writers has been to forget completely the τι ποιητικόν and to pay court to an ideal of history something like an anatomical map or a treatise of mechanics.

But the defect that ancient historiography exposes to our gaze is of another sort. The ancients did not observe it as a defect, or only sometimes, in a vague and fugitive manner, without attaching weight to it, for otherwise they would have remedied it when it occurred. The modern spirit inquires how the sentiments and conceptions which are now our ideal patrimony, and the institutions in which they are realized, have been gradually formed. It wishes to understand the revolutionary passages from primitive and Oriental to Græco-Roman culture, how modern ethic was attained through ancient ethic, the modern through the ancient state, the vast industry and international commerce of the modern world through the ancient mode of economic production, the passage from the myths of the Aryans to our philosophies, from Mycenean to French or Swedish or Italian art of the twentieth century. Hence there are special histories of culture, of philosophy, of poetry, of the sciences, of technique, of economy, of morality, of religions, and so on, which are preferred to histories of individuals or of states themselves, in so far as they are abstract individuals. They are illuminated and inspired throughout with the ideas of liberty, of civilization, of humanity, and of progress. All this is not to be found in ancient historiography, although it cannot be said to be altogether absent, for with what could the mind of man have ever been occupied, save by human ideals or 'values'? Nor should the error be made of considering 'epochs' as something compact and static, whereas they are various and in motion, or of rendering those divisions natural and external which, as has been demonstrated, are nothing but the movement of our thought as we think history, a fallacy linked with the other one concerning the absolute beginning of history and the rendering temporal of the forms of the spirit. Whoever is gifted with the patience of the collector will meet here and there with suggestions and buddings of those historiographical conceptions of which, generally speaking, we have denied the existence in the writings of the ancients. He who finds diversion in modernizing the old may travesty the thoughts of the ancients, as they have been travestied, so as to render them almost altogether similar to those of the moderns. In the first book of Aristotle's Metaphysics, for instance, is to be admired a sketch of the development of Greek philosophy, of the various naturalistic interpretations which have been in turn proposed for the explanation of the cosmos, and so on, up to the new orientation of the mind, when, "compelled by truth itself," it turned toward a different order of principles—that is to say, till the time of Anaxagoras, "who seems to be a sober man among the intoxicated," thus continuing up to the time of Socrates, who founded ethic and discovered the universal and the definition. A sketch of the history of civilization is to be found at the beginning of the History of Thucydides, and Polybius will be found discoursing of the progress that had been made in all the arts, while Cicero, Quintilian, and several others trace the progress of rights and of literature. There are also touches of human value in conflict with one another in the narratives of the struggles between Greeks and barbarians, between the truly civil and active life of the former and the proud, lazy habits of the latter. Other similar conceptions of human values will be found in many comparisons of peoples, and above all in the way that Tacitus describes the Germans as a new moral power rising up against that of ancient Rome, and perhaps also in the repugnance which the same historian experiences at seeing before him the Jews, who follow rites contrarius ceteris mortalibus. Finally, Rome, mistress of the world, will sometimes assume in our eyes the aspect of a transparent symbol of the human ideal, analogous to Roman law, gradually idealized in the form of natural law. But here it is rather a question of symbols than of conceptions, of our own conclusions than of the thoughts proper to the ancients. When, for instance, we examine the history of philosophy of Aristotle as outlined by him, we find that it consists above all in a rapid critical account to serve as propædeutic to his system; and literary and artistic histories and histories of civilization seem often to be weakened by the prejudice that these are not really necessary mental forms, but luxuries and refinements. At the utmost we can speak of exceptions, incidents, tentatives; which does not in any way alter the comprehensive impression and general conclusion to the effect that the ancients never possessed explicit histories of civilization, philosophy, religions, literature, art, or rights: none, in fact, of the many possessed by ourselves. Nor did they possess 'biography' in the sense that we do, as the history of the ideal function of an individual in his own time and in the life of humanity, nor the sense of development, and when they speak of primitive times they rarely feel that they are primitive, but are rather disposed to transfigure them poetically, in the same way that Dante did by the mouth of Cacciaguida that Fiorenza which "stood soberly and modestly at peace" within the circle of the ancient days. It was one of the "severe labours" of our Vico to recover the crude reality of history beneath these poetic idylls. In this work he was assisted, not by the ancient historiographers, but by documents and mostly by languages.

The physiognomy of the histories of the ancients as described very accurately reflects the character of their philosophy, which never attained to the conception of the spirit, and therefore also failed to attain to that of humanity, liberty, and progress, which are aspects or synonyms of the former. It certainly passed from physiology or cosmology to ethic, logic, and rhetoric; but it schematized and materialized these spiritual disciplines because it treated them empirically. Thus their ethic did not rise above the custom of Greece and Rome, nor their logic above abstract forms of reasoning and discussing, nor their poetic above classes of literature. For this reason all assume the form of precepts. 'Anti-historical philosophy' has been universally recognized and described, but it is anti-historical because anti-spiritual, anti-historical because naturalistic. The ancients also failed to notice the deficiency observed by us, for they were entirely occupied with the joy of the effort of passing from myth to science and thus to the collection and classification of the facts of reality. That is to say, they were engrossed upon the sole problem which they set themselves to solve, and solved so successfully that they supplied naturalism with the instruments which it still employs: formal logic, grammar, the doctrine of the virtues, the doctrine of literary classes, categories of civil rights, and so forth. These were all Græco-Roman creations.

But that ancient historians and philosophers were not explicitly aware of the above defect in its proper terms, or rather in our modern terms, does not mean that they were not to some extent exercised by it. In every historical period exist problems theoretically formulated and for that very reason solved, while others have not yet arrived at complete theoretical maturity, but are seen, intuited, though not yet adequately thought. If the former are the positive contribution of that time to the chain whose links form the human spirit, the latter represent an unsatisfied demand, which binds that time in another way to the coming time. The great attention paid to the negative aspect of every epoch sometimes leads to the forgetting of the other aspect, and to the consequent imagining of a humanity that passes not from satisfaction to satisfaction through dissatisfaction, but from dissatisfaction to dissatisfaction and from error to error. But obscurities and discordances are possible in so far as light and concord have been previously attained. Thus they represent in their way progress, as is to be seen from the history that we are recounting, where we find them very numerous for the very reason that the age of mythologies and of prodigies has been left behind. If Greece and Rome had not been both more than Greece and more than Rome, if they had not been the human spirit, which is infinitely greater than any Greece and any Rome—its transitory individuations—they would have been satisfied with the human portraits of their historians and would not have sought beyond. But they did seek beyond—that is to say, those very historians and philosophers sought; and since they had before them so many episodes and dramas of human life, reconstructed by their thought, they asked themselves what was the cause of those events, reasonably concluding that such a cause might be one fact or another, a particular fact; and for this reason they began to distinguish between facts and causes, and, in the order of causes themselves, between cause and occasion, as does Thucydides, or between beginning, cause, and occasion ἀρχή, αἰτία, πρόφασις, like Polybius. They thus became involved in disputes as to the true cause of this or that event, and ever since antiquity attempts have been made to solve the enigma of the 'greatness' of Rome, assuming in modern times the guise of a solemn experimentum of historical thought and thus forming the diversion of those historians who linger behind. The question was often generalized in the other question as to the motive power behind all history; and here too appear doctrines, afterward drawn out to great length, such as that the form of the political constitution was the cause of all the rest, and that other doctrine relating to climate and to the temperaments of peoples. The doctrine principally proposed and accepted was that of the natural law of the circle in human affairs, the perpetual alternation of good and evil, or the passage through political forms, which always returns to the form from which it has taken its start, or as growth from infancy to manhood, declining into old age and decrepitude and ending in death. But a law of this sort, which satisfied and still satisfies the Oriental mind, did not satisfy the classical mind, which had a lively sense of human effort and of the stimulus received from obstacles encountered and conflicts endured. Hence therefore the further questions: Does fate or immutable necessity oppress man, or is he not rather the plaything of capricious fortune, or is he ruled by a wise and sagacious providence? It was also asked whether the gods are interested in human affairs or not. These questions met with answers that are sometimes pious, advocating submission to the divine will and wisdom, sometimes, again, inspired with the notion that the gods are not concerned with human affairs themselves, but solely with vengeance and punishment. All these conceptions lack firmness, and are for the most part confused, since a general uncertainty and confession of ignorance prevails in them: in incerto judicium est, said Tacitus, almost summing up the ancient argument on the subject in this epigram, or rather finding non-thought, failure to understand, to be the result of the argument.

What we do not understand we do not dominate; on the contrary, it dominates us, or at least menaces us, taking the form of evil; hence the psychological attitude of the ancients toward history must be described as pessimistic. They saw much greatness fall, but they never discovered the greatness that does not fall and that rises up greater after every fall. For this reason a flood of bitterness inundates their histories. Happiness, beauty of human life, always seemed to be something that had been and was no longer, and were it present would have soon been lost. For the Romans and those professing the cult of Rome, it was primitive, austere, victorious Rome; and all the Roman historians, big and little, Livy, Sallust, and Tacitus, Paterculus and Florus, fix their gaze upon that image, as they lament the corruption of later days. Once it was Rome that trampled the world underfoot; but they knew that the triumphant queen must some day become slave from queen that once she was. This thought manifests itself in the most various forms, from the melancholy meditations of Scipio upon the ruins of Carthage to the fearful expectation of the lordship which—as Persia to Babylonia and Macedonia to Persia—must succeed to that of the Romans (the theory of the 'four monarchies' has its origin in the Græco-Roman world, whence it filtered into Palestine and into the Book of Daniel). Sometimes repressed, sometimes outspoken, we hear the anxious question: Who will be the successor and the gravedigger? Will it be the menacing Parthian? Will it be the Germans, so rich in new and mysterious energy?—all this, despite the proud consciousness of ancient times that had uttered the words "Rome, the eternal city." Certainly, that general pessimism is not altogether coherent, for no pessimism can be so altogether, and here and there appear fugitive hints of a perception of human progress in this or that part of life. We find, for instance, Tacitus, bitterest of men, remarking that nec omnia apud priores meliora, sed nostra quoque ætas multa laudis et artium imitanda tulit, and one of the speakers in the De oratoribus observes that literary forms change with the times and that it is owing to the vitio malignitatis humana that we hear the perpetual praise of ancient things and the perpetual abuse of things modern. Another interlocutor in the same dialogue draws attention to the dialectic connexion between the turbulence of life and the greatness of art, whence Rome donec erravit, donec se partibus et dissensionibus confecit, precisely at that time tulit valentiorem eloquentiam. This linking together of good and evil is not altogether absent in ancient philosophy, and is also to be found here and there in ancient historiography. Sallust, for example, is of opinion that Rome remained in good health so long as she had Carthage opposed to her and giving her trouble. Readers of Cicero and of Seneca will be aware that the idea of humanity also made considerable progress during the last days of the Republic and the first days of the Empire, owing to the influence of Stoicism. Divine providence too is courted, as was not formerly the case, and we also find Diodorus Siculus undertaking to treat the affairs of all nations as those of a single city (καθάπερ μιᾶς πολέως). But these promises remain still weak, vague, and inert (the promissor Diodorus, for example, carried out none of his grandiose prologue), and in any case they foretell the dissolution of the classical world. During this epoch the problem as to the signification of history remains unsolved, because the contradictory conceptions above mentioned of fortune or of the gods, the belief in a universal worsening of things, in a fall or a regression, which had already been expressed in many ancient myths, were not by any means solutions.

Owing to their failure to realize spiritual value as the immanent progressive force in history, even the loftiest of the ancient historians were not able to maintain the unity and autonomy of historiographical work, which in other respects they had discovered and asserted. Although they had penetrated the deception exercised by those histories that are really poetry, or lies and partisanship, or collections of material and unintelligent piling up of erudition, or instruments of pleasure, affording marvel for simple folk, yet they were on the other hand incapable of ever setting themselves free of the preconception of history as directed to an end of edification and chiefly of instruction. This real heteronomy then appeared to be autonomy. They are all agreed as to this: Thucydides proposed to narrate past events in order to predict from them future events, identical or similar, the perpetual return of human fortunes; Polybius sought out the causes of facts in order that he might apply them to analogous cases, and held those unexpected events to be of inferior importance whose irregularities place them outside rules; Tacitus, in conformity with his chief interest, which was rather moralistic than social or political, held his chief end to be the collection of facts notable for the vice or virtue which they contained, ne virtutes sileantur utque pravis dictis factìsque ex posteritate et infamia metus sit. Behind them came all the minor historians, all the hypocrites, who repeated by imitation or involuntary echo or false unction and in a superficial way what in the greater writers was the result of profound thought, as, for instance, the Sallusts, the Diogenes, the Diodori, the Plutarchs, and those that resemble them. Then there were all the extractors of historical quintessences, of memorable deeds and words of statesmen, captains, and philosophers, and even of women (the γυναικῶν ἀρεταί). Ancient historiography has been called 'pragmatical,' and such it is, in the double sense of the word, ancient and modern: in so far as it limits itself to the earthly side of things and especially to the political (the 'pragmatic' of Polybius), and in so far as it adorns them with reflections and advice (the 'apodictic' of the same historian-theorist).

This heteronomous theory of history does not always remain merely theory, prologue, or frame, but sometimes operates so as to lead to the mingling of elements that are not historiographical with history, such as, for instance, is the case with the 'speeches' or 'orations' of historical personages, not delivered or not in agreement with what was really said, but invented or arranged by the historian and put into the mouths of the personages. This, in my opinion, has been wrongly looked upon as a survival of the 'epic spirit' in ancient historiography, or as a simple proof of the rhetorical ability of the narrators, because, if the first explanation hold as to some of the popular writers and the second as to certain rhetoricians, the origin of those falsifications was with the greater historians nothing but the fulfilment of the obligation of teaching and counselling accepted by them. But when such ends had been assigned to history, its intrinsic quality of truth and the line of demarcation which it drew between real and imaginary could not but vacillate to some extent, since the imaginary sometimes served excellently well and even better than the real for those ends. And setting aside Plato, who despised all knowledge save that of the transcendental ideas, did not Aristotle himself ask whether the greater truth belonged to history or to poetry? Had he not indeed said that history is 'less philosophical' than poetry? And if so why should not history have availed itself of the aid of poetry and of imagination? In any case, resistance could be opposed to this ulterior perversion by seeking the truth with vigilant eye, and also by reducing the share of the imaginary speeches and other parerga co the smallest dimensions. But it was impossible to dispense with belief in the end of instruction, because it was in any case necessary that history should have some end, and a true end had not been discovered, and the end of instruction performed almost the function of a metaphor of the truth, since it was to some extent the nearest to the truth. In Polybius critical vigilance, scientific austerity, a keen desire for ample and severe history, attain to so high a level that one would feel disposed to treat the historian of Megalopolis like one of those great pagans that medieval imagination admitted to Paradise, or at least to Purgatory, as worthy of having known the true God by extraordinary means and as a reward for their intense moral conscience. But if we envisage the matter with greater calmness we shall have to consign Polybius also to the Limbo where those who "were before Christianity" and "did not duly adore God" are received. They were men of great value and reached the boundary, even touching it, but they never passed beyond.

III

MEDIEVAL HISTORIOGRAPHY

For the same reason that we must not look upon the beginning of any history as an absolute beginning, or conceive of epochs in a simplicistic manner, as though they were strictly limited to the determinations represented by their general character, we must be careful not to identify the humanistic conception of history with the ancient epoch of historiography which it characterizes or symbolizes—in fact, we must not make historical the ideal categories, which are eternal. Græco-Roman historiography was without doubt humanistic, but it was a Græco-Roman humanism—that is to say, it not only had all the limitations that we have been pointing out, but also the special physiognomy which such humanism assumes in the ancient historians and thinkers, varying more or less in each one of them. Not only was it thus humanistic, but other formations of the same sort probably preceded, as they certainly followed, it in the course of the centuries. It is perhaps attractive, but it is also artificial (and contrary to the true concept of progress), to conceive of the history of philosophy and of historiography as of a series of ideal phases, which are traversed once only, and to transform philosophers into categories and categories into philosophers, making synonymous Democritus and the atom, Plato and the transcendental idea, Descartes and dualism, Spinoza and pantheism, Leibnitz and monadism, whittling down history to the dimensions of a Dynastengeschichte, as a German critic has satirically described it, or treating it according to a sort of 'line of buckets' theory, as an Englishman has humorously described it. Hence, too, the view that history has not yet appeared in the world, or that it has appeared for the first time and by flashes, in response to the invocations made by the historian and the critic of the present day. But every thinking of history is always adequate to the moment at which it appears and always inadequate to the moment that follows.

The opportuneness of this warning is confirmed by the astonishment of those who consider the passage from ancient to Christian or medieval historiography; for what can be the meaning of this passage, in which we find ourselves faced with a miraculous and mythological world all over again, identical as it seems, in its general characteristics, with that of the ancient historians, which has disappeared? It is certainly not progress, but rather falling into a ditch, into which also fall all the dearest illusions relating to the perpetual advance of humanity. And the Middle Ages did seem to be a ditch or a declivity, sometimes during the period itself and most clearly at the Renaissance, and this image is still represented in common belief. Restricting ourselves solely to the domain of historiography, and following up the impression of astonishment at first caused by it, we end by representing events at the beginning of the Middle Ages somewhat in the way they appeared to our writer Adolfo Bartoli, in his introductory volume to the History of Italian Literature, which is all broken up with cries of horror and with the gesture of covering the face lest he should see so much ugliness. "We are in a world," writes Bartoli, when speaking of Gregory of Tours, "where thought has descended so low as to cause pity, in a world where a conception of history no longer exists," and history also becomes "a humble handmaid to theology—that is to say, an aberration of the spirit." And after Gregory of Tours (continues Bartoli) there is a further fall: "Behold Fredigarius, in whom credulity, ignorance, and confusion surpass every limit... there survives in him nothing of a previous civilization." After Fredigarius, with the monastic chronicle, we take another step down-ward toward nothingness, though this would seem to be impossible. Here "we seem to see the lean monk putting his trembling head out of the narrow window of his cell every five or eleven years, to make sure that men are not all dead, and then shutting himself up again in the prison, where he lives only in the expectation of death." We must protest against such shrinking back (which makes the critic of to-day look like the "lean monk" whose appearance he has so vividly portrayed); we must assert that mythology and miracle and transcendency certainly returned in the Middle Ages—that is to say, that these ideal categories again acted with almost equal force and that they almost reassumed their ancient bulk, but they did not return historically identical with those of the pre-Hellenic world. We must seek in the heart of their new manifestations for the effective progress which is certainly accomplished by Gregory of Tours and Fredigarius, and even by the monkish chroniclers.

The divinity descends again to mingle anthropomorphically with the affairs of men, as a most powerful or ultra-powerful personage among the less powerful; the gods are now the saints, and Peter and Paul intervene in favour of this or that people; St Mark, St Gregory, St Andrew, or St January lead the array of the combatants, the one vying with the other, and sometimes against the other, playing malicious tricks upon one another; and in the performance or the non-performance of an act of worship is again placed the loss or gain of a battle: medieval poems and chronicles are full of such stories. These conceptions are analogous to the antique, and indeed they are their historical continuation. This is not only so (as has so often been pointed out) owing to the attachment of this or that particular of ancient faith to popular religion and to the transformation of gods into saints and demons, but also, and above all, to a more substantial reason. Ancient thought had left fortune, the divinity, the inscrutable, at the edge of its humanism, with the result that the prodigious was never completely eliminated even from the most severe historians—the door at any rate was left open by which it could return. All are aware with how many 'superstitions' philosophy, science, history, and customs were impregnated during late antiquity, which in this respect was not intellectually superior, but indeed inferior, to the new Christian religion. In the latter the fables gradually formed and miracles which were believed became spiritualized and ceased to be 'superstitions'—that is to say, something extraneous or discordant to the general humanistic conception—and set themselves in harmony with the new supernaturalistic and transcendental conception, of which they were the accompaniment. Thus myth and miracle, becoming intensified in Christianity, became at the same time different from ancient myths and miracles.

They were different and more lofty, because they contained a more lofty thought: the thought of spiritual worth, which was not peculiar to this or to that people, but common to the whole of humanity. The ancients had indeed touched upon this thought in speculation, but they had never possessed it, and their philosophers had sought it in vain or attained to it only in abstract speculation not capable of investing the whole soul, as is the case with thoughts that are profoundly thought, and as was the case with Christianity. Paulus Orosius expresses this in his Historæ adversus paganos, in such accents as no Græco-Roman historian had been able to utter: Ubique patria, ubique lex et religio mea est.... Latitudo orientis, septentrionis copiositas, meridiana diffusio, magnarum insularum largissimæ tutissimæque sedes mei juris et nominis sunt, quia ad Christianos et Romanos Romanus et Christianus accedo. To the virtue of the citizen is added that of man, of spiritual man, who puts himself on a level with the truth by means of his religious faith and by his work, which is humanly good. To the illustrious men among the pagans are opposed illustrious men among the Christians who are better than illustrious, being saints; and the new Plutarch is found in the Vitæ patrum or eremitarum, in the lives of the confessors of Christ, of the martyrs, of the propagators of the true faith; the new epics describe the conflicts of the faithful against unbelievers, of Christians against heretics and Islamites. There is here a greater consciousness of conflict than the Greeks had of the conflict between Greeks and barbarians, or freedmen and slaves, which were usually looked upon rather as representing differences of nature than of spiritual values. Ecclesiastical history now appears, no longer that of Athens or of Rome, but of religion and of the Church which represented it in its strifes and in its triumphs—that is to say, the strifes and triumphs of the truth. This was a thing without precedent in the ancient world, whose histories of culture, of art or philosophy, did not go beyond the empirical stage, as we have seen, whereas ecclesiastical history has a spiritual value as its subject, by means of which it illuminates and judges facts. To censure ecclesiastical history because it overrules and oppresses profane history will perhaps be justified, as we shall see, from certain points of view and in a certain sense; but it is not justifiable as a general criticism of the idea of that history, and, indeed, when we formulate the censure in these terms we are unconsciously pronouncing a warm eulogy of it. The historia spiritalis (as we may also call it, employing the title of Avito's poem) could not and in truth would not consent to be a mere part, or to suffer rivals at its side: it must dominate and affirm itself as the whole. And since history becomes history of the truth with Christianity, it abandons at the same time the fortuitous and chance, to which the ancients had often abandoned it, and recognizes its own proper law, which is no longer a natural law, blind fate, or even the influence of the stars (St Augustine confutes this doctrine of the pagans), but rationality, intelligence, providence. This conception was not unknown to ancient philosophy, but is now set free from the frost of intellectualism and abstractionism and becomes warm and fruitful. Providence guides and disposes the course of events, directing them to an end, permitting evils as punishments and as instruments of education, determining the greatness and the catastrophes of empires, in order to prepare the kingdom of God. This means that for the first time is really broken the idea of the circle, of the perpetual return of human affairs to their starting-point, of the vain labour of the Danaïds (St Augustine also combats the circuitus); history for the first time is here understood as progress: a progress that the ancient historians did not succeed in discovering, save in rare glimpses, thus falling into unconsolable pessimism, whereas Christian pessimism is irradiated with hope. Hence the importance to be attributed to the succession of empires and to the function fulfilled by each of them, and especially with regard to the Roman Empire, which politically unified the world that Christ came to unify spiritually, to the position of Judaism as opposed to Christianity, and the like. These questions have been answered in various ways, but on the common assumption that divine intelligence had willed those events, that greatness and that decadence, those joys and afflictions, and therefore that all had been necessary means of the divine work, and that all had competed in and were competing in the final end of history, linked one with the other, not as effects following from a blind cause, but as stages of a process. Hence, too, history understood as universal history, no longer in the sense of Polybius, who narrates the transactions of those states which enter into relations with one another, but in the profounder sense of a history of the universal, of the universal by excellence, which is history in labour with God and toward God. By means of this spirit which invests them, even the most neglected of the chronicles become surrounded with a halo, which is wanting to the classical histories of Greece and Rome, and which, however distant they be from our particular view-points, yet in their general aspect makes them very near to our heart and mind.

Such are the new problems and the new solutions which Christianity brought to historical thought, and it may be said of them, as of the political and humanistic thought of the ancients, that they constitute a solid possession of perpetual efficacy for the human spirit. Eusebius of Cæsarea is to be placed beside Herodotus as 'father' of modern historiography, however little disposed it may be to recognize its parents in that barbaric author and in the others who were called 'fathers of the Church,' to whom, and particularly to St Augustine, it yet owes so great a part of itself. What are our histories of culture, of civilization, of progress, of humanity, of truth, save the form of ecclesiastical history in harmony with our times—that is to say, of the triumph and propagation of the faith, of the strife against the powers of darkness, of the successive treatments of the new evangel, or good news, made afresh with each succeeding epoch? Do not the modern histories, which narrate the function performed or the pre-eminence assumed by this or that nation in the work of civilization, correspond to the Gesta Dei per Francos and to other like formulas of medieval historiography? And our universal histories are such not only in the sense of Polybius, but also of the universal as ideal, purified and elevated in the Christian sense; hence the religious sentiment which we experience on approaching the solemnity of history.

It will be observed that in presenting it in this way we to some extent idealize the Christian conception; and this is true, but in the same way and in the same measure as we have idealized ancient humanism, which was not only humanism, but also transcendency and mystery. Christian historiography, like ancient historiography, solved the problems that were set to it, but it did not solve other problems that were only formed afterward, because they were not set to it. A proof of this is to be found in the caprices and the myths that accompanied its fundamental conception. The prodigious and the miraculous, which, as already observed, surrounded Christian historiography, bore witness precisely to the incomplete ideality of the new and loftier God, the thought of whom became converted into a myth, his action into fabulous anecdotes. Yet when it was not a question of miracles, or when these were reduced to small compass, attenuated and held back, if not refuted, there nevertheless remained the miracle of the divinity and of the truth, conceived as transcendent, separated from and opposed to human affairs. This too was an attestation of the Christian spirit, in so far as it surpassed the ancient spirit, not with the calmness and security of thought, but with the violence of sentiment and with the enthusiasm of the imagination. Transcendency led to a consideration of worldly things as external and rebellious to divine things: hence the dualism of God and the world, of a civitas colestis and of another that was terrena, of a civitas Dei and of a civitas diaboli which revived most ancient Oriental conceptions, such as Parseeism, and was tempered, if not internally corrected, by means of the providential course of history, internally compromised by that unconquered dualism. The city of God destroyed the earthly city and took its place, but did not justify it, although it tried to do so here and there, in accordance with the logic of its providential and progressive principle. St Augustine, obliged to explain the reasons of the fortune of Rome, escaped from the difficulty with the sophism that God conceded that greatness to the Romans as a reward for their virtues, earthly though they were and not such as to lead to the attainment of heavenly glories, but yet worthy the fleeting reward of earthly glory. Thus the Romans remained always reprobate, but less reprehensible than other reprobates; there could not have been true virtue where there had not been true religion. The contests of ideas did not appear as conflicting forms of the true in its becoming, but simply diabolical suggestions, which disturbed the truth, which was complete and possessed by the Church. Eusebius of Cæsarea treated heresies as the work of the devil, because it was the devil who prompted Simon Magus, and then Menander, and the two currents of gnosis represented by Saturninus and Basil. Otto of Frisia contemplated the Roman Empire succeeding to the Babylonian as son to father, and the kings of the Persians and the Greeks almost as its tutors and pedagogues. In the political unity of Rome he discovers a prelude to Christian unity, in order that the minds of men should form themselves ad majora intelligenda promptiores et capaciores, be disciplined to the cult of a single man, the emperor, and to the fear of a single dominant city, that they should learn unam quoque fidem tenendam. But the same Otto imagines the whole world a primo homine ad Christum ... exceptis de Israelitico populo paucis, errore deceptus, vanis superstitionibus deditus, dæmonum ludicris captus, mundi illecebris irretitus, fighting sub principe mundi diabolo, until venit plenitudo temporis and God sent His son to earth. The doctrine of salvation as a grace due to the good pleasure of God, indebita Dei gratia, is not at all an accidental excrescence upon this conception, but is its foundation or logical complement. Christian humanity was destined to make itself unhuman, and St Augustine, however much reverence he excites by the energy of his temperament, by his gaze ever fixed above, offends us to an equal degree by his lack of human sympathy, his harshness and cruelty; and the 'grace' of which he speaks assumes in our eyes the aspect of odious favouritism and undue exercise of power. It is nevertheless well to remember that by means of these oscillations and deviations of sentiment and imagination Christian historiography prepared the problem of the surpassing of dualism. For if the search for the Christianity of the non-Christians, for grace due to all men from their very character of men, the truth of heresies, the goodness of pagan virtue, was a historical task that has matured slowly in modern times, the division and opposition of the two histories and the two cities, introduced by Christianity, was a fundamental necessity, as their unity thought in the providential divine Unity was a good preparation for it.

Another well-known aspect of this dualism is dogmatism, the incapacity to understand the concrete particularization of itself by the spirit in its various activities and forms. This explains the accusation levelled against ecclesiastical history of overriding and tyrannically oppressing the whole of the rest of history. This did in fact take place, because ecclesiastical history, instead of developing itself in the concrete universal of the spirit, remained rooted in a particular determination of it. All human values were reduced to a single value—that is to say, to firmness of Christian faith and to service of the Church. This value, thus abstractly conceived, became deprived of its natural virtue and declined to the level of a material and immobile fact, and indeed the vivid, fluid Christian consciousness after some centuries of development became solidified in dogmas. That materialized and motionless dogma necessarily prevailed as a universal measure, and men of all times were judged according to whether they had or had not been touched with the divine grace, were pious or impious, and the lives of the holy fathers and of believers were a Plutarch, who excluded every other profane Plutarch. This was the dogmatism of transcendency, which therefore resolved itself into asceticism, in the name of which the whole actual history of mankind is covered with contempt, with horror, and with lamentation. This is particularly noticeable in Augustine, in Orosius, and in Otto of Frisia, but is to be perceived at least in germ as a tendency among all the historians or chroniclers of the early Middle Ages. What thoughts are suggested by the battle of Thermopylæ to Otto of Frisia? Tædet hic inextricabilem malorum texere cratem; tamen ad ostendendam mortalium miseriam, summatim ea attingere volo. And what by the deeds of Alexander? Regni Macedonum monarchia, quæ al ipso cœpit, ipso mortuo cum ipso finitur.... Civitas autem Christi firmata supra firmam petram.... With asceticism is linked the often noted and often ridiculed credulity of the medieval historians (not to be confounded with the belief in miracles, originating from religion): this credulity is generally attributed to the prevalence of imagination, or to social conditions, which rendered books rare and critical capacity difficult to find—that is to say, to things which required to be explained in their turn.

Indifference is, indeed, one of the principal sources of credulity, because no one is ever credulous in the things that touch him closely and of which he treats, while on the other hand all (as is proved in daily life) are ready to lend an ear to more or less indifferent talk. Asceticism, diminishing the interest for things of the world and for history, assisted in the neglect and dispersion of books and documents, promoted credulity toward everything heard or read, unbridling the imagination, ever desirous of the wonderful and curious, to the disadvantage of discernment. It did this not only in history properly so called, but also in the science of nature or natural history, which was also indifferent to one, who possessed the ultimate truth of religion. The weak capacity for individualization noticeable in medieval historiography must be attributed to ascetism, which is usually satisfied with the general character of goodness or badness (the 'portrait' is very rare in it, as in the figurative arts of the same age), and it has even less consciousness of the historical differences of place and time, travestying persons and events in contemporary costume. It even goes so far as to compose imaginary histories and false documents, which portray the supposed type. This extends from Agnello of Ravenna, who declared that he wrote also the lives of those bishops of Ravenna about whom he possessed no information, et credo (he said) non mentitum esse, because, if they filled so high a past, they must of necessity have been good, charitable, zealous, and so forth, down to the false decretals of the pseudo-Isidore. We also owe to asceticism the form of chronicle as its intimate cause, because, when the meaning of particular facts was neglected, it only remained to note them as they were observed or related, without any ideological connexion and with only the chronological connexion. Thus we frequently find among the historians of the Middle Ages the union (at first sight strange, yet not without logical coherence) of a grandiose history, beginning with the creation of the world and the dispersion of the races, and an arid chronicle, following the other principle and becoming ever more particular and more contingent as approach is gradually made to the times of the authors.

When on the one hand the two cities, the heavenly and the earthly, and on the other the transcendency of the principle of explanation had been conceived, the composition of dualism could not be sought for in intelligence, but in myth, which put an end to the strife with the triumph of one of the two adversaries: the myth of the fall, of the redemption, of the expected reign of Christ, of the Last Judgment, and of the final separation of the two cities, one ascending to Paradise with the elect, the other driven back into hell with the wicked. This mythology had its precedent in the Judaic expectations of a Messiah, and also, from some points of view, in Orphism, and continued to develop through gnosis, millenarism, and other heretical tentatives and heresies, until it took a definite or almost a definite form in St Augustine. It has been remarked that in this conception metaphysic became identified with history, as an entirely new thought, altogether opposed to Greek thought, and that it is a philosophical contribution altogether novel and proper to Christianity. But we must add here that, as mythology, it did not unite, but indeed confounded, metaphysic and history, making the finite infinite, avoiding the fallacy of the circle as perpetual return of things, but falling into the other fallacy of a progress beginning and ending in time. History was therefore arranged in spiritual epochs or phases, through which humanity was born, grew up, and attained completion: there were six, seven, or eight epochs, according to the various ways of dividing and calculating, which sometimes corresponded to the ages of human life, sometimes to the days of the creation, sometimes to both these schemes combined; or where the hermeneutic of St Jerome upon the Book of Daniel was accepted, the succession of events was distributed among the four monarchies, of which the last was the Roman, not only in order of time, but also in that of the idea, because after the Roman Empire (the Middle Ages, as we know, long nourished the illusion that that empire persisted in the form of the Holy Roman Empire) there would be nothing else, and the reign of Christ or of the Church and then of Antichrist and the universal judgment were expected to follow without any intermission. The end which history had not yet reached chronologically, being also intrinsic to the system, was ideally constructible, as the Apocalypses had already ideally constructed it, pervading theological works and even histories, which in their last section (see the works of Otto of Frisia for all of them) described the coming of Antichrist and the end of the world: hence the idea of a history of things future, continued by the paradoxical Francesco Patrizzi, who gave utterance to his theory in the sixteenth century in his dialogues Upon History (1560). This general historical picture might be here and there varied in its particulars, but never shattered and confuted; it varied in orthodoxy up to the time of Augustine, and afterward among the dissentients and the heretics: most noteworthy of these variations was the Eternal Evangel of the followers of Gioacchino di Flora, who divided history into three epochs, corresponding to the three persons of the Trinity: the first that of the Old Testament or of the Father, the second that of the New Testament or of the Son, the third and last, that of the Spirit. These are but artificial combinations and transactions, by means of which life always seeks to find a passage between the preconceived schemes which compress and threaten to suffocate it.

But such transactions did not avail to get the better of the discord between reality and plan which everywhere revealed itself. Hence the necessity of the allegorical interpretation, so dear to the Middle Ages. This consisted substantially in placing an imaginary figure between the plan and the historical reality, a mixture of both, like a bridge, but a bridge which could be crossed only in imagination. Thus personages and events of sacred and profane history were allegorized, and subtle numerical calculations made and continually reinforced with new imaginary contributions, in order to discover correspondences and parallelisms; and not only were the ages of life and the days of creation placed on a parallel line with historical epochs, but so also were the virtues and other conceptions. Such notions are still to be found in books of devotion and in the preaching of the less acute and less modernized of sacred orators. The 'reign of nature' was also included in allegorical interpretation; and since history and metaphysic had been set at variance with one another, so in like manner was natural science set at variance with both of them, and all appeared together in allegorical forms in the medieval encyclopædias, the Pantheons and Mirrors of the World.

Notwithstanding these inevitable strayings, the new idea of history as the spiritual drama of humanity, although it inclined toward myth, yet acted with such energy as to weaken the ancient heteronomous conception of history as directed toward the administration of abstract instruction, useful in actual practice. History itself was now the teaching, the knowledge of the life of the human race from its creation upon the earth, through its struggles, up to its final state, which was indicated in the near or remote horizon. History thus became the work of God, teaching by His direct word and presence, which is to be seen and heard in every part of it. Declarations are certainly not wanting, indeed they abound, that the reading of histories is useful as counselling, and particularly as inculcating, good behaviour and abstention from evil. Sometimes it is a question of traditional and conventional declarations, at others of particular designs: but medieval historiography was not conceived, because it could not be conceived, heteronomously.

If asceticism mortified minds, and if the miraculous clouded them, it is not necessary to believe, on the other hand, that either had the power to depress reality altogether and for a long period. Indeed, precisely because asceticism was arbitrary, and mythology imaginary, they remained more or less abstract, in the same way as allegorical interpretation, which was impotent to suppress the real determinations of fact. It was all very well to despise and condemn the earthly city in words, but it forced itself upon the attention, and if it did not speak to the intellect it spoke to the souls and to the passions of men. In its period of youthful vigour, also, Christianity was obliged to tolerate profane history, dictated by economic, political, and military interests, side by side with sacred history. And as in the course of the Middle Ages, in addition to the religious poetry of the sacred hymns and poems, there also existed an epic of territorial conquests, of the shock of peoples and of feudal strife, so there continued to exist a worldly history, more or less mingled and tempered with religious history. We find even fervent Christians and the most pious of priests yielding to the desire of collecting and handing down the memory of their race: thus Gregory of Tours told of the Franks, Paulus Diaconus of the Lombards, Bede of the Angles, Widekind of the Saxons. Their gentle hearts of political partisans do not cease to beat. Not only do they lament the misery and wickedness of humanity in general, but also give vent to their particular feelings, as we observe, for instance, in the monk Erchempertus, who, ex intimo corde ducens alta suspiria, resumes the thread of Paul's history to narrate the deeds of his glorious Lombards (now hunted back into the southern part of Italy alone and assaulted and imbushed on every side), non regnum sed excidium, non felicitatem sed miseriam, non triumphum sed perniciem. And Liutprand of Cremona, although he makes the deity intervene as ruler and punisher on every occasion, and even the saints in person do battle, does not fail, for instance, to note that when Berengarius proceeded to take possession of the kingdom after the death of Guido, the followers of the latter called for King Lambert, quia semper Itali geminis uti dominis volunt, quatinus alterum alterius terrore coherceant: which is also the definition of feudal society. They were most credulous in many things, far from profound and abandoned to their imagination, but they were not credulous, indeed they were clear-sighted, shrewd and diffident in what concerned the possessions and privileges of the churches and monasteries, of families, and of the feudal group and the order of citizenship to which each belonged. It is to these interests that we owe the formation of archives, registers, chronologies, and the exercise of criticism as to the authenticity and genuineness of documents. The conception of the new Christian virtue oppressed, but did not quench, admiration (though held sinful by the most severe) for the great name of ancient Rome, and the many works of pagan civilization, its eloquence, its poetry, its civil wisdom. Nor did it forbid admiration for Arabic or Judaic-Arabic wisdom, of which the works were well received, notwithstanding religious strife. Hence we may say that in the same way as Græco-Roman humanism did not altogether exclude the supernatural, so the Christian supernatural did not prevent human consideration of worldly passions and earthly transactions.

This becomes more and more evident as we pass from the early to the late Middle Ages, when profane historiography progresses, as the result of the struggles between Church and State, of the communal movement, of the more frequent commercial communications between Europe and the East, and the like. These are themselves the result of the development, the maturing, and the modernization of thought, which grows with life and makes life grow. Neither life nor thought remained attached to the conceptions of the fathers of the Church, of Augustine, of Orosius, to whom history offered nothing but the proof of the infinite evils that afflict humanity, of the unceasing punishments of God, and of the "deaths of the persecutors." In Otto of Frisia himself, who holds more firmly than the others to the doctrines of Augustine, we find the asperity of doctrine tempered by grace; and when he afterward proceeds to narrate the struggle between the Church and the Empire, if it cannot be said that he takes the side of the Empire, it also cannot be said that he resolutely defends that of the Church, for the eschatological visions that form so great a part of his work do not blind his practical sense and political judgment. The party of the faith against the faithless remained, however, always the 'great party,' the great 'struggle of classes' (elect and reprobate) and of 'states' (celestial and earthly cities). But within this large framework we perceive other figures more closely particularized, other parties and interests, which gradually come to occupy the first, second, and third planes, so that the struggle between God and the devil is forced ever more and more into the background and becomes somewhat vague, something always assumed to be present, but not felt to be active and urgent in the soul, as something which is still talked of, but is not deeply felt, or at least felt with the energy that the words would wish us to believe, the words themselves often sounding like a refrain, as pious as it is conventional. The miraculous gradually fills less and less space and appears more rarely: God acts more willingly by means of secondary causes, and respects natural laws; He rarely intervenes directly in a revolutionary manner. The form of the chronicles, too, becomes also less accidental and arid, the better among the chroniclers here and there seeking a different 'order'—that is to say, really, a better understanding—and we find (particularly from the thirteenth century onward) the ordo artificialis or internal opposed to the ordo naturalis or external chronological order. There are also to be found those who distinguish between the sub singulis annis describere and the sub stilo historico conglutinare—that is to say, the grouping together according to things described. The general aspect of historiography changes not a little. Limiting ourselves to Italian historiography alone, there are no longer little books upon the miracles and the translations of the bodies of saints and bishops, but chronicles of communes, all of them full of affection for the feudal superiors or for the archbishop, for the imperial or the anti-imperial side, for Milan or for Bergamo, or for Lodi. The sense of tragedy, which weighed so heavily upon Erchempertus, returns with new and stronger accents in the narrative of the deeds of Barbarossa at Milan, entitled Libellus tristititiæ et doloris, angustiæ et tribulationis, passionum et tormentorum. Love for one's city usurps much of the space previously devoted to things celestial, and praises of Milan, of Bergamo, of Venice, of Amalfi, of Naples, resound in the pages of their chroniclers. Thus those vast chronicles are reached which, although they begin with the Tower of Babel, yet lead to the history of that city or of that event which makes the strongest appeal to the feelings and best stimulates the industry of the writer, and become mingled with the persons and things of the present or future life. Giovanni Villani, a pilgrim to Rome to celebrate the papal jubilee, is not inspired with the ascetic spirit or raised to heaven by that solemn spectacle; but, on the contrary, "since he finds himself in the holy city of Rome on that blessed pilgrimage, inspecting its great and ancient possessions, and reading the histories and the great deeds of the Romans," he is inspired to compose the history of his native Fiorenza, "daughter and creation of Rome" (of ancient Rome prior to Christianity). His Fiorenza resembled Rome in its rise to greatness and its following after great things, and was like Rome in its fall. Thus the 'holy' and the 'blessed' do not lead him to holy and blessed thoughts, but to thoughts of worldly greatness. To the historiography of the communes answers the more seriously worldly, the more formally and historically elaborated historiography of the Norman and Suabian kingdom of Sicily. In the proem to its Constitutiones sovereigns are declared to be instituted ipsa rerum necessitate cogente, nec minus divinæ provisionis instinctu; with its Romualdo Guarna, its Abbot Telesino, its Malaterra, its Hugo Falcando and Pietro da Eboli, its Riccardo da San Germano, with the pseudo-Jamsilla, and Saba Malaspina. All of these have their heroes, Roger and William the Normans, Frederick and Manfred the Suabians, and what they praise in them is the sound political basis which they knew how to establish and to maintain with a firm hand. Eo tempore, says Falcando of Roger, Regnum Sicilia, strenuis et præclaris viris abundans, cum terra marique plurimum posset, vicinis circumquoque gentibus terrorem incusserat, summaque pace ac tranquillitate maxima fruebatur. And the so-called Jamsilla, of Frederick II: Vir fuit magni cordis, sed magnanitatem suam multa, qua in eo fuit, sapientia superavit, ut nequaquam impetus eum ad aliquid faciendum impelleret, sed ad omnia cum rationis maturitate procederet;... utpote qui philosophisæ studiosus erat quam et ipse in se coluit, et in regno suo propagare ordinavit. Tunc quidem ipsius felici tempore in regno Siciliæ erant litterati pauci vel nulli; ipse vero imperator liberalium artium et omnis approbatæ scientia scholas in regno ipso constituit ... ut omnis conditionis et fortuna homines nullius occasione indigentiæ a philosophiæ studio retraherentur. The state, profane culture, 'philosophy,' impersonated in the heresiarch Frederick, are thus set in clear relief. And while on the one hand more and more laical theories of the state become joined to these political and cultural currents (from Dante, indeed from Thomas Aquinas, to Marsilio of Padua), and the first outlines of literary history (lives of the poets and of men famous for their knowledge, and the rise of vernacular literatures) and histories of manners (as in certain passages in Ricobaldo of Ferrara), on the other hand scholasticism found its way to such problems and conceptions by means of the works of Aristotle, which represented as it were a first brief summary of ancient knowledge. It is unnecessary to say that Dante's poem is the chief monument of this condition of spirit, where the ideas of the Middle Ages are maintained, but the political, poetical, and philosophical affections, the love of fame and of glory, prove their vigour, although subordinated to those ideas and restrained, as far as possible, by them.