The Chief Periods of European History

PREFACE

These are the Lectures referred to in the last paragraph of the Preface to the course on the “Methods of Historical Study,” lately published. I have added to them the second of two articles which appeared in the Contemporary Review for 1884. The former of them, “Some Neglected Periods of European History,” I have not reprinted, as its substance will be found in the present course. The second, “Greek Cities under Roman Rule,” as dealing somewhat more in detail with some points which are barely glanced at in the present course, seemed to make a fitting Appendix to it.

I find that the same thought as to the political result of modern scientific inventions which is brought out at pp. 184, 185 of these Lectures is also brought out in the Lecture at Edinburgh, reprinted in my little book “Greater Greece and Greater Britain,” published last May. This kind of thing is always likely to happen in lectures given in different places. It seemed to me that the thought came naturally in both lectures, and that either would lose something by its being struck out. As for those who may be so unlucky as to read both, I can only say that a thought which is worth suggesting once is worth suggesting twice. At least I have often found it so in the writings of others, specially in those of Mr. Grote.

The two courses of Oxford lectures which have now been printed are both introductory. In this present course the division into periods which is attempted is, on the face of it, only one among many which might be made. Another man might divide on some principle altogether different; I might myself divide on some other principle in another course of lectures. My present object was to set forth as strongly as possible, at the beginning of my teaching here, the main outlines of European history, as grouped round its central point, the Roman power. The main periods suggested by such a view of things are those which concern the growth and the dying-out of that power – Europe before the growth of Rome – Europe with Rome, in one shape or another, as her centre – Europe since Rome has practically ceased to be. When this main outline, a somewhat formal one, has once been established, it is easy at once to fill in and to subdivide in an endless number of ways and from an endless number of points of view. Thus I have at present little to do with the political developement of particular nations. Of some branches of that subject I have treated at some length in other shapes; I may, in the course of my work here, have to treat of others. But they are not my subject now. Nor have I now to deal with the great events and the great institutions of Europe, except so far as they helped to work out the one main outline which I have tried to draw. The power of the Popes may be looked at in a thousand ways; it concerns me now only in its strictly Roman aspect, as one, and the greatest, of the survivals of Roman power. The great French Revolution again may be looked on in a thousand ways. It concerns me now as having led to the sweeping away of the last relics of the old Roman tradition, and as having set up for a while the most memorable of conscious imitations of the Roman power. I say all this, that no one may be disappointed if he fails to find in this thin volume even a summary of all European history, much less a philosophical discussion of all European history. My business now is simply to draw an outline, ready either for myself or for others to fill up in various ways.

These two introductory courses make up the result of my public work as Professor during my first year of office, 1884-5. Besides these, there was the minute study of Gregory of Tours with a smaller class, followed by the like study of Paul the Deacon. In my second year, 1885-6, I have, besides this study of texts, been engaged, as I said in my former Preface, with public lectures of a much more minute kind, on the history of the Teutonic nations in Gaul. These I do not design to publish as lectures. If I live long enough, I trust to make my way through them to an older subject of mine, the Teutonic settlements in Britain. Neither the history of Gaul nor the history of Britain in the fifth century A.D. can be fully understood – it follows that the whole later history of the two lands cannot be fully understood – without comparing it with the history of the other land. In dealing with Goths, Burgundians, and Franks, the comparison and contrast with Angles, Saxons, and Jutes, if it sometimes passes out of the immediate sight, must never be allowed to pass out of the mind’s eye. The broad light of the history of Gaul is the best comment on the yet more instructive darkness of the history of Britain.

This subject brings me at once within the range of controversy. I believe that the doctrine for which I have struggled so long, the doctrine, as I have somewhere put it epigramatically, that we, the English people, are ourselves and not somebody else, is now often held to be altogether set aside. Only a few old-fashioned people like myself are thought likely to maintain it. Yet, whenever I come across these new lights, I always begin to doubt whether those who kindle them have ever minutely contrasted the circumstances or the results of the Teutonic settlements in Britain with those of the better known Teutonic settlements in Gaul. Now this is the very root of the matter; in discoursing of the phænomena of Gaul, I have always had an eye to the phænomena of Britain, and I trust some day, if I am ever able to work through my materials, to set forth the contrast in full. To this object the lectures which I am now gradually giving will, I hope, serve; but it will be best to put no essential part of them forth to the world till I can deal with the subject as a whole. Till then I will simply put on record, for the benefit of those who may have heard statements attributed to me which they have certainly not read in my writings, that I have nowhere said, because I never thought, that every one Briton was necessarily killed, even in those parts of Britain which became most thoroughly Teutonic. At the same time, I think that every one who really reads his Gregory and his Bæda, every one who carefully compares the map of Gaul with the map of Britain, every one who stops to think over the history of the French and the English tongues – and the history of the Welsh tongue too will not do him any harm – may possibly come to the conclusion that the doctrine that Englishmen after all are Englishmen has really some little to be said for it.

LECTURE I.

EUROPE BEFORE THE ROMAN POWER

In my first course of public lectures I did my best to speak in a general way of the nature of historical study, of its kindred pursuits, of the difficulties by which it is beset and of the most hopeful means of overcoming them. I spoke of the nature of the evidence with which we have to deal in the search after historic truth, and of the nature of the witnesses by whom that evidence is handed down to us. In future courses I trust to apply the principles which I then strove to lay down to the study of some of the most memorable periods since the point at which, if at any point, the special business of this chair begins. That we have ruled to be the point at which the Teutonic and Slavonic nations first began to play a chief part in the great drama of the history of Western man. In the present term I ask your attention to a course which will attempt to fill a place intermediate between these two, and which may naturally serve as a link between them. Now that we have laid down rules for the general guidance of our studies, while we are looking forward to a more minute dealing with the history of some specially memorable lands and times, we may, as the intermediate stage, do our best to part off the history of man, such parts of it at least as concern us, into a few great and strongly-marked periods. In my former course, while taking a very general view of my whole subject, I did not feel myself bound to keep within any artificial limits, whether of my own fixing or of any other man’s. When speaking of evidence and of authorities, I drew my illustrations as freely from centuries before our æra as from centuries after it. In my present course I must make a yet more direct and open raid into the territories of my ancient brother. The history of the Teuton and the Slave, since the days when those races came to the forefront of the nations in the fourth, fifth, sixth, and seventh centuries of our æra, will be simply unintelligible if we do not attempt at least a general picture of that elder world into which they made their way, and of the course of events which gave that world the shape in which they found it. But my sojourn in the lands which are ruled to belong to another will not be a long one; before a ξενηλασία or an Alien Act can be hurled at me, I shall be gone. It will be only for the space of about a thousand years that I need tarry beyond the frontier which after all is a frontier of my own choosing. And I shall always welcome my ancient brother on a return visit of at least the same length. If I claim to walk lightly at his side through the ages between the first Olympiad and the great Teutonic invasion of Gaul, I bid him walk more steadily, more abidingly, at my side through the ages between the Teutonic invasion of Gaul and the Ottoman conquest of Trebizond. In my next academic year I shall not need to ask leave to play truant even for so short a space as I have spoken of. My main subject will then lie fully within the barrier. We shall cross the Rhine and the Channel with the Vandal and the Saxon of the fifth century. And if it may still be sometimes needful to look back to Arminius and Ariovistus, to remember that men of our own stock fought against Gaius Julius and Gaius Marius, we can in return again call on our elder brethren to look forward for a far longer space, to assure them that we hold them thoroughly at home, not only in the Rome, Western or Eastern, of any age, but in the Aquæ Grani of Frankish Cæsars and in the Jerusalem of Lotharingian Kings.

There is one truth which in one sense I need not set forth again – it has been my lot to set it forth so often – but which I must none the less set forth almost every time that I open my mouth among you, for it must be the groundwork of my whole teaching, as it is the groundwork of all sound historic teaching. This is the truth that the centre of our studies, the goal of our thoughts, the point to which all paths lead and the point from which all paths start again, is to be found in Rome and her abiding power. It is, as I said the first time I came before you, one of the greatest of the evils which spring from our artificial distinctions where there are no distinctions in nature, from our formal barriers where there are no barriers in fact, that this greatest and simplest of historic truths is thereby wholly overshadowed. He who ends his work in 476 and he who begins his work in 476 can neither of them ever understand in its fulness the abiding life of Rome, neither can fully grasp the depth and power of that truest of proverbial sayings which speaks of Rome as the Eternal City. And none but those who have thoroughly grasped the place of Rome in the history of the world can ever fully understand the most notable historic feature of the age in which we ourselves live. We live in an age from which Rome has passed away, an age at least in which Rome has lost her headship. And, by one of the wonderful cycles of history, the Romeless world from which Rome has passed away is in not a few points a return to the elder Romeless world on which Rome had not yet risen. In both alike the European world lacks a centre; in both alike, each city or nation does what is right in its own eyes, without even the theory of a controlling power. The fuller carrying out of this analogy I keep for the last lecture of the present course. I have now only to divide my subject into three great and marked periods. We have Europe before the headship of Rome arose. We have Europe under the headship of Rome, even if that headship was sometimes disputed and divided. Lastly, we have Europe since the headship of Rome has altogether passed away. It is the first of these three periods of which I wish to give such a sketch to-day as may at least put it in its right relation to the periods which follow it.

But there is one aspect in which all those periods form one whole; there is one tie which binds all three together; there has been one abiding duty which has been laid on Aryan Europe in all her phases, before Rome, under Rome, and after Rome. One “question” has, in the cant of the day, been “awaiting its solution,” from the beginning of recorded history, and from a time long before recorded history. That is the question on which a shallow sneerer, in the lucky wisdom of his blindness, bestowed the epithet of “Eternal.” Happily indeed did he transfer to that abiding strife the epithet of the city whose sons bore so long and mighty a part in it. It is the “Eternal Eastern Question,” the undying question between the civilization of the West and the barbarism of the East, a question which has here and there taken into its company such side issues as the strife between freedom and bondage, between Christendom and Islam, but which is in its essence simply that yet older strife of whose earlier stages Herodotus so well grasped the meaning. It is a strife which has, as far as we can look back, put on the familiar shape of a strife between East and West. And in that abiding strife, that Eternal Question, the men of the Eternal City, Scipio and Sulla, Trajan and Julian, played their part well indeed; but it was waged before them and after them as far back as the days of Agamemnôn and Achilleus, as near to the present moment as the days of Codrington and Skobeleff. In all ages, from the earliest to the latest, before the championship passed to Rome and after it had passed away from Rome, two great and abiding duties have been laid on Aryan Europe and on the several powers of Aryan Europe. They have been called on to develope the common institutions of the great family within its own borders; and they have been called on to defend those borders and those institutions against the inroads of the barbarian from without.

When our historic scene first opens, those twofold duties were laid on a small branch of the European family, and that the branch that dwelled nearest to the lands of the enemy. It is not without a cause that those lands of Europe which lie nearest to Asia – we might almost add, those lands of Asia which are historically part of Europe – are in their physical construction the most European of European lands. Europe is the continent of islands, peninsulas, and inland seas; the lands round the Ægæan, its Asiatic as well as its European shore, form more thoroughly a world of islands, peninsulas, and inland seas than any other part of Europe or of the world. The Greek land was made for its people, and the Greek people for their land. I remember well the saying of one in this place with whom geographical insight is an instinct, that neither the Greeks in any other land nor any other people in Greece could have been what the Greeks in Greece actually were. The mission of the Greek race was to be the teachers, the lights, the beacons, of mankind, but not their rulers. They were to show what man could be, in a narrow space and in a short space of time; they were to show every faculty developed to its highest point, to give models of every form of political constitution, of every form of intellectual life, to bring to perfection among themselves and to hand on to all future ages that most perfect form of human speech, a living knowledge of which is still the one truest test of the highest culture. Greece was given to be the mistress of the world in the sense of being the world’s highest intellectual teacher; it was not hers to be the mistress of the world in the sense in which that calling fell to another of the great peninsulas of southern Europe. Deep and abiding as has been the influence of old Greece on every later age, her influence has been almost wholly indirect; it has been an influence of example, of precept, of warning; it has not been an influence of direct cause and effect. In one sense the world could never have been what it now is if the men of old Hellas had not lived and fought and thought and sung. But it is in another sense from that in which we say that the world could not be what it now is if the men of old Rome had not lived and fought, and – we will not say thought and sung, but ruled and judged the nations. It is indeed no small thought, it is one of the most quickening and ennobling of thoughts, that those men of Hellas were our kinsfolk, men of the same great family as ourselves, men whose institutions and whose speech are simply other and older forms of the speech and institutions of our own folk. The ancient lore alike of Greece and of England puts on a keener charm when we see in the Agorê before Ilios the same gathering under well nigh the same forms as we see in the Marzfeld beneath the walls of Rheims and in the Gemót beneath the walls of London. We seem more at home alike in either age when we see the ἑταῖροι, the θεράποντες, that fought around Achilleus rise again in the true gesiðas, the faithful þegnas, of our own folk, in Lilla who gave his life for Eadwine and in the men who died, thegn-like, their lord hard by, around the corpse of Brihtnoth at Maldon. Still all this is but likeness, example, analogy, derivation from a common source; we are dealing, not with forefathers but with elder brethren. The laws of Lykourgos and Solôn have passed away; it is the laws of Servius and Justinian that still abide. The empire of Mykênê, the democracy of Athens, the league of Achaia, are all things of the past. If the Empire of Rome is no longer a thing of the present, if it has passed away, if it is dead and buried, it is well to remember that there are still men living who have seen its funeral. I am myself not old enough to have seen its funeral; but I have before now seen some look amazed when I told them that I had lived on the earth for twelve years along with a man who had once been Emperor of the Romans.

The days before the Roman power may be looked on as in some sort the preface to a volume the last page of which is not written, as the porch of a building which still stands and which architects to come may still add to or take from. It is with Rome that the chapters of the book itself begin; it is Rome that reared the first still inhabited chambers of the house. Or we may rather say that the tale of the days before Rome is a summary, short and brilliant, of all that man has done or can do. The tale of Hellas shows us a glorified ideal of human powers, held up to the world for a moment to show what man can be, but to show us also that such he cannot be for long. And herein is the highest glory of Greece; herein is the highest value of the tongue and history of Greece as supplying the truest and noblest teaching for the mind of man. In no other study are we so truly seeking knowledge simply to raise and school the mind; in none do we so sharply draw the still abiding line between those who have gone through the refining furnace of those immortal studies and the barbarians – sometimes the self-condemned barbarians – who stand without. When we study the tongue, the laws, the history, of our own people, of any people of our immediate kindred, of that people who, whether conquering or conquered, were still the masters of us all, we are as it were engaged in our own work, we are busy with the toil of our own daily life; it is still something of a business, something of a calling. In our Hellenic studies we stand on a loftier height, we breathe a purer air, even as the peak of Olympos overtops the height of Alba. We master the tongue of Latium, because it is still the tongue of no small part of the business of practical life, because it meets us at every turn as an essential part of our own law, our own history, our very daily being. We master the tongue of Hellas as being in itself the first and noblest form of the common speech, as the tongue which, in its native and unborrowed strength, brought forth the greatest master-pieces of every form of lettered utterance, those master-pieces which none can know save those who can follow the very words of the poet, the orator, the philosopher himself, and who are not at the mercy of some blind guide who vainly strives to reproduce those living words in ruder tongues. After long years of familiar knowledge, we need hardly sigh for the days when those deathless works were fresh to us. The tale of Ilios and Ithakê, the oldest inheritance of the common folk, the oldest picture of the common household, is ever living, ever fresh. We can but pity the doom of those who, by their own act or by the act of others, are shut out from it.

The beginnings then of European history, more strictly perhaps the beginnings of the brilliant prologue to unbroken European history, will be found in the borderlands of Europe and Asia, among the islands and peninsulas of the Ægæan sea. I am speaking now of history in the narrower sense, of the continuous political history of man. With the strangers who lay without the great brotherhood, ancient as may have been their power, mighty as may have been their works, we have to deal only when they come across the men of our own household. We begin in short with the first beginnings of the recorded history of Greece, with the first Olympiad as a conventional date, but not forgetting times before the first Olympiad so far as our earliest pictures carry us back to yet older times. I cleave to the date which I proposed in my Inaugural Lecture. I have to be sure come across a singular objection from a critic in this place. I have been told that, by beginning with the first Olympiad, I leave out all Mahometan history. There are then, one must think, those who believe that all Mahometan history took place before the first Olympiad. “Felices errore suo.” I can only heartily wish that it were so, and that the Ottoman was a thing as dead and gone as the Hittite. I fear that, beginning with 776 B.C., nay even if we begin with the mystic year 476 A.D., we shall still have all Mahometan history in front of us, and that the needs of our tale will drive us to take not a few glimpses at that side of the world. From the very beginning we have to do with powers which filled the same place in the world which the Mahometan powers filled in after ages, the powers against which our eldest brethren had to wage the earlier stages of the strife which still is waging. With ingenious speculations as to the earliest origin, the earliest settlements, the earliest forms of speech, of the Hellenic folk, I am not, in such a summary as this, called on to concern myself. I gladly leave them to my ancient brother. I have to deal with the Greek when he appears on the stage of the world as the first champion of the great cause and as waging a strife against worthy rivals. One people alone in the barbarian world have even the shadow of a right to be placed side by side, to be dealt with as ebenbürtig, with the men of Hellas. In the men of Canaan the men of Hellas had to acknowledge rivals who were largely forerunners and in some sort masters. Greece had ships, colonies, and commerce; but Phœnicia had ships, colonies, and commerce in days earlier still. How high in all the material arts the Phœnician stood above the earliest Greek we see in our earliest picture of Hellenic life. Not to speak of lesser gifts, we all bear in our minds that it was from the Phœnician that Hellas must first have learned to carve the abiding records of man’s thought on the stone, on the brazen or wooden tablet, on the leaves of Egypt and on the skins of Pergamon. The political life of Greece was her own; that assuredly was no borrowed gift from Tyre or Sidon; yet Tyre and Sidon and that mightier Carthage whose institutions Aristotle studied had a political life of their own which brought them nearer to the Hellenic level than any other people beyond the Aryan fold. Only, if we must admit that the men of Canaan were on some points the teachers of the men of Hellas, yet it was the men of Hellas and not the men of Canaan to whom destiny had given the call to be the teachers of the world. It is a strange destiny by which the people who gave Greece the art of writing should have left to us no writings to hand down to us the thoughts and deeds of a world of their own that has passed away. Strange destiny that, while so large a part of the acts of the Phœnician are recorded by Greek and Roman enemies, while the tongue of the Phœnician may be said still to live for us in the speech of the kindred Hebrew, yet the direct memorials of so great a people should not go beyond a few coins, a few inscriptions, a few ruins of cities which once held their place among the mightiest of the earth.