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Linda
Dowling
ROMAN
DECADENCE
AND VICTORIAN
HISTORIOGRAPHY
IN 1881 WILLIAM T.
ARNOLD,
GRANDSON OF THOMAS AND
NEPHEW
OF
Matthew
Arnold,
meditated an
ambitious
plan
to
complete
for
a
new
generation
of readers his
grandfather's
unfinished
History of
Rome
(1838-1842).
"I want," he told his sister Mrs
Humphry
Ward, "to
point
out what
the Germans
think of
the
book,
and
what line
research
has
taken since."'
In
proposing
to
graft
the latest
German
historical schol-
arship upon
his
grandfather's
account of
Rome,
Arnold
was
setting
himself an
impossible
task.
His
efforts, however,
illustrate
some of the
complexities
that beset the British
historiography
of Rome in the later
part
of
the
Victorian
period.
Arnold
himself seems
implicitly
to have
recognized
the
difficulty
of
his
task,
because he abandoned
his
attempt
to complete his grandfather's book and also a later plan simply to pro-
duce
a new edition
of it.
In
the
end,
Arnold
managed
merely
to re-edit
the
chapters dealing
with the Second
Punic War
(1886).
Nor
did his
own work
on Roman
history prosper.
Commissioned
by
a
publisher
to
write a student handbook
on
the earlier
Empire,
Arnold
began
the
project
with
high
enthusiasm.
The
handbook would
help
him
establish
the
historiography
of Rome on a
more
scholarly
basis. "Entre
nous,"
he
told
Mrs
Ward,
"I have come
to
the
conclusion
that we
in
England
know absolutely nothing of the history of the Empire. It has to be
largely
reconstructed
from
epigraphic
sources,
and of these
hardly any-
thing
is known
in this
country"
(Ward, p.
xxxviii).
Yet work on the handbook
faltered,
too. As one
of
Arnold's
friends noted
sadly,
handbooks,
"to be done
at
all,
must be
what an
ex-
pert
feels to
be
rough-and-ready"
(Ward, p.
xxxvii).
And
Arnold,
who
ever
kept
before
himself the
heroic
figure
of
Theodor
Mommsen,
never
Quoted by Mrs Humphry Ward, "Memoir of the Author," in W. T. Arnold, Studies of Roman Im-
perialism,
ed.
Edward Fiddes
(Manchester:
University
of
Manchester
Press,
1906),
xxxviii.
SUMMER
1985
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Linda
Dowling
felt his
work
ready,
at least
if it
was to
be
measured
by
Mommsen's
high
standard. Mommsen was the
great pioneer
in Roman
epigraphic
research;
it was
his lifetime labor to
edit the vast
Corpus
Inscriptionum
Latinarum. Guided
by
Mommsen's
example,
Arnold tried to
pack
into
his
handbook
all his own
gatherings
from
inscriptions
as
well
as all the
latest
technical discoveries
gleaned
from
German
monographs
and
spe-
cialist
reviews. In
short,
Arnold's full
scholarship
burst
the narrow ves-
sel, and the handbook, after years of work, was abandoned.
There is
obviously
a
specific
psychopathology
at work in
Wil-
liam Arnold's
pattern
of
postponement
and failure. But we
would
miss
the
real
significance
of his failure
if we
read it
simply
in
psychological
terms.
Arnold's career
as a Roman
historian illustrates
dramatically
and
poignantly
a
larger
conflict
within
Victorian
historiography:
the
conflict between a
providentialist interpretation
based
upon
literature,
and a
newer,
ostensibly objective interpretation
based
upon
the meth-
ods of empirical science. The presiding geniuses of the providentialist
and the
empirical
schools of
Victorian
historiography
were
Thomas
Ar-
nold
and Theodor
Mommsen,
the
two
figures
whose
examples
guided
William
Arnold's fruitless
Roman researches. The
conflict between the
two schools can be
illustrated
by
their
divergent
interpretations
of
Ro-
man
"decadence":
questions
concerning
the
cause,
nature, or,
indeed,
the
very
existence of Roman decadence
raise to
high
visibility
questions
about the
possibility
of
historiography
itself.
I
Any
account of
historiographic
views of Roman
decadence in
the Victorian
period
must
perforce
begin
with
Edward
Gibbon,
whose
depiction
of
Antonine
felicity
endowed
Roman
decadence with a
more
persuasive
glamor
than it
had
yet
possessed.
Gibbon's
History
of
the
Decline
and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776-1788) was the pre-
eminent modern
history
of
Rome,
thanks
less
to
its
startling
thesis
than to
the
superb
literary
and
dialectical
mastery
which
presented
that thesis
and to the
scholarly
accuracy
which so
firmly underlay
it.
To
readers
familiar
only
with such
pedestrian
school-text
histories
as
Oliver
Gold-
smith's
(1769),
in which
forty-one
emperors
are
treated with
remorse-
less
chronology
in
forty-one
successive
chapters,
Gibbon's
powerfully
dramatic and
ingeniously
ordered
narrative
of "the
triumph
of
barba-
rism
and
religion"
came as a
revelation.
Gibbon's
masterpiece
thus
cast
its
long
shadow
over
every
subsequent
attempt
to write
a Roman
histo-
VICTORIAN
STUDIES
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Linda
Dowling
that "with
regard
to
...
objectionable
passages,
which
do
not
involve
mis-statement
or
inaccuracy,
[I
have]
intentionally
abstained from
di-
recting particular
attention towards
them
by
any
special
protest."2
Even
at
midcentury,
the Reverend
Mr. H.
G.
Bohn
considered it
pru-
dent
to
reassure
prospective
readers that his edition
of
Gibbon
was
the
work
of "an
English
Churchman."3
Thomas Arnold's
attempt
to deal
with Gibbon
was
intellectually
bolder: he turned to the Roman historiography of Niebuhr. Lytton
Strachey's
malicious remark
that Arnold's unfinished
history
was
based
partly
on
the researches of Niebuhr and
partly
on an
aversion to
Gib-
bon is thus not
without its truth. Arnold
declared that his
highest
ambi-
tion was
to
make his own
work "the
very
reverse
of
Gibbon,"
for
he
hoped
to raise
the estimate
of
Christianity
in
his own
account as
unobtrusively
as
Gibbon had
stealthily
lowered it
in
his.4
At the
same
time,
Arnold's
resort to
Niebuhr
for
help against
Gibbon is
ironic.
For
the thorough-going scepticism that Niebuhr's Romische Geschichte
(1812)
displayed
toward
Livy's
account of
early
Roman
history
recalled
to
many
British
readers
Gibbon's own
scepticism
about
received histor-
ical
opinion.
Similarly,
Niebuhr's
expressed
doubts
concerning
certain
aspects
of the
Genesis
story
reminded
many
readers of
Gibbon's
mock-
ing
attitude
towards
theological
dogma.
The
Quarterly
Review,
for
in-
stance,
declared
that
Niebuhr
"is,
what
Mr.
Wordsworth
should
not
have called
Voltaire,
'a
pert,
dull
scoffer,'
"as well
as
being
the
author
of "some of the most offensive paragraphs which have appeared since
the
days
of the
Philosophical
Dictionary
...
pregnant
with
crude
and
dangerous speculations."5
Though
Thomas Arnold
seems to
have had
some
reservations
about
Niebuhr's
work,
his initial
reluctance
to
admit
the
whole of
Niebuhr's
conclusions
gave
way
in
later
years.
According
to
Arnold's
student and
biographer,
A. P.
Stanley,
Arnold's
admiration of
Niebuhr
"rose at last
into a
sentiment
of
personal
veneration,
which
made
him,
as he used to say, at once emulous and hopeless, rendering him jealous
for
Niebuhr's
reputation,
as if
for his
own."
When
Julius
Hare and
2
"Preface
by
the
Editor,"
The
History of
the
Decline
and
Fall
of
the
Roman
Empire:
By
Edward
Gibbon,
ed.
H. H.
Milman,
12
vols.
(London:
John
Murray,
1838-1839),
I,
xxiii.
3
Edward
Gibbon,
The
History of
the
Decline
and
Fall
of
the
Roman
Empire,
With
Variorum
Notes
. . .
by
an
English
Churchman
[ed.
H.
G.
Bohn],
6
vols.
(London:
Henry
G.
Bohn,
1853),
title
page.
4
Arthur
P.
Stanley,
The
Life
and
Correspondence
of
Thomas
Arnold,
D.
D.,
2d
ed.,
2
vols.
(Lon-
don:
B.
Fellowes,
1844),
I,
206.
5
[John
Barlow],
"Russia,"
Quarterly
Review,
39
(January-April 1829),
8n-9n.
J.
C.
Hare and
Con-
nop Thirlwall responded in A Vindication of Niebuhr's History of Rome From the Charges of the
Quarterly
Review
(Cambridge: John
Taylor,
1829).
VICTORIAN
STUDIES
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ROMAN
DECADENCE
Connop
Thirlwall
decided not
to
translate
Niebuhr's third
volume,
Ar-
nold considered
undertaking
the task
himself,
"from
a desire
'to
have
his name connected with the
translation
of that
great
work,
which
no
one had
studied more or admired
more
entirely'
"
(Stanley,
I,
45).
Why
did
Arnold turn to Niebuhr for aid
against
Gibbon? As
Duncan Forbes and others have
pointed
out,
the two
historians
had
a
great
deal in
common:
a
love of
Edmund
Burke,
a
hatred
of
violent
po-
litical change, a belief in the ethical and patriotic instruction provided
by history.6 Underlying
these
topical
similarities is a shared belief in
the
organic
and
idealist nature
of
history.
Tracing
its
source
ultimately
to
Plato,
this view held that
the
"life" of a
nation,
no
less
than
the life
of
a human
being,
was
constituted
by
ideas rather
than
acts,
and was
to be
known at its most characteristic
only
in its "inward"
aspect.
As
Arnold said
in his
inaugural
lecture at Oxford:
[We]
have
another life besides that of outward
action;
and it
is this inward life
after
all
which determines the character of the actions and of the man. And how
eagerly
do we de-
sire
in
those
great
men
whose actions
fill so
large
a
space
in
history,
to know not
only
what
they
did but
what
they
were: how much do we
prize
their letters or their recorded
words,
and
not least such words
as
are uttered
in their
most
private
moments,
which
enable
us to
look as
it
were
into the
very
nature of
that
mind,
whose distant effects we know
to
be
so
marvellous.
But
a
nation has its inward
life no less than
an
individual,
and
from this
its
outward
life also is characterized.7
Such
a view
of
the "inward"
nature of
history
inclined Liberal
Angli-
can and Romantic
idealist historians
such as
Thomas
Carlyle
to
grant
literary texts and other imaginative modes such as ballads and legends
a
special
authority
as historical
evidence.
Although
Arnold
stressed
the
fundamental
importance
of
examining
the
laws
and institutions
of a
nation,
he
laid
great
emphasis
as
well on
its literature.
According
to Ar-
nold,
studying
its laws
and institutions
would
merely
discover a
nation's
outward
identity,
while
studying
its literature
would reveal its
inward
spirit,
as
well as the
spirit
of its
period:
"We
may
arrive
at a
very just
and
full
knowledge
of
the
character
of the
literature of a
peri-
6
I
am
indebted
to
Duncan
Forbes,
The
Liberal
Anglican
Idea
of
History
(Cambridge:
Cambridge
University
Press,
1952),
Robert
Preyer,
Bentham,
Coleridge
and the Science
of
History
(Bochum
Langendreer:
Heinrich
Poppinghaus,
1958),
and
G.
P.
Gooch,
History
and Historians
in the
Nine-
teenth
Century (London:
Longmans,
Green,
1913).
See also Robert
Preyer,
"The Dream
of a
Spiritualized
Learning
and
Its
Early
Enthusiasts:
German,
British and American"
in Geschichte
und
Gesellschaft
in
der
amerikanischen
Literatur,
eds.
Karl Schubert
and Ursula Miiller-Richter
(Heidelberg:
Quelle
and
Meyer,
1975), pp.
62-85. For
a
study emphasizing
Arnold's
debt to
Vico,
see Peter
Dale,
The Victorian Critic
and
the Idea
of
History (Cambridge:
Harvard
University
Press,
1977).
7
Thomas Arnold, "Inaugural Lecture" in Introductory Lectures on Modern History (Oxford: John
Henry
Parker,
1842),
p.
11.
SUMMER
1985
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Linda
Dowling
od,
and
thereby of
the
period
itself.
.
.
.
And
by
such means .
..
we
may
I
think imbue ourselves
effectually
with
the
spirit
of a
period."8
For idealist
historians such as Thomas Arnold
and
Thomas
Carlyle,
F. A.
Wolf's method of
philological analysis
was
crucial.
Through
a
philological
analysis
of
texts,
Wolf claimed to
establish
ac-
curately
the
primacy,
authenticity,
and,
perhaps
most
important,
the
derivational
relationships among
competing
textual
explanations
of
historical events. Wolf's Prologomena to Homer (1795) thus helped to
open
a new era of
historiography
by
providing
a
method
through
which
historical
explanations
could be established on
"scientific" terms
of
evidence, induction,
and
certainty.
Niebuhr,
who had
thoroughly
assimilated these
methods,
realized
that
philology
preserved
"through
thousands
of
years
an unbroken
identity
with the
noblest and
greatest
nations of the ancient world
.
. .
familiarizing
us,
through
the
medi-
um
of
grammar
and
history,
with the works of their
minds and the
course of their destinies, as if there were no gulf that divided us from
them."9 Armed
with critical
philology,
Niebuhr
was able to
pick
his
way through
the
spurious
documents
relating
to Rome's
early
history
and
seize
upon
the
true. Niebuhr
seems,
moreover,
to have
possessed
what
Novalis called the
essential
requirement
in
a
historian,
an
almost
"divinatory
instinct" which allowed him
rapidly
and
accurately
to dis-
cern
from
internal evidence the
fabulous
elements
incorporated
in
putatively
factual narratives
as well
as
the
genuinely
historical ele-
ments embedded in legends and folklore.
It is
hardly
surprising,
then,
that Thomas
Arnold and
other Lib-
eral
Anglican
historians seized
upon
Niebuhr's
Roman
history
with
such
excitement.
No
longer,
they
believed,
would
the
gulf
between an-
cient and
modern times continue
to
widen
inexorably.
No
longer
were
the
powers
of
historians to
be
diminished
by
the
passage
of
time.
"Do
not the records of
a
Tacitus,"
Carlyle
had
complained, "acquire
a
new
meaning,
after
seventeen
hundred
years,
in
the
hands of a
Montesquieu?
Niebuhr
has
to
reinterpret
for us
at a still
greater
dis-
tance,
the
writings
of a Titus
Livius."'1
But
Niebuhr was
untroubled
by
such doubts.
He believed
instead that
philology
collapsed
the
dis-
tance
between
ancient and
modern
times
by
opening
the
very
minds of
8
Thomas
Arnold,
"Lecture
I"
in
Introductory
Lectures,
pp.
106-107
(my
emphasis).
9
Barthold
Georg
Niebuhr,
"Preface"o
The
Historyof
Rome,
tr.
Julius
Charles
Hare
and
Connop
Thirlwall,
3
vols.
(Philadelphia:
Thomas
Wardle,
1835),
I,
x.
'0
Thomas
Carlyle,
"On
History
Again,"
n
The Works
f
Thomas
Carlyle
CentenaryEdition),
30
vols. (essayorig. pub. 1833;London:ChapmanandHall, 1899;rpt. ed., NewYork:AMSPress,
1969),
XXVIII,
175-176.
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ROMAN DECADENCE
vanished
generations
to
modern
understanding.
The
modern historian
of
Rome could
greet
the ancient Romans as
contemporaries,
and
this
Niebuhr
did
with
irresistible verve:
He who
calls
departed ages
back
into
being
enjoys
a bliss
like
that of
creating:
it
were
a
great thing,
if
I
could scatter the mist that
lies
upon
this
most
excellent
portion
of
ancient
story,
and could
spread
a clear
light
over
it;
so that
the
Romans shall stand before the
eyes
of
my
readers,
distinct,
intelligible,
familiar as
contemporaries,
with their institutions and
the
vicissitudes of
their
destiny, living
and
moving.
(Niebuhr,
I,
4).
Quite simply,
Niebuhr's
Romische Geschichte made the
past
live. Hence
Arnold's
impatience
with
Dr.
Johnson's
remark that
"an
account of the
ancient
Romans,
as
it cannot
nearly
interest
any
present
reader,
and
must
be
drawn
from
writings
that have
been
long
known,
can owe
its value
only
to
the
language
in
which it is
delivered,
and the
reflections
with which it
is
accompanied.""
Arnold knew that
Niebuhr
had not only discovered new facts about ancient Rome
-
indeed,
Niebuhr
had made
the
spectacular
discovery
of the Institutes
of
Gaius
-
but
he
had
presented
those
facts
in a
new
light.
Introduced
by
Hare and
Thirlwall,
sponsored
by
Arnold,
Niebuhr's
History
of
Rome thus
became
a classic text
for Victorians
in
the two
decades
before
midcentury,
influencing
even
the school texts
of
Victorian children.12
And
this
despite
his
admittedly
imperfect gift
for
historical
narrative:
Niebuhr,
declared
T.
B.
Macaulay,
was
"a
man
who would
have been the
first
writer
of his
time,
if his talent
for com-
municating
truths
had borne
any proportion
to
his talent
for
investigat-
ing
them."'3
At Oxford
in the
1840s
Niebuhr
was
king
and
Arnold
was
his
ambassador.
Recalling
those
years,
E.
A. Freeman
said,
"the
won-
derful
work of
Niebuhr
.
. .
overthrew
one
creed and
set
up
another.
.
. . Niebuhr's
theory
in fact
acted
like a
spell;
it was not
to
argument
or
evidence
that
it
appealed;
his followers
avowedly
claimed
for him
a
kind of
power
of
'divination.'
"14
Niebuhr's
Romische
Geschichte
did
more,
however,
than
dra-
matically
renew
and
reanimate
the
past.
His
analysis
of
Roman
history
provided
Liberal
Anglican
historians
like Arnold
and
Stanley
with
a
"
[Thomas
Arnold],
"Early
Roman
History," Quarterly
Review,
32
(June
1825),
68. Arnold
is
quoting
from
Johnson's
review
of
Thomas
Blackwell's
Memoirs
of
the Court
of
Augustus.
12
Compare
Thomas
Keightley,
"Preface,"
The
History
of
Rome
(London: Longman,
Rees, Orme,
Brown,
Green
and
Longman,
1836),
p.
iii.
13
Thomas
B.
Macaulay,
"Preface"
to
Lays
of
Ancient Rome
(orig.
pub.
1842;
London:
Longman,
Brown,
Green
and
Longmans,
1852), p.
6.
14
E. A. Freeman, "Mommsen's History of Rome" in Historical Essays, 2d series (essay orig. pub.
1859;
London:
Macmillan,
1873),
p.
241.
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Linda
Dowling
theory
of historical
development
that
they
could
apply
to the
histories
of
other nations. Because Niebuhr had removed the
early period
of
Ro-
man
history
from
the realm of
myth
and
conjecture
and
established
it
on
an undoubted historical continuum with the
Republic
and the
Em-
pire,
Rome's
history
could be
clearly
traced from first
to last.
And
what
is
more,
it
could be read as a
story,
for
Rome,
uniquely
among
nations,
had
passed through
all
the
stages
of historical
development.
"Few
na-
tions," Niebuhr said, "have, like the Romans, completed a life never
cut
short
by
the
power
of
strangers;
none
among
these few with
such
strength
and
fullness. No other state has existed
so
long
without
any
principle
of its
life
being
stifled"
(quoted
in
Preyer,
Bentham,
Cole-
ridge,
p.
31).
That there
were
distinct
stages
of
historical
development
was,
of
course,
an
ancient
assumption.
What Plato had
merely posited,
howev-
er,
Niebuhr
sought
to
prove by
adducing
literary
evidence. That the
early period of Rome represented the "youth" of the nation he assumed
on
the
basis
of
the folk
ballads characteristic
of the
early period
-
po-
etry,
according
to
the theories
of
Johann
Gottfried von
Herder
and
F.
A.
Wolf,
representing
the first
literary
expression
of a
people.
The
pat-
tern of
youth, maturity,
and old
age
that Niebuhr traced in
Roman
his-
tory
became,
in
one
form or
another,
the
Romantic
historicist
para-
digm
for all
historical
change.
In
Arnold's
phrase,
"the
History
of
Rome
must be
in
some sort the
History
of the World"
(Stanley,
I,
203).
There was a difficulty, however, in Niebuhr's schema of nation-
al
youth, maturity,
and
decline for an
Anglican priest
and
teacher
such
as
Arnold,
and it
lay,
obviously,
in
the
schema's
apparent
determinism.
If,
as Arnold
said,
history
could
not show "in
any
instance"
that the
old
age
of nations
had been followed
by
anything
other than their
dissolu-
tion,15
then
it
would be
difficult
to defend the
idea of free will
in
histo-
ry.
Indeed,
it would be
difficult to
defend the
study
of
history,
for
the
historicist claim
that the
newly
revealed
patterns
in
history
could
pro-
vide
lessons for
the
future
was simply confounded by the very existence
of such
patterns.
Historians could
hardly
instruct
people
how to
choose
if
there
were
in
fact no
choices. On
one
level,
then,
the
lesson
taught
by
Niebuhr's
new
historiography
was
no
more than the
lesson
of the old:
acquiescence
in
the
inevitable.
Duncan
Forbes
has
provided
the
classic
account of the
Liberal
Anglican
solution
to this
dilemma,
a
solution
involving
what
was
in
ef-
'5
Thomas Arnold, "The Social Progress of States" in Miscellaneous Works (essay orig. pub. 1830;
New
York:
Appleton, 1845),
pp.
322-323.
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ROMAN
DECADENCE
feet
a
two-tier
model of historical
development.
According
to
the Lib-
eral
Anglican
view,
the
decay
and dissolution manifest
in
Gibbon's
Roman
Empire
and
in
every past
instance
of
national
development
oc-
curred on a
lower level of national
life;
Rome and all
past
societies
were redeemed
by
being
incorporated
on a
higher
level
as
a
necessary
part
of
the
unfolding
of God's
providence
(see
Forbes,
pp.
65-66).
Lib-
eral
Anglican
historians,
moreover,
were
particularly
insistent about
the power of individual action to alter things for good or ill even on the
lower
plane
of historical action. This is
the
emphatic
theme
of
Stanley's
1840
Oxford
Prize
Essay,
"Whether
States,
Like
Individuals,
After
a
Certain
Period of
Maturity,
Inevitably
Tend
to
Decay."
The Liberal
Anglican interpretation
of
history
thus
asserted the
intelligibility
and
hence the moral
significance
of
historical
patterns
without
conceding
to those
patterns
any
deterministic coerciveness.
In
Liberal
Anglican
texts,
historical
sequence
was moralized and became
historical plot. And because they argued that the three-part plot of
youth, maturity,
and
age
recurred
in different nations at different
times,
the
idea
that
national
history
formed a distinct and articulated
narrative
received additional
emphasis.
It is this recurrence of
the
plot
that
allowed
Arnold to make
his
most
cherished
claim for historical
study
-
namely,
that it
taught
valuable,
because
genuinely
applica-
ble,
lessons
to the
men and women
of
his own
day.
The recurrence
of
the historical
plot
also
brought
parallel phases
of
history
into vivid con-
junction. Niebuhr's historiography thus explained to Arnold why he
felt so
intensely
that
Thucydides spoke
to
him
as
a
living
contempo-
rary,
with
"a wisdom more
applicable
to us
politically
than
the wisdom
even
of
our own
countrymen
who
lived
in
the middle
ages"
("Social
Progress,"
pp.
325-326).
In
its
turn,
Arnold's
historiography
explained
to
a
generation
of
young
readers,
including
his son
Matthew,
why
Mar-
cus
Aurelius
spoke
to
them "not as
a
Classical
Dictionary
hero,
but
as
a
present
source
from which
to
draw
'example
of
life,'
and
'instruction
of
manners.'
"16
When
Thomas
Arnold described
the
plot
of
history,
he
placed
special
emphasis
on
the last
act of the
plot. Though
he
concerned
him-
self
with
the earlier
Roman
period
in
his
history,
in other works
Arnold
(as
Peter
Dale has
stressed)
dwelled
with an
obsessive
pessimism upon
the
imminence
and
significance
of the
last
phase
in the
life of nations.
In his
Oxford
inaugural
lecture,
for
instance,
he declared
that "modern
6 Matthew Arnold, "Marcus Aurelius," in Complete Prose Works, ed. R. H. Super, 9 vols. (essay
orig. pub.
1863;
Ann Arbor:
University
of
Michigan
Press,
1962),
III,
136.
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ROMAN
DECADENCE
tus to the
Death
of
Heraclius
(1853),
with its unselective inclusiveness
and
disregard
of
causality,
narrative,
and human
action.17
At
the
same
time,
the
underlying
conflict
between scientific
and
literary
elements
in
Liberal
Anglican historiography
was
effectively
masked
from
its
practitioners by
the
apparently
"scientific" sanction
bestowed
by
textual
philology
upon
Niebuhr's
work
and works
like Ar-
nold's which derived
from Niebuhr.
Niebuhr's
work,
after
all,
had
demonstrated that literary evidence could have genuine historical val-
ue,
and
this
apparent
indulgence
towards
literature on the
part
of a
"scientific" historian
encouraged
the Liberal
Anglicans
to maintain
a
number of
essentially
literary
attitudes
-
particularly
a fondness
for
the
biographical
mode
of
Carlyle.
At
any
rate,
Arnold,
who
loved
Carlyle's
"inimitable
living pictures,"
was
inclined
to
furnish his
own
historical
writing
with
vivid scenes
and
personalities
and to
judge
his-
torians
by
literary
standards.
The reliable
historian,
he told
his stu-
dents, will be known by his prose style: "The mere language of an his-
torian
will furnish us with
something
of a
key
to
his
mind,
and
will tell
us,
or
at least
give
us cause to
presume,
in
what
his main
strength
lies,
and
in what
he is deficient"
("Lecture
VIII,"
p.
384).
The
literary
bias
in Arnold's
work
thus
brought
the new scientif-
ic
historiography
of
Niebuhr close
to the
older belletristic
sort.
It also
suggested
the
hidden and
insuperable
difficulty
that Wolf's
philologi-
cal
method
posed
to
the Liberal
Anglican
enterprise.
Though
Wolf's
philological analysis seemed at first to bestow scientific certainty upon
the Liberal
Anglicans'
text-dependent
and
textually
plotted
interpreta-
tion of
history,
in fact
its
support
was
illusory.
For even
though
Wolf's
methods
could
be
applied
with
great
success
to
literary
texts,
they
could
not
ratify
literary
values.
Instead,
the two
ways
of
judging
texts
remained
utterly
distinct.
Simply
put,
in
philological
analysis,
the de-
cisive
standards
were
temporal
priority
and
authenticity,
not truth
and
beauty.
The scientific force of Wolf's methods in historical research,
moreover,
always
depended
upon
their
faithful
application:
only
phil-
ological
conclusions
based
on
the
widest
range
of
evidence,
for
exam-
17
Hayden
White,
in a
brilliantly suggestive
essay
entitled
"The Value
of
Narrativity
in the
Represen-
tation
of
Reality"
(Critical
Inquiry,
7
[1980-81],
5-27),
has
argued
that,
for all the
secular
historiographical
prejudice
against
moralizing
histories
like Arnold's
and
Kingsley's,
it is
precisely
the desire
for the
establishment
of
a moral
authority
that
finds
expression
in the
"hypotactic"
ordering,
closed
sequences,
and
plots
of the
"highest"
mode
of historical
writing,
namely,
nar-
rative
history.
White observes
the
standard
historiographical
distinction
betweeen the
two
"lower"
forms
of
annal and
chronicle,
a distinction
elided
here.
For the
Christian-apologist
basis
of
chronologies before Gibbon's Decline, see James William Johnson, "Chronological Writing: Its
Concepts
and
Development,"
History
and
Theory,
2
(1962-63),
124-145.
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Linda
Dowling
pie,
could claim to be scientific.
In the same
way,
only
a historical
sci-
ence that
acknowledged
its
obligation
to
let the evidence
dictate
its
conclusions
could
make a similar
claim.
Liberal
Anglican historiog-
raphy
seemingly
had
little
to
fear
from
such
concessions to
the
princi-
ples
of
scientific induction.
And
yet,
once claimed
by
the
Liberal
Angli-
cans,
the scientific method
continued
to work
independently
of
their
idealist
assumptions,
at last
subverting
them as
completely
as Rome
it-
self had once been subverted by its own invited and domesticated foes.
II
Niebuhr's
providentialism,
his treatment
of
sources,
and
his
style
("no
Roman lives
in
his
pages")
were
criticized
by
G.
H.
Lewes as
early
as
1843,
while Niebuhr's
divinatory
method,
his
"ballad
theory,"
and his arrogant dogmatism were directly challenged by G. Cornewall
Lewis in
his
Inquiry
into
the
Credibility of
the
Early
Roman
History
(1855).18
Less
immediately
apparent
to
Victorians,
however,
was
the
challenge
to
Niebuhr's methods
posed
by
his
successor
Theodor
Mommsen,
whose Roman
history
began
appearing
in the
1850s.
Mommsen's work
made
much less
of an
impression
upon
nonspecialist
British readers
than
Niebuhr's
had,
not
least
because the
Niebuhr-
Arnold
tradition in
Roman
historiography
was
carried
on so
vigorously
in the second half of the century by the widely popular work of Charles
Merivale,
Charles
Kingsley,
and
Thomas
Hodgkin.
In
A
History of
the
Romans Under
the
Empire
(1850-1864),
Merivale,
for
instance,
located
himself in
the
processional
line of
Niebuhr
and Arnold.
Acknowledging
his
indebtedness,
he
declared
that had
Arnold lived
to finish his
History
of
Rome,
"it
is
needless to
say
that
my
ambition
would have been
di-
rected
elsewhere."19 If
Merivale
lacked the
rigorous
moral
standards
of
Arnold
in
judging
historical
figures,
his
volumes
nonetheless
resound
with
the
major
Arnoldian
themes:
the
contemporaneity
of the
Roman
past,
the
centrality
of ideas in
shaping history,
the vital
teaching
func-
tion
of
history
and
historians,
and
the
special
relevance
of
Roman
his-
tory
for the
English.
Even
Merivale's
reluctant decision
to break
off
his
18
[G.
H.
Lewes],
"Charges Against
Niebuhr,"
Westminster
Review,
40
(December 1843),
335-349.
For a
history
of
reactions to Niebuhr's
ballad-theory,
see
Renate
Bridenthal,
"Was There
a
Roman
Homer?:
Niebuhr's Thesis
and Its
Critics,"
History
and
Theory,
11
(1972),
193-213.
19
Charles Merivale, "Preface" to A History of the Romans Under the Empire, 7 vols. (London:
Longman,
Brown,
Green
and
Longmans,
1850-1864),
I,
viii.
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ROMAN
DECADENCE
history
before the end of the Western
Empire
participates
in
an
Arnoldian
sorrow that the field must once
again
be left
to
Gibbon.
Charles
Kingsley aggressively
continued Arnold's
emphasis
on
the
providential design
of
history
without
sharing any
of Arnold's
scholarly
care. Where
Arnold in
his
Oxford lectures treated
history
as
an
intellectual
discipline,
a science
whose laws were
just beginning
to
emerge, Kingsley
treated
history
as a fund
of
morally
renewing
anec-
dote. Indeed, one feels when reading his Cambridge lectures, The Ro-
man and the Teuton
(1864),
that
Kingsley
does
not
so much elicit his
lessons
from
history
as
busily
embed them
there.
So,
for
instance,
he
pauses
over
-
not the sack of
Rome
by
Alaric in 410
A.D.
-
but
the
historically
far less
significant plundering
by
Totila
in 546-549
A.D.:
"Gentlemen,
I
make
no
comment.
I
know no more awful
page
in
the
history
of
Europe. Through
such facts
as these God
speaks.
Let
man
be
silent;
and
look on
in
fear
and
trembling,
knowing
that
it was written
of old time - The wages of sin are death."20
Arnold's
providentialism
and
scholarship
are unified
in the work
of a
third
successor,
Thomas
Hodgkin.
Hodgkin's eight-volume
history
of the barbarian
incursions
upon
Rome,
Italy
and
Her Invaders
(1879-1899),
was the
delight
of novelists
and scholars
alike:
George
Gissing
quarried
material
for his unfinished
historical novel
Veranilda
(1904)
from
it,
and
the
great
scholar
of
the later
Empire, J.
B.
Bury,
gave
it
repeated
praise. Hodgkin
illuminated
his vivid
narrative with
the benign light of Arnold's providentialism:
It was time
for the Teutonic
nations to
rejuvenate
the
world,
to
bring
their
noisy energy
into
those
silent
and
melancholy
countries,
peopled
only
by
slaves and
despots.
It was
time
to exhibit
on the arena
of the world
the ruder
virtues and
the more
vigorous
vices
of a
peo-
ple
who,
even in their
vices,
showed that
they
were still
young
and
strong;
it was
time
that
the
sickly
odour
of
incense
offered to imbecile
Emperors
and
lying
Prefects should
be
scat-
tered
before
the
fresh moorland-air
of
liberty.
In
short,
both as
to the
building up,
and as
to
the
pulling
down of
the
world-Empire
of
Rome,
we have
a
right
to
say,
"It
was,
be-
cause the Lord God
willed
it
so."21
In Hodgkin's somewhat plaintive appeal to his "right" to speak
thus, however,
we
hear an
embattled
cry.
Plainly,
the
grounds
of
historiography
had shifted in the
years
since Arnold
wrote.
By
1879
the
20
Charles
Kingsley,
The Roman
and the
Teuton:
A
Series
of
Lectures
Delivered
Before
the Univer-
sity
of
Cambridge
(London:
Macmillan,
1864), p.
161.
Kingsley's
militant
providentialism
was
in-
fluenced
by Carlyle's
French
Revolution,
which
taught
him,
as
it
taught
his fictional
hero
Alton
Locke,
"to see
in
history
not
the mere
farce-tragedy
of
man's
crimes and
follies,
but
the
dealings
of
a
righteous
Ruler
of
the universe"
(Charles Kingsley,
Alton
Locke,
Tailor and Poet:
An
Auto-
biography
[1850;
rpt.
ed.,
New
York:
Oxford
University
Press,
1983],
p.
97).
21
Thomas Hodgkin, Italy and Her Invaders, 2d ed., 8 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1892-1899),
II,
532.
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ROMAN
DECADENCE
or
despised,
was
in
fact an
appropriate
and even
admirable
model for
Britain:
I
may
add,
that
not
merely
the
Roman
Empire,
but
that
every
large
political society
...
to make
my
meaning
clear,
all such states
as the
larger
kingdoms
of modern
Europe,
with
no
exception
as to our own
country,
are
not fit
subjects
for
the
constitutional
system.
That
system,
with its fictions and indirect
action,
may
offer
advantages
at certain
times
.
.
but,
on
the
whole,
I think
it alien to
good
government.
It has ever
failed
...
it is
failing
you
now,
in
the
presence
of
real
dangers
and
war.23
Congreve's
advocacy
of
dictatorship
("A protector
or
dictator,
if
you
like to call
him
so
-
the
name
is
unimportant"
[Congreve,
p.
62])
pro-
voked
a
crushing
rebuttal from Goldwin
Smith,
who called the Positiv-
ists "an
advanced
and
slightly
terrorist school of
philanthropists."24
But
it also
persuaded
Congreve's
student
Beesly
to
champion
such
unlikely
heroes as
Catiline
and Tiberius.
Such
unabashed
Caesarism
finds its source in
Comte
and the re-
habilitation
of
Julius
Caesar
begun
by
Napoleon.
It
is,
at
the same
time,
a
deeply
"literary"
motive,
for it
represents
in
part
an emotional
response
to
heroic
character,
and thus
resembles the
hero-worship
of
such Romantic historians as
Carlyle
and
Kingsley.
Hence,
it is
particu-
larly
striking
that the Positivists'
defense of Caesarism should
involve at
the same time an attack
upon
the
literary
bias of Liberal
Anglican
historiography, though
this
is
perhaps
no more than to
say
that
like
so
many programmatic
reformers,
the
Comteans
did
not detect
contra-
dictions
in
their
program.
In
any
case,
Beesly
did not
dispense
with
the
literary category
of heroic character even as he mocked the modern his-
torian
for
being
so
"accustomed
to
the voluminous materials
from
which modern
history
is
drawn,
[that
he]
frets at the obscure
and
mea-
gre
narratives
which have descended
to us from
the
ancient
world."
Even
worse,
according
to
Beesly,
modern
historians are
guided
almost
entirely
by
the
literary
bias of traditional
historiography.
They
prefer
the written to
the
non-written,
and the
better
written,
or
writing
which
approximated
the
higher
literary
forms,
to
the less well-written:
Our wretched
classical
education
does
not even introduce
its victims to
more
than
a
small
fraction of the
scanty,
but
precious,
remains
of
ancient
history.
How do
they
know that
Velleius
[biographer
of
Tiberius]
is
a
toady?
Because
they
are told so
by
the
literary
men,
who
can
just
see
that either
he
or Tacitus
must
be
utterly wrong
about
Tiberius,
and,
of
course,
decide
for the
finest
[sic]
writer.25
23
Richard
Congreve,
The Roman
Empire
of
the West:
Four Lectures
Delivered at
the
Philosophical
Institution,
Edinburgh,
February
1855
(London:
John
Parker,
1855),
pp.
60-61.
24
See Goldwin
Smith,
"Review of
Mr.
Congreve's
'Roman
Empire
of the
West,'
"
in
Oxford Essays
(London:
n.p.,
1856),
p.
295.
25
E. S. Beesly, "Clodius" [orig. pub.1866] in Catiline, Clodius and Tiberius (London: Chapman and
Hall,
1878),
p.
40;
"Tiberius:
Part
I"
[orig. pub.
1867]
in
Catiline,
pp.
105n-106n.
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Linda
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It is at
this
point
that
English
Positivist
historiography
verges
up-
on the scientific
historiography
of
Mommsen and
Leopold
von
Ranke.
Mommsen
himself,
of
course,
was
notorious
for
his
passionate
Caesar-
ism,
and if
this failed to convict
him as a "terrorist
philanthropist,"
it
at
least raised
persistent questions
about the moral
tendency
of his
work.
According
to
E. A.
Freeman:
It
seems
perfectly
indifferent to
[Mommsen]
whether
Caesar,
or
anybody
else,
was moral-
ly
right
or
wrong.
It is
enough
for him
that Caesar was a man of
surpassing
genius,
who
laid
his
plans
skilfully
and
carried them out
successfully.
The
only
subject
on
which
Mommsen
ever seems to
be
stirred
up
to
anything
like moral
indignation
is
one
not
very
closely
connected with his
immediate
subject,
namely
American
slavery.
It is
however
some
comfort that
he
does
not,
like
Mr.
Beesly, go
in
for Catilina.26
If
Mommsen
resisted
moralizing,
he
also
appeared
to
resist the
lure
of
literariness. To
Victorians familiar with
such vivid
treatments
of
Ro-
man
history
as those of
Gibbon
and
Arnold,
Mommsen seemed
color-
less.
Mommsen
"understands,"
wrote
Freeman,
"but he
does
not
al-
ways
feel;
his
narrative
constantly
seems cold and
tame after
that
of
Arnold."27
Freeman missed
"the
brilliant
picture
.
..
the
awful
vision
. . .
the
pictures"
of
Arnold;
he
set
parallel
passages
from the
two au-
thors beside
each other and
lamented "how
different a strain "
(Free-
man,
p.
255).
Mommsen's volume
on
Roman
provincial
history
during
the
Empire,
moreover,
made his
earlier work
on Caesar
and the
Republic
seem
by
comparison
picturesque
and colorful.
Here
we
approach
the
difference between the British Positivist and the German
positivist
his-
torians of Rome
which
most
struck
their
Victorian
contemporaries.
For
despite
all
the
pro-Caesar,
anti-Cicero
prejudice
he
shared with
Beesly,
Mommsen's first
allegiance
was
declaredly
to
historical
objectivity,
to
Ranke's
famous dictum
that
the
historian must
concern
himself
only
with "how
it
actually
was"
(wie
es
eigentlich
gewesen ist).
Such
objec-
tivity
required
not
merely
setting
aside
personal
prejudices
and
allow-
ing only
the
available
evidence to
determine one's
conclusions;
it meant
widening the base of evidence wherever possible. Thus Mommsen, for
instance,
in
studying
the
history
of
the
Empire
found
he had
to
consid-
er
the
provinces
as
well
as the
capital.
If the
nature
of
the
historical
evidence
changed,
then
so
too,
Mommsen
declared,
must the
treatment
which
presented
that evi-
26
E.
A.
Freeman,
"Mommsen's
History of
Rome:
Appendix
from
Saturday
Review,
March
28,
1868"
in
Historical
Essays,
2d
series
(London:
Macmillan,
1873),
p.
270.
27
Freeman, pp.
254-255.
Mommsen's literary powers impressed others more favorably: G. B. Shaw
undertook to
dramatize "the
Mommsenite
view of
Caesar" in
Caesar
and
Cleopatra
(1901).
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ROMAN DECADENCE
dence. The
scientific historian
could
not
rely
upon
continuous
narra-
tive
or vivid
biographical
accounts
in
writing
the
history
of the Roman
provinces.
Instead,
Mommsen had
to
tease
his
history
out
of the
Corpus
Inscriptionum
Latinarum,
the vast
collection
of over
150,000
inscrip-
tions, coins,
and other
epigraphic
material
he
spent
most
of
his
lifetime
editing.
Such
non-literary
evidence
simply
did not
permit
the
historian
to
indulge
a
literary
taste
for brilliant
pictures
or awful visions:
"Charms of detail, pictures of feeling, sketches of character, it has none
to
offer;
it is
allowable
for
the
artist,
but not for the
historian,
to
repro-
duce the
features of
Arminius. With
self-denial this book has been
writ-
ten;
and with self-denial let
it
be
read."28
In
Mommsen's
view,
history
bestowed a moral
rigor
-
not
upon
life,
as
Arnold had
supposed
-
but
upon
historiography.
Mommsen's
positivist
attention
to historical evidence seemed
to
some Victorians to
separate
him
decisively
from Positivists
such
as
Beesly and Congreve, who like their mentor Comte so frequently be-
lied their
scientific
claims.
T. H.
Huxley charged,
for
instance,
that the
Positivists
were
anti-scientific
precisely
to
the
degree
that
they
were
anti-empirical.29
So
too,
as
we shall
see in the
case
of
J.
B.
Bury,
respect
for
empirical
evidence
undermined
the
authority
of the Positivist anal-
ysis
of
history by questioning
the
teleology
of the
three
stages.
Mommsen
thought
it futile
(and
Bury
worse than
futile)
that
a
literary
appetite
for
pattern
should
prompt
historians
to
link
"into a
semblance
of chronological order fragments that do not fit each other"
(Mommsen,
I,
5).
The evidence
of
the
Corpus
overwhelmingly
resisted
plot.
Ironically,
Mommsen,
possessed
of
great
narrative
gifts,
subvert-
ed
the
idea of historical
plot,
while
Niebuhr,
who
so
conspicuously
lacked those
gifts,
established
the
plot
of
Roman
history
as
the recur-
rent
story
of
the
world.
Mommsen's most
immediate
impact upon
historiography,
however,
was his transformation
of
ideas
about Roman
decadence.
By
focusing on the Roman provinces, Mommsen diverted attention
from
the
Roman
capital
and
from the
emperors
who,
from Nero
to
Augustulus,
had
traditionally
been
seen
as
precursors
or embodiments
of Rome's
decline. To focus
upon
the
provinces
was
to
show
that "the
cruelties and
eccentricities
of the
monarch
had but
little effect
28
Theodor
Mommsen,
The
Provinces
of
the Roman
Empire
from
Caesar to
Diocletian,
tr. William
P.
Dickson,
2 vols.
(London:
Richard
Bentley,
1886),
I,
6.
29 See T. H. Huxley, "The Scientific Aspects of Positivism" in Lay Sermons, Addresses and Reviews,
4th
ed.
(essay orig. pub.
1869;
London:
Macmillan,
1872),
pp.
147-173.
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Linda
Dowling
throughout
the boundless
expanse
of
the
Roman world"
(Gooch,
p.
462),
and
so to
suggest
the
relatively
limited influence of
individual
ac-
tions
upon
the
decadence of
the
Empire.
Mommsen's
researches
com-
pelled
Victorians
to
see
that
the
greater
Roman world
beyond
the
capi-
tal
enjoyed prosperity
and a
lingering peace
during
the
period
of its
supposed
decadence.
As he detailed the
complex
and
triumphantly
effi-
cient
functioning
of
Roman administration in the
provinces,
Mommsen
described the vitality and continuity of Roman institutions. "For the
tradition of
an
age
of
despotism
and
decay
he substituted
the
picture
of
a stable order from
which Western civilisation was to arise"
(Gooch,
p.
462).
Mommsen's
revision of
later
Roman
history deeply
influenced
the transvaluation
of Roman decadence carried out
by
late Victorian
avant-garde
writers;
it
also
more
obviously
influenced the work
of the
historian
H. F.
Pelham,
who
expressed
his
special gratitude
to the Ger-
man historian in Outlines of Roman History (1893), a school-text ex-
pansion
of his 1887
Encyclopaedia
Britannica
article on Rome.
Pelham
maintained
the distinction Mommsen made between
emperors
im-
portant
to
literary
memory
and
emperors
of
consequence
to
Roman
history:
Caligula,
Nero,
Commodus,
and their
like,
filled
a
place
in
the
literary
gossip
which to so
great
an extent did
duty
for
rational
history
in the first
three centuries after
Christ,
which
was
altogether disproportionate
to
their
real
importance.
We have now learnt
to look
up-
on the reigns of Augustus, of Hadrian, of Septimus Severus, and of Diocletian as marking
the decisive
epochs
in the annals of the
Empire,
and their
significance
for
the
histo;ry
of
the
imperial
city
is
equally
great.30
Pelham
perceived
that
the
thorough-going application
of
Mommsen's
methods had
opened
a new era in
the
historiography
of Rome. As
J.
B.
Bury
declared,
"The first
volume of Mr.
Pelham's
history
of the Em-
pire,
which
is
expected shortly,
will
show,
when
compared
with
Merivale,
how
completely
our
knowledge
of Roman
institutions
has
been transformed within a very recent
period."31
Mommsen's stress
upon
the
stability
and
continuity
of
Roman
institutions
during
the
Empire
found
an echo in
Pelham,
who
pointed
to "the
peculiarity
which is so
distinctive of
Roman
history
in
gener-
30
H.
F.
Pelham,
"Discoveries t
Rome,
1870-89"
n
Essays,
ed.
F.
Haverfield
essay
orig. pub.
1889;
Oxford:
Clarendon
Press,
1911),
p.
263.
For the
in-de-siecle
transvaluation f
Roman
decadence,
see Linda
Dowling,
"Neroand
the Aesthetics f
Torture,"
Victorian
Newsletter,
66
(Fall 1984),
1-5.
31
Bury, "Introduction" to Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Em-
pire,
ed.
J.
B.
Bury,
7
vols.
(London:
Methuen,
1896-1900),
,
In-lin.
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ROMAN
DECADENCE
al
-
its
unbroken
continuity"
(Pelham,
p.
238).
Where
the
Liberal
Anglican
historian Merivale
spoke
of a
continuity
of
moral
conscious-
ness
expressed
and
preserved
in a
literary
tradition
("There
is
not
one,
perhaps,
of
the
whole
number of
statesmen and warriors who
fills an
important
place
in
the
period,
whose moral lineaments are not
pre-
served
for us
in vivid relief
by
our
remaining
historians and
biogra-
phers"
[Merivale,
I,
xiii]),
Pelham
saw a
continuity
of
physical
evi-
dence, even of stone: "From the time when the earliest graves were dug
in the native rock of the
Esquiline
down to
the
age
of
Theodoric,
the
city
has
undergone
a continuous
process
of
superimposition,
and
the
successive strata
thus
formed
have
preserved
a
unique
record
of
its
growth"
(Pelham,
p.
238).
Such
physical
evidence
supplied
Pelham
with
a
useful material
analogue
for historical
developments:
"The
gradual
centralization
of
all
authority
and administrative
energy
in
Caesar
has its
counterpart
in
the growing monopoly of the actual soil of the city as revealed by a
study
of its monuments. The
private
houses which clothed the
slopes
and
spread
over the
crown
of
the Palatine
hill
were
buried
deep
below
the
vast
piles
which the Caesars
raised above
them"(Pelham,
pp.
263-264).
As Pelham
realized,
the
physical
evidence
also reached
fur-
ther
back into
the
past
than
could
literature.
Even
comparative philol-
ogy,
the
new
science of
language
for
which vast claims
had
been made
by
Max
Muller,
could
not
surpass
the backward
reach of
archaeology
into the past. As J. W. Burrow has noted, the traces of human con-
sciousness
represented
by
the
hypothetical
reconstructions
of
Proto-
Indo-European
soon
paled
into
insignificance
beside the
kitchen
middens
of
Sumer.32
Mommsen's
emphasis upon
the
importance
of
non-literary
and
physical
evidence,
moreover,
was
reinforced
by
an
English
tradition
in
historiography begun
by
George
Finlay.
Finlay,
a
Philhellene
and
younger
friend of
Byron,
fought
for
Greek
independence
and
farmed
Greek land before abandoning in frustration "the active duties of life,
and the noble
task of
labouring
to
improve
the
land,
for the sterile
oc-
cupation
of
recording
its
misfortunes."33
Finlay's experience
in
the
32
See
J.
W.
Burrow,
"The Uses of
Philology
in
Victorian
England"
in Ideas
and Institutions
of
Vic-
torian
Britain:
Essays
in Honour
of
George
Kitson
Clark,
ed.
Robert
Robson
(New
York:
Barnes
and
Noble,
1967),
pp.
180-240.
33
George
Finlay,
"Dedicatory Epistle
to his
Brother"
in
A
History
of
Greece,
From Its
Conquest
by
the Romans to the Present Times, B.C. 146-A.D. 1864, ed. H. F. Tozer, 7 vols. (orig. pub. 1856;
Oxford:
Clarendon
Press,
1877),
I,
ix.
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Dowling
world of
practical
concerns made him attend to
a kind of
historical
causation
-
namely,
economic
-
which most
"literary"
historians
chose to
ignore:
"[Finlay's]
great
merit in
tracing
the
course of
events
consists in his
looking
below
the
surface,
and
endeavouring
to
discover
the
secret influences that were
at
work.
In numerous
instances
of
the
decline of
a race
or
community,
where it
would have been
easy
to
talk
vaguely
of deterioration of
national
character,
he
has shown
that
the
effect has been produced by some external cause, such as the alteration
of lines of traffic
or
injudicious
taxation."34
Of
great
significance
for late Victorian
explanations
of
Roman
decadence was
Finlay's
attention to the
Eastern
Empire.
So well
estab-
lished now are the
outlines of
Byzantine
history
that
it is
difficult to
re-
call how recent
its
study
is and
how much it owes
to
late
Victorian
scholars,
especially
Finlay.
Dismissing
the sneers of
Voltaire and
Gib-
bon,
he labored
to
understand
Byzantium
afresh,
tracing
back link
by
link, as John Morley said,
the
long
chain
of
political,
social,
ecclesiastical,
racial,
and
above all
economic
events,
that
explained
the
Attic
peasant
of
to-day
and
of all
the
ages
intervening
since the
peasant
of
Alexander
the
Great.
...
[H]e
could not tell
the
Greek
story
without the
Byzantine sto-
ry,
and it is
Finlay
who first
unfolded what
the
Byzantine
Empire
was,
and
first
vindicat-
ed
its
share in the
growth
of Western
civilisation
and the
forms of
the
modern
world.35
Finlay
portrayed
the
transformation of
ancient
times
into
modern. In
following
the
particular
fortunes of
Greece,
he
came
to
see the
later
Roman
Empire
not as
a
"declining"
into
"death"
but
as a
long process
of
evolution. So
continuous
was the
process
that he
hesitated
to
mark it
off
into
historical
stages
or
acts: the
dissolution of
the
Roman
Empire
was,
he
said,
"so
gradual,
that the
new
state
was
created
by
the
trans-
formation of
the
old."36
Finlay's
portrayal
of
the
persistence
of
Roman
institutions
was
crucial for
the
late
Victorian
revaluation of
Roman
decadence,
and
powerfully
influenced E. A.
Freeman,
who
made
that
persistence
a
central
message
in
his
books
and
popular
articles
for the
Saturday
Re-
view:
"Ask
for
the
last
despatch
and
the
last
telegram,
and
it will
tell
us
34
H.
F.
Tozer,
"Note
by
the
Editor"
n
Finlay,
History,
I,
xlvii.
35
John
Morley,
"Mr.
[Frederic]
Harrison's
Historical
Romance
Theopano:
The
Crusade
of
the
Tenth
Century],"
Nineteenth
Century,
56
(October
1904),
577.
Finlay's
was one
of
the
accounts
W. B.
Yeatsread
before
writing
his
Byzantium
poems.
36
GeorgeFinlay,GreeceUnder he Rornans:A HistoricalViewof the Conditionof the GreekNa-
tion,
B.C. 146-
A.D. 717
(Edinburgh:
William
Blackwood,
1844),
p.
442.
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ROMAN
DECADENCE
that
the
history
of Rome has not
yet
reached its end. It is in
Rome that
all
ancient
history
loses
itself;
it
is out
of
Rome
that
all
modern
history
takes its source"
(Freeman,
p.
237).
Like
Thomas Arnold before
him,
Freeman
believed
that the
"history
of
Rome is in
truth the same as
the
history
of
the
world"
(Freeman, p.
234).
But we
may
also invoke the
statement to measure his
distance from
Arnold,
because Freeman
means in
a
quite
literal
sense
that the
history
of Rome
continues;
Ro-
man institutions, however transformed, continue to exist beneath or
among
or
within
the
forms of modern
life.
For
Arnold,
however,
the
statement
that
"the
History
of
Rome
must be
in
some
sort
the
History
of
the World"
derived its
authority
from its
analogical
power:
Rome
per-
sisted in modern times as a
pattern
of national
development,
a
plot.
To
Arnold,
Freeman's
meaning
would
have
seemed
trivial;
to
Freeman,
Arnold's
was
merely
fanciful.
The
extensive researches into
the Eastern and
provincial Empire
pursued by Finlay, Mommsen, and such successors as Pelham and J. B.
Bury
could
not be accommodated
within Arnold's
shapely
plot
of Ro-
man
infancy,
adolescence,
and
decline.
Even
more
menacing
to the
Liberal
Anglican
thesis,
the newer
research
seemed to
suggest
"very
different conclusions
-
that the
Empire
was,
in the
main,
a
sound
and
healthy
State
until the barbarians attacked
it,
and that
even at the last
its
civilisation
and
political
order
possessed
a
vitality
which
precludes
the
notion
of a
protracted organic
decay
commencing
from
within."37
Thus overwhelmed by disconfirming evidence, Arnold's metaphor col-
lapsed;
drawn
out
and
gradually
incorporated
into
modern
times,
the
all-important
final act
of
Arnold's
historical
drama had
disappeared.
With the
disappearance
of Roman
decay
as
the final
act of Roman his-
tory,
the
moral
significance
of
Roman decadence
disappeared
as well.
Even historians
who
were
willing
for the
moment to
grant
the
premise
of
"decay"
now declined to
invest
it with the
traditional
moral
expla-
nations.
Sir
John
R.
Seeley,
for
example, pointed
out
that such
expla-
nations,
when
they
were
not
entirely literary
in
origin, applied only
to
a small
group
of
aristocrats
in the Roman
capital.
Moral
degeneration
simply
could
not
explain
the erosion
of
Roman
strength
long
before
the
barbarians
reached
Rome.
Instead,
he
argued,
"the immediate
cause
to
which
the
fall
of the
Empire
can
be traced
is a
physical,
not
a
moral de-
cay.
...
Men
were
wanting;
the
Empire
perished
for want of men."38
37
Francis
J.
Haverfield,
"The
Fall
of the
Western Roman
Empire,"
Edinburgh
Review,
190
(July
1899),
172.
38
John R. Seeley, "Roman Imperialism II: The Fall of the Roman Empire," Macmillan's,
20
(August
1869),
287.
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Linda
Dowling
Seeley
anticipated
the
demographic
emphasis
of
twentieth-
century
Annaliste
and
"cliometric"
historiography
in
drawing
atten-
tion
to
the
devastating
effect
upon
Roman
population
of the Aurelian
plague.
Such
"events"
as
the
plague,
he
pointed
out,
resisted
tradi-
tional
historiography
because
they
could
not be
described
through
the
usual
literary
means.
Nonetheless,
Seeley
realized,
they
were
crucial
to
an
understanding
of
historical
causation: "We are
in
danger
of
attach-
ing too little importance to occurrences of this kind. The historian
devotes but a few
lines
to
them
because
they
do not
often
admit
of
being
related
in
detail. The battle
of
Cressy occupies
the historian more
than
the
Black
Death,
yet
we
now
know that
the Black
Death
is
a
turning-point
in
mediaeval
English
history"
(Seeley,
p.
290).
Seeley
might
think
of
himself
as
a
"scientific"
historian,
but he
was not one
in
practice.39
His
career
displays
the
same
cleavage
be-
tween
literary
and
scientific
historiographical
modes that
characterizes
William Arnold's. It is only fair to say, however, that Arnold's failure
to
reconcile
Liberal
Anglican assumptions
with those
of Mommsen and
his
school
provides
no
adequate
measure of
the
difficulty
of his under-
taking.
After
all,
even
historians
unencumbered
by
Arnold's
historiographical
ambitions
regularly
failed to
finish their
histories of
Rome: William
Arnold
joined
the
honorable
company
of
Niebuhr,
Hare
and
Thirlwall,
Thomas
Arnold,
Pelham,
and
Mommsen,
all
of
whom left their
histories of
Rome
unfinished. But
Arnold's
failure
may
nevertheless be
seen as representing an instance of that characteristic
fin-de-siecle
phenomenon:
the
breakdown
of
the
Victorian
gift
for
compromise.
What
Arnold
could not
unite
-
the
older
literary
with
the
newer
scientific
historiography
-
his brilliant
contemporary, J.
B.
Bury,
did
not
try
to unite. For
Bury,
whose least
achievement
it
was to
finish
Arnold's own
hopelessly
abandoned
handbook
(1893),
attempted
no
such
compromise
as Arnold's
between
"literary"
and
"scientific,"
but
stood forth
unmistakably
as the
perfect
Mommsenite and also
as
that
new
thing,
the
professional
historian.
III
A
precociously
gifted
classicist,
trained
(as
was
Oscar
Wilde)
by
J.
P.
Mahaffy,
Bury
won
a double
first
at
Trinity,
Dublin,
where he
be-
39
See
Deborah
Wormell,
Sir
John
Seeley
and the
Uses
of History (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press,
1980),
pp.
110-133.
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ROMAN
DECADENCE
came
Regius
Professor of
Greek and
later Professor of
Modern
History.
In 1902
he followed
Lord
John
E.
E.
Acton as
Regius
Professor of
Mod-
ern
History
at
Cambridge.
Bury
began
as
a
philologist
and
was
early
remarkable
for his
keen
sensitivity
to
language,
which
might
have
giv-
en
his
historical studies a
literary
slant.
"Words in
poetry,
like
stars,
create
atmospheres
around
them which
cannot be
displayed
in
a
dic-
tionary."40
Students
remembered
him
with
his delicate head
thrown
back, chanting in the approved Aestheticist manner the lines of Wil-
liam Morris.
Even in
the historical
work that in 1889
brought
Bury
an
international
reputation
at the
age
of
twenty-eight,
we catch an
unmis-
takably
Aestheticist
note.
The transitional nature of
the
Roman
fourth
and fifth centuries
A.
D.,
he
wrote,
"lends to the
study
of such
a
period
a
peculiar
interest,
or
we
might
say
an aesthetic
pleasure.
We
see a
number
of
heterogeneous
elements
struggling
to
adjust
themselves
into
a
new order
-
ingredients
of
divers
perfumes
and colours
turning
swiftly round and blending in the cup of the disturbed spirit,"4' an im-
age
taken
from
Swinburne's
"Triumph
of
Time"
("All
senses
mixed
in
the
spirit's
cup"),
just
as
surely
as the diction
is taken from Pater.
Yet
Bury's
aesthetic
sensitivity
was
firmly
controlled
by
his
phil-
ological training,
and this seems
to have
made him
sceptical
about
the
sort
of
imaginative
historicism
which the
Liberal
Anglicans
and such
"literary"
historians as
Carlyle
had
pursued.
In
an
important
early
es-
say,
"Anima Naturaliter
Pagana"
(the
title alludes not
only
to
Tertullian but to the last chapter of Marius the Epicurean), Bury
questioned
whether even
the
most
sympathetic
student,
a
complete
"modern
pagan,"
could
ever
truly
accomplish
the
historicist
project
and
"realis[e]
the Hellenic
temper."
For
words stood
in the
way:
"Eve-
ry
word
of
spiritual significance
has its
history;
and
whether
we know
that
history wholly
or
in
part,
or
not,
the emotion
which it
awakens in
us is a result of that
history"42
The
Greeks
had no exact
equivalent
to
the
English
"world" or
"heart";
correspondingly,
English
had no word
to render
X0aQK
or aQETr. Twenty centuries of Christian experience
fell between.
Bury's scepticism
did not
extend
so far as to
say
that
no
imaginative
effort could
ever
grasp
the
Greek
experience.
At the same
time,
his estimate
of
the time
required
for what
he called the
"histori-
40
Bury quoted
by
Norman
H.
Baynes,
A
Bibliography
of
the Works
of
J.
B.
Bury,
Compiled
with
a
Memoir
(Cambridge:
Cambridge
University
Press,
1929),
p.
57.
41
J.
B.
Bury,
"Preface"
to
A
History of
the
Later
Roman
Empirefrom
Arcadius
to
Irene,
395
A.D.
to
800
A.D.,
2
vols.
(London:
Macmillan,
1889),
I,
2.
42
J. B. Bury, "Anima Naturaliter Pagana: A Quest of the Imagination," Fortnightly Review, 49
(January
-
June 1891),
108.
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Linda
Dowling
cal
methods
of
aesthetic" to
accomplish
their
task is
sufficiently
sober-
ing:
"The
processes
of
analysis
are
slow,
and our
race shall have
seen
many generations
of historians
pass" ("Anima,"
p.112).
Patient,
exacting,
Bury
became
pre-eminently
the
historian
of
the
age
of
Mommsen.
Though
apparently
he
only slowly
appreciated
the
great change
wrought by
Mommsen
and
his
school,
Bury
absorbed
its
significance completely;
a
posthumous
estimate of
Bury's
work
on
the law and administration of the later Empire ranked it equal to
Mommsen's
own
work on the
Republic
and
the
Principate.43
The
Mommsen
that
Bury
himself
preferred
was not the
dazzling champion
of
Caesar but the consummate
epigraphic
scholar and
editor of
the
Corpus.
This
was
the
authority
that
Bury
implicitly
invoked
when he
did
battle with such
"literary"
judges
of
history
as
Benjamin
Jowett.
Writing
of
Thucydides
in
1881,
Jowett
declared
that the Greek
histori-
an
had
to
be
judged by
standards internal to his
work,
because the
ever-diminishing truth and ever-increasing fictions of a later genera-
tion
could
provide
no
reliable
gauge:
"When,
as in
modern
histories of
ancient
Greece,
the
good
cloth of
Herodotus
or
Thucydides
or
Xenophon
is
patched
with
the
transparent
gauze
of
Diodorus and
Plu-
tarch,
the
whole
garment
becomes
unequal
and
ragged"
(Baynes,
p.
106).
To
this
Bury
made
a
devastating
reply:
Mr.
Jowett's
view
is the
view of a man of
letters,
who
judges
history
altogether
from
a lit-
erary standpoint,
and who does
not care to
hear
what
happened
for its own
sake, but only
when
it
is told
with
literary
effect. Nor
is
it
the
case,
as he
seems to
imply,
that
literary
merit and
truth are
always
united.
...
The
power
of
appreciating
evidence from
whatev-
er
quarter
it comes is
assured
by
a
quality
which it is
absolutely
necessary
for a
historian
to
possess
-
we
might
also
say
that it
is
his
essential
quality.
He
may
possess many
other
val-
uable
qualities,
but if this
be
wanting,
he
will not
be
a
true
historian.
And,
on the
other
hand,
he
may
lack
many qualities
which one
would
willingly
see in a
historian,
and
yet
if
he
possess
this he
will be
entitled
to bear
that name.
(Baynes,
p.
107).
Bury's
mistrust
of
"literary"
historiography
found
its
most fa-
mous
expression
in
his
inaugural
lecture
at
Cambridge,
"The
Science
of
History"
(1903),
which
was
widely
discussed
and
perhaps
even
more
widely
misunderstood.44
Yet even
in
his
first
book,
the
young
man
who
delighted
in
the
poetry
of
Rossetti
and
Swinburne
did
not
hesitate to
43
"J.
B.
Bury,"
Dictionary
of
National
Biography:
1922-1933,
ed.
J.
R.
H.
Weaver
(London:
Oxford
University
Press,
1937),
p.
145.
44
DorisGoldstein,"J.B. Bury'sPhilosophyf
History:
AReappraisal,"
merican Historical Review,
82
(1977),
896-919.
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ROMAN DECADENCE
chasten his
pen:
the social
life
and
manners of
the later
Empire
were
treated there in brief
chapters
of
"jottings"
which,
he
said,
"could not
be
conveniently
introduced into the
narrative,
and were
too character-
istic to be
omitted"
(Bury,
"Preface," I,
xi-xii).
As his
biographer
notes,
Bury
"would
never
have
spoken
thus
casually
of the
'characteristic'
fea-
tures of the
life
of
the
Roman
State"
(Baynes, p.
70).
Convinced of the
uninterrupted
continuity
of
European
history by
Freeman,
Bury
inter-
ested himself not in the lives of individuals but of institutions, especial-
ly political
institutions,
for it was there that the
continuity
of Rome
was
to
be seen
most
unmistakably. Bury's
strict scientific conscience
limited his aims. To it he sacrificed continuous
narrative,
historical
portraiture,
and even
his own
personal
voice:
"Lord
Morley
observed
that
Bury
did
not 'cast his
shadow
on
the
page';
and the observation
was not all
praise" (DNB,
p.
147).
As
Bury's
biographer
observes,
"He
played
the
game
in
its utmost
rigour.
'With
self-denial this book has
been written, with self-denial it must be read': the words of Mommsen
could stand as a motto for the historical work of
Bury" (Baynes,
p.
48).
Bury's
work
represents
the
full
triumph
of
Mommsen's scientific
historiography
over the
providentialism
of the
Liberal
Anglicans.
The
most
dramatic evidence for this view
is
found
in the
undergraduate
lec-
tures
Bury
gave
at
Cambridge
when
he,
like
Kingsley,
was Professor of
Modern
History
there. Whereas
Kingsley
called
upon
his
young
men
to
read
history
and
change
their
lives,
Bury,
recounting
to their
grandsons
Totila's sack of Rome, said merely this: "I cannot include the story of
the fall of the
Ostrogothic
kingdom,
and the
resumption
of
Italy
under
the immediate
government
of
the
emperor,
within
the
compass
of
these
lectures."45
What had been a breathless
climax,
a moral
turning-point
in
Kingsley ("Through
such facts as
these God
speaks")
has become
flat
summary
in
Bury.
The most "awful
page
in the
history
of
Europe"
has
slipped
from
Bury's
book.
Scientific
historiography
transformed
the
public
role
of
the
histo-
rian from sage to specialist. A historian-sage such as Thomas Arnold had
inhabited
a world
of
providential design
where
"decadence" was a
pattern
produced by
moral choice.
Standing
at
the
end of the
rationalist-
45
J.
B.
Bury,
The Invasion
of
Europe
by
the Barbarians:
A
Series
of
Lectures
(London:
Macmillan,
1928),
pp.
206-207. In
his own
inaugural
lecture
at
Cambridge,
"The Science of
History,"
Bury
seems
deliberately
to
have been
answering
Kingsley's inaugural
lecture,
"The Limits of Exact
Science as
Applied
to
History" (1860),
a
work
which,
according
to
Beesly,
showed
Kingsley
"decry-
ing
the
science
he
professes
. . .
demonstrating
its
uselessness,
and,
as
far as lies in
him,
deterring
sensible men from wasting their time and attention upon it" ("Mr. Kingsley on the Study of
History,"
Westminster
Review,
75
o.s.,
19 n.s.
[April
1861],
305-306).
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Linda
Dowling
materialist
line of
explanation
begun by
Finlay,
applauding
his
pred-
ecessors,
Bury
dismissed traditional moral
explanations
of
Roman
decadence:
To
derive the decline of the
Empire
from the dinners
of
Apicius
and the
orgies
of Nero
is
a
fallacy
too
simple
to
deceive,
too
edifying
to be
easily
surrendered. As a matter of
fact,
lux-
ury
and
immorality
do
not
constitute,
and
need
not
be
symptoms
of,
a
disease that
is
fatal
to the life
of
States. But
even
if
the
argument
were
free from this
defect,
it
is,
like all
rea-
soning
founded
on historical
analogy,
futile.46
Bury's
sense of
the
pointlessness
of
historical
parallels
led him
to avoid
William
Arnold's
analogizing.
Where
Arnold
hoped
to
weight
his
newspaper
articles on British
imperialism
with
insights
from
Mommsen,
Bury
wrote
for the
periodical
press
only
to
say
that
any
analogy
with the Roman
Empire
was
absurd:
"One
day
tells
not anoth-
er
day,
and
history
declines to
repeat
herself."47
Given
Bury's
successful
routing
of
Liberal
Anglican
premises
and partisans, it is not surprising that he should serve as the admiring
editor of
their
old
enemy
Gibbon.
Bury brought
Gibbon's
Decline
up
to
date with continental
scholarship, just
as William
Arnold
had
hoped
to
do
for his
grandfather's history. Bury
the
scientific
professional
rejoiced
in the
improvement
that had taken
place
in
Roman
historiography:
"We
have
now to
be
thankful for
many
blessings
denied to Gibbon
and
-
so recent
is
our
progress
-
denied to Milman
and
Finlay"
(Bury,
"Introduction,"
p.
xlix).
New
methods and
materials had
trans-
formed both
the
study
of Rome
and
its
scholars. For
as Charles
Pearson
had noted in
his
gloomy
(and
hence
remarkably
accurate)
forecast of
British
life,
what
happens
in
physical
science will
have its
counterpart
in
scientific
history.
The
succes-
sors
of
Gibbon,
[that is]
Mr.
Finlay
and
Mr.
Bury,
are
inevitably
less
capable
of
giving pic-
torial
effect
to their
narrative,
because it is more
circumstantial and
minute. The mere
hesitations of a man
balancing
evidence are
against
effect in
style;
and as
the scientific
spirit
takes
nothing
on
trust,
it
would
not
allow
even
a Gibbon in the
present day
to
pres-
ent
his
conclusions more or
less
positively
in a
flowing
narrative.48
With this
estimate
Bury
concurred;
if
Gibbon wrote in the
1890s,
his
manner "would not be
that of
sometimes
open,
sometimes
transparent-
46
J.
B.
Bury,
"The British
and the
Roman
Empire,"
Saturday
Review
(27
June 1896),
645.
47
Bury,
"The
British and the
Roman
Empire," p.
645.
Compare Raymond
F.
Betts,
"The
Allusion to
Rome
in British
Imperialist
Thought
of the
Late-Nineteenth
and
Early-Twentieth
Centuries,"
Vic-
torian
Studies,
15
(1971),
149-159. But
see also Howard
Erskine-Hill,
The
Augustan
Idea
in
English
Literature
(London:
Edward
Arnold,
1983),
p.
354.
48
Charles
Pearson,
National
Life
and
Character:
A
Forecast
(London:
Macmillan,
1893),
p.
313.
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ROMAN
DECADENCE
ly
veiled,
dislike;
he
would
rather assume
an
attitude
of
detachment.
He would
be
affected
by
that
merely
historical
point
of
view,
which is a
note of
the
present
century
and its
larger
tolerances"
(Bury,
"Introduc-
tion,"
p.
xxxix).
If Gibbon wrote in the
1890s,
in
short,
he
would write
very
much like
Bury,
who
did
not
cast his shadow
on
the
page.
Bury's
verdict
upon
Gibbon
would
seem to
mark the
ultimate
"triumph of positivism and scepticism" over the idealist historiography
of the
Liberal
Anglicans.
At the same
time,
we should observe that
Bury's scepticism appears
ultimately
to have
triumphed
over even
his
positivism,
severely
qualifying
his
own firm belief
in
progress.
Bury
had
criticized
Thomas Arnold's
view
of modern
history
as the
last
phase
in
human
history, objecting
that Arnold's
argument
rested
on
unproven
assumptions
and insufficient
data.
By taking
relatively
short
views,
both Arnold
and Comte
had
been able
to
construct
closed
teleo-
logical systems of historical explanation. Yet the only truly adequate
data
for
such
explanations,
insisted
Bury,
were the data
furnished
by
cosmic
science:
"The
unapparent
future
.
..
bids us
consider
the whole
sequence up
to
the
present
moment
as
probably
no
more than
the
be-
ginning
of a social
and
psychical
development,
whereof
the end is
with-
drawn
from our
view
by
countless
millenniums
to come ...
We must
see our
petty
periods
sub
specie perennitatis."49
Though
Bury
himself believed
that
the
general
pattern
of
hu-
man history was marked by progress, he knew at the same time that
progress
was
inescapably
a time-bound
idea: "Does
not
Progress
itself
suggest
that its
value
as a
doctrine
is
only
relative,
corresponding
to
a
certain
not
very
advanced
stage
of
civilisation;
just
as
Providence,
in its
day,
was
an idea
of relative
value,
corresponding
to
a
stage
less
ad-
vanced?"50
The
idea of
progress
seemingly
accorded
with the
vastly
ex-
tended
viewpoint
of
cosmic
or
astrophysical
science
better than such
te-
leological
notions
as
Arnold's
providence
or
Comte's
third
stage.
None-
theless, it was no more than an interim hypothesis. Thus Bury came,
in
time,
to
see Gibbon's
Decline
less
as
evidence
of
progress
in
historiography
than
simply
as
a
masterly
personal
achievement.
He
came
to believe
that
it was
not
Gibbon's
"zealous
distrust of zeal"
that
established
the
superiority
of
the
Decline
over
other
histories
of
Rome;
49
J.
B.
Bury,
"The
Science of
History"
in Selected
Essays,
ed. Harold
Temperley
(Cambridge:
Cam-
bridge
University
Press,
1930),
p.
15.
50 J. B. Bury, The Idea of Progress: An Inquiry into Its Origin and Growth (London: Macmillan,
1920),
p.
351.
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Linda
Dowling
it was instead that
very
unprogressive
element,
Gibbon's
immortal
"spite,"
that colored his
page
and made
it,
amidst
the
relativity
of
all
judgments,
a work
of
lasting
value.51
More than
this,
Bury's
growing
scepticism
at last made even
the
possibility
of
historiography,
of whatever
kind,
seem
radically
prob-
lematic.
Bury's
study
of the later
Empire
slowly
convinced him of
the
importance
of
contingency
or
chance
in historical
causation:
"The
gradual collapse of the Roman power in [the western] section of the
Empire
was the
consequence
of
a series
of contingent
events.
No
gener-
al causes can be
assigned
that made
it inevitable."52 Because chance
played
a
greater
role
in
simpler
than
in
more
complex
societies,
Bury
considered it
unwise for the scholar of
ancient
history
to
impose
any
ex-
planatory
scheme
upon
the
evidence: it was better "to leave the
facts
a
mere
sequence
than
present
them
as
points
in a
logical development
which,
however
probable,
cannot be
proved" (DNB,
p.
146).
Many of Bury's colleagues considered that to forego the search
for
general
causes was
to
abandon
historiography
as
a
discipline
and
to
yield
the
study
of historical
evidence to
that most unambitious
drudge,
the mere
chronologist.
As his
biographer
concludes
sorrowfully,
"The
first-fruits of
Bury's
doctrine of
contingency
do not raise
our
hopes
for
the future of
historiography
based
upon
that
theory"
(Baynes, p.
76).
Others such as
E.
H. Carr
have contended that
Bury's
final belief in
the
importance
of chance was
symptomatic
of a
larger
European
mood of
cultural uncertainty and apprehension. And in the view of twentieth-
century
idealist historians
like R.
G.
Collingwood, Bury's
radical
scep-
ticism about the
scope
of
historiographical
explanation represents
a
"failure,"
a
betrayal,
a "final
collapse."53
Bury's
position
as the
culminating figure
in
the
story
I
have been
telling
of the
Victorian
historiography
of Rome
is ironic
because
his
own work
finally
subverts
the
assumptions
of
Thomas
Arnold and
Theodor Mommsen
alike.
But to
see
Bury
this
way
is to view
him
from
the
teleological perspective
he
denied. If we
were
to consider
his
place
from
a
Buryan
point
of
view,
we should
have to
say
that
Bury
is
simply
51
Bury,
"A
Letter on the
Writing
of
History"
in
Selected
Essays, pp.
70-71.
The
letter
was written
to
the
London
Mornting
Post
in
1926,
less
than
a
year
before
Bury's
death.
Baynes
emphasizes
the
decisive
break
between
Bury's
earlier
and
later
years;
Goldstein
says,
"What is
puzzling,
if
not
jar-
ring,
in
Bury's
conclusion here is
his
negation,
in
effect,
of
his own
lifework"
(Goldstein,
p.
911).
52
J.
B.
Bury,
History of
the
Later
Ronman
Empire
From the
Death
of
Theodosius I
to the
Death
of
Justinian
(A.D.
395
-
A.D.
565),
2
vols.
(London:
Macmillan,
1923),
II,
311.
53
See R. G. Collingwood, The Idea of History (London: Oxford University Press, 1973), pp.
147-151.
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ROMAN
DECADENCE
what
happened
next
in
the Victorian
historiography
of
Rome,
and
ad-
mit that the shadow he did
not cast
upon
his own white
page
is written
down here to color this.
University of Cologne
607