Dr. Lipscomb's History of Bucks.

206

Remarks on M. Niebuhr's History of Rome.

tion of some great person, upon or contiguous to one of those eminences, which from the time of Noah's erection of an altar on Mount Ararat, if not before, to the days of Balak, and down to the happy period of the introduction of Christianity, were devoted to religious purposes; and under the shelter of whose sacred precincts kings and heroes, the mighty and the brave, have desired to repose their mortal remains; where also, consecrated by their reverence and esteem for departed worth, their survivors established their principal abodes; and adorning them with the most curious, valuable, or costly materials of their respective ages and countries, tempted the rapacity of their enemies and assailants, who in turn possessed themselves of their houses, altars, and domestic gods.

In all this, however, I may have been in error; but as truth and accuracy are the great objects of historical research, it will always afford me more satisfaction to be corrected, when I am mistaken or have been misled, than to persist in any opinion unsupported by facts and sound reasoning.

Your Reviewer will therefore, I hope, condescend to accept my thanks for the benefits which I promise myself from his criticism; as well as the proofs he has afforded of great candour and indulgence, of which I am quite aware that the work which he has examined is much in need.

[Sept:

Polybius to those of Niebuhr, have been wielded in illustration of the history of a people who once occupied so prominent a situation upon our globe. Dionysius of Halicarnassus, a foreigner, and the contemporary of Livy, as all know, was the first of another nation who undertook to write of the antiquities of the Romans; and writing with the impartiality which we may suppose a Greek to have possessed, his recorded character of this enterprizing people should pass for much. Rome, even in her infancy," he remarks, brought forth infinite examples of virtue, than which no city, either Greek or Barbarian, ever produced greater for piety, justice, habitual temperance, and military accomplishments." The suffrage of Dionysius is not by any means solitary. All ancient commentators have followed on the same side, and have furnished, of course, the text-books from whence the moderns draw their materials. From their various narratives, we therefore conclude, with the greatest certainty, that the Romans for many centuries, in their great national character, stood renowned, amongst all other nations, for bravery, patriotic thinking, magnanimity, and a concentration of all those endowments that Sir William Temple would sum up in his idea of "heroic virtue." The information given us, on these matters, by Polybius, Aulus Gellius, Appian, Livy, Dionysius, Florus, Dion. Cassius, Utropius, Valerius Maximus, Velleius Paterculus, Tacitus, Pliny, Herodian, Suetonius, and Diodorus Siculus, is, in its general drift and import, to be greatly depended upon; as there seems no reason to invalidate the testimony of persons living so much nearer to the times of which they treat. It would seem, however, that the hitherto accredited writers who have constituted our most established authorities on Roman affairs, are now to be tried before a new tribunal.

Are we to suppose that M. Niebuhr has discovered, amidst the recesses of Germany,-amidst the lore of antiquity still there preserved, inedited manuscripts and memorials which had escaped the penetration of Tacitus, or Whatever of Pliny, or of Cæsar? light M. Niebuhr has thrown upon Roman history for the benefit of posterity, his indefatigable research is, perhaps, his most prominent and praise

1831.]

Remarks on M. Niebuhr's History of Rome.

worthy characteristic. His pretensions
to research are high, but this is far
from being a reason why the current
credit of most of his predecessors
should be impugned.

When an historian comes forward
upon the public stage of literature, for
the alleged object of the reformation
of errors and the restoration of truth,
his motives are respected, and his
learning admitted to its due rank. M.
Niebuhr's object, doubtless, so far as
it tends to superinduce a right concep-
tion upon points connected with the
manners, genius, and policy of a people
so renowned as the Romans, is of pa-
ramount importance. But if he im-
pugn the most accredited of his prede-
cessors, of whom will he borrow ma-
terials?

In his introductory chapter, M. Niebuhr says, "it were a great thing if I might be able to dissipate for those who read me the cloud which hangs on this most excellent portion of ancient story, and to spread a clear light over it, so that the Romans shall stand before their eyes distinct, intelligible, and familiar as contemporaries, with all their institutions, and the vicissitudes of their destiny, living and moving.'

A

Livy, in his preface, has remarked, "Novi semper scriptores, aut in rebus certius aliquid allaturos, aut scribendi, arte rudem vetustatem superaturos, credunt." M. Niebuhr is chargeable with this ambition, or he would have seen that the Romans have long, already, stood living and moving" before the reader of their history.

But our countryman, R. Hooke, be it observed, a century ago wrote a "Dissertation on the Credibility of the History of the first 500 years of Rome," in which learning is blended with some most judicious positions in an attempt to separate what is credible from what is manifestly fabulous. M. De Beaufort, in his " Dissertation sur l'Incertitude des Cinq premières Siecles de l'Histoire Romaine," has asserted that the annals of the first 500 years was selected from family memoirs. But Mr. Hooke has shown the contradictions into which those authors perpetually fall, who assert that there were no public or written annals in Rome, during this period. He says, likewise, with the greatest justice, "the fables which are found interspersed in the writings of the Roman historians, ought not to ruin

207

the credit of the history of the first ages of Rome as to the essentials of it."

The proneness which almost every nation of antiquity that has attained to eminence, has evinced to push the narratives connected with their first history into the marvellous, and the fact of their origin having, in a certain degree, traditionary legends mixed up with matter-of-fact, is acknowledged by all who have given attention to the nature and complexion of ancient history. This is plain; but it does not hence follow, that either Niebuhr is happy in his conception that Roman history needs that very extensive expurgation which he seems disposed to inflict upon it, or that he alone has, of all others, stumbled upon the feliciter scribendi, which will illuminate all posterity.

Bolingbroke, whose accurate judgment enabled him generally to take clear views of those subjects of which he had endeavoured to make himself master, although his occasionally flippant manner sorts ill with the historian,-Bolingbroke acknowledges that Livy had, in the early documents which were still extant among his countrymen, materials for his history. That these materials were all authentic, will not perhaps be readily asserted. All commentators have allowed that when Brennus and his followers burnt the old city, a multitude of records connected with the antiquities of their history, the first institutions of their government, and the sacred rites of their Augurs and Haruspices, must inevitably have perished. The loss of these was as irreparable, afterwards, when Rome attained a high state of letters and civilization, as the loss of so many of the books of Livy, treating, as Bolingbroke says, of a most interesting portion of the history of the Romans-their progress from liberty to slavery-must be to all succeeding generations. But it is still allowed that some escaped; and to imagine, on the other hand, that either Dionysius or Livy (who himself, in the first chapter of the sixth book of his history, warns his readers not to be too credulous of some marvellous tales which he nevertheless narrates) never, in their province of historians, exercised that of expurgators, is somewhat gratuitous. The act, likewise, of driving the nail (clavem pangens) into the wall of the temple, which an

208

Remarks on M. Niebuhr's History of Rome.

nually devolved upon the Prætor, in the early æras of Roman chronology, may have been a rude method of computing time; but, when we recollect the scrupulous and superstitious devotion with which the Romans kept these public ordinances, we have no reason to think it to have been a defective one. Bolingbroke certainly intimates that he does not consider all as authentic history in the four first ages of Rome. He quotes the passage of Antony the Rhetorician, to show that there is a wide difference between a person who merely chronicles naked facts, and the historian. But although the passage alluded to, "Ab initio rerum Romanorum, usque ad P. Mucium pontificem maximum, res omnes singulorum anuorum mandabat literis pontifex maximus, efferebatque in album, et proponebat tabulam domi, potestas ut esset populo cognoscendi, iidemque etiam nunc annales maximi nominantur," may not speak of history properly so called, these records "efferebant in album" may assuredly form the basis upon which the future historian builds.

But there seems no satisfactory reason why the authority or the judgment of Dionysius, a writer of experience and intelligence, should labour under an attainder. He examined the sources of knowledge, then extant, as assiduously as any of the moderns can be supposed to do, and as he lived incomparably nearer to the time of which he treats, he had probably many collateral sources which no longer exist. He borrows his account of the first planting of Italy from Antiochus of Syracuse, who flourished a year or two after the burning of Rome, and who himself, in his turn, tells us that he extracted what was most credible and certain from the ancient histories, concerning the aborigines. His accounts of these people, first called Enotri, from Enotrus the son of Lycaon, who emigrated from Greece, and settled in Italy, are confirmed from the testimony of Pherecydes the Athenian, a still older authority, who speaks also of the Pencetii, the Ausonians, the Tyrrhenians, the Pelasgi, the Morgetes, and the Siceli. There may be some fabling in these narratives, but over the transactions of a period so excessively remote, it is impossible to imagine that a coherence and succinctness should impend similar to that

[Sept.

which covers the affairs of recent times.

M. Niebuhr will not pretend that any of the authorities from which he has collected his materials, are exceptions to this rule. Nor does there seem, on the other hand, any grounds for suspecting Hieronymus, Timæus, or Antigonus, of mis-statements, or of garrulous credulity in composing their histories-the channels through which Dionysius chiefly collected his infor

mation.

If traditionary legends, however, have, borrowing from the earliest annalists, been on some occasions mixed up with the first accounts of the infant colony, nothing, it is clear, but an illumination from heaven can ever hope, in this age of the world, to separate them from truth.

Romulus and Remus may not have been suckled by a wolf; but the code of laws instituted by the former, and his salutary regulations for the prosperity of the infant state (for we always suppose, until the contrary is shown, that there really existed such a man), are but little affected by the truth or falsehood of this ancient tradition.

With every respect, also, for M. Niebuhr, his method as a historian (for method on these occasions is always to be studied) is too desultory and diffuse. Critical and comparative examination, whether relating to laws or topography, are good, under certain cases; but a history should not be broken down into endless dissertations, sometimes upon points concerning which it does not much interest posterity to be informed. In perusing him (we have reference, of course, to his first volume,) the reader is bewildered and harassed with the rambling nature of his critical analysis. There is in history a condensation, a generalizing, and unity which distinguishes it from a series of dissertations, which however valuable when considered as the labours of the antiquary, have more the effect of oppressing the mind with a multiplicity of things, than of carrying the imagination forwards, and giving it a lucid view of its subject. Our countryman Hooke, it may be observed, has, in this respect, performed more to the satisfaction of his reader. Vigilant in the pursuit and detection of truth, he occasionally speaks as a moralist through the de

Extracts from the Cecil MSS.