If there is a definitive biography of James Madison, I guess I should read it. In Joseph Ellis’s evaluation, Madison was the master legislator, subtle and clever as a fox. By his lights, quite apart from Madison’s secretarial role at the Constitutional Convention and as co-author of The Federalist, Madison’s gift to his country was keeping it together and moving it forward from his position in the first Congresses while Washington was president.
And the reason I say that I now should inquire about a comprehensive Madison biography, is that the two books I do recall having read about the man put their emphasis (and not entirely complimentary emphasis) on Madison’s reputation as “father of the Constitution” (Novus Ordo Seclorum by Forrest McDonald) and as president of the United States (The War of 1812 by Donald Hickey).
In their own ways, both McDonald and Hickey depict the diminutive Madison as somewhat feckless. Ellis is far more respectful than either of them, although he too suggests that Madison’s personality did not command respect in the ways familiar to politicians. Madison was obviously of a less flamboyant political culture, combining energy, good sense, calculation, and patience. (These are common qualities, but I have not frequently observed them present in the same person.) It was Madison’s genius that he would ultimately be
consulted for the end game.
And there is another reason that Ellis earns commendation for illuminating this period: relating the details of any legislation is a thankless job. A modern nation is nothing if not its laws, of course. But the tedious process of actually moving from an idea to a statue rarely lends itself to a story worth telling in a popular history. Ellis does as good a job as any I have read in performing this thankless task.
But to move beyond Madison, the centerpiece of Founding Brothers is the final chapter, a lengthy consideration of Adams and Jefferson, as elucidated by their lengthy correspondence at the end of their lives. For me, at least, it is impossible to come away from the comparison of the two as illustrated by their own letters without concluding that Adams, for all his vanity and contrarianism, was the more admirable of the two. Ellis is understanding of both and ultimately makes no judgments, but something in Adams, to me at least, emerges as more genuine and less languorously affected than the sage of Monticello.
Ronald C. Finucane, Soldiers of the Faith --
More of an extended monograph, this book is a semi-scholarly, semi-popular examination of the Crusades. Since Finucane organizes his material topically and not chronologically, it cannot really be called a history (except by academics, I guess). There were, after all, numerous Crusades occurring over hundreds of years, each with its own peculiar characters, each with its own specific history. The personalities were different; the politics were different; and even the outcomes were different.
The assumptions of this work are that the reader is already familiar with the overall story and Finucane thus spends little time introducing the supporting players who may be entirely unknown to the lay reader — and he gives virtually no context prior to remarking on the deeds of notorious figures such as Peter the Hermit, Richard I, and Saladin. (Saladin in particular is worth more than periodic references; he appears to have been one of history’s great charmers. Clearly not a zealot -- his doctor was a Jew and his brother a Christian — his chivalry was one of his foremost characteristics, at least until he was betrayed by Richard.)
Obviously there is much to be said for an organization which contains chapters on the preparation, on the weapons, on the journey, etc. Indeed the pace of change in those distant centuries was such that the similarities in such areas may well have outweighed the differences. But when scholarship is put aside, the book is only inviting when it dwells on an illustrative anecdote, for instance that of Margaret of Beverly, whose “Little Big Man” story of life as a soldier and slave in the Levant she told as an ancient in a Parisian convent. With this book, a reader can learn such vivid details, but never grasp their larger significance.
Eric Foner, Reconstruction --
Foner's opening premise is that there is even a debate about when Reconstruction began, never mind what it meant. For example, he reminds us that West Virginia seceded in 1861 and that its re-integration into the Union could easily be seen as the first chapter of the process which ended with the Compromise of 1877.
The book, however, is not particularly compelling. Though Foner moves more or less chronologically through the period, there is almost no sense of a story. This is not his mission, of course, but any writer should ensure that his readers want to keep reading. Foner uses subheadings to encapsulate certain events or subjects that were prominent within the relevant time period. This need not be as numbingly dull as he makes it. Daniel Boorstin, for example, proceeded in a similar fashion in his The Americans (q.v.), books that were endlessly informative and reliably interesting. Foner, by contrast, almost never uses his topics to advantage. One could imagine, for instance, that a section devoted to the impeachment of Andrew Johnson would contain some tension. Foner's account, however, is not much more interesting than reading the Congressional Record.
It is not exactly that the writer is not judgmental. He tends to give more support to the Radical Republicans than I am familiar with, to pick an example. His problem seems to be an incapacity to set out his theses in a way that the evidence (which he recites in abundance, from anecdotes to statistics) becomes more arresting and significant than the matter-of-fact style that Foner does not seem to be able to transcend.
Bil Gilbert, God Gave Us This Country --
This is an excellent book, ostensibly a biography of Tekumseh (which the author spells "Tekamthi”), leader of the Indian nations against the United States in the “first” American Civil War.
Gilbert is apparently an “ecological” writer, which would not auger well for his fairness on a subject matter such as this one, calling out as it normally would for the utmost political correctness. In fact, however, he is even-handed and surprisingly good-natured about the intractable differences among the protagonists.
As for Tekumseh, Gilbert immediately acknowledges that the absence of any written records for the Indians makes his efforts at best a “shadow” biography of a remarkable leader. The war and its outcome are preponderantly remembered through the records of “the whites,” as he calls them (although he includes some colorful reminiscences by Tekumseh’s brother, Tenskwatawah, “The Prophet,” given in his old age to furnish some arresting verisimilitude — and blarney — to the narrative).
But for all of its geniality, the book is a serious study of a mortal clash between two worlds, neither of which was destined to accommodate the other. In one of his opening chapters, “To Be Shawnee,” Gilbert vividly outlines the prevailing ethnographic background of his subject to illustrate the doom to come. The Shawnee were both ferocious and fickle, as mistrusted by the other Indian tribes as by the white man, proud, rootless, and formidable. “The constant, crucial ambition of the Shawnee was to remain Shawnee, which they were unshakably convinced was auch better than being anybody else.”
It is in this context that the author fleetingly comments on the moral similarities between the North American Indian and the Greeks in the time of Homer. I believe that he means the comparison to be flattering to the Indians, but if there is a similarity, it could only be in how the Greeks eventually did become civilized. For the primitive warriors of Agamemnon’s day took another half of a millennium to become the moralists and ethicists of Plato’s Academy; and Achilles fought on a wheeled chariot and the American Indian had no Homer.
What they did have, surprisingly, were several white men who through fate had been raised as boys by the Indians after having already learned the conventions and language of white society. One of them, Anthony Shane, through his half-breed mother, was actually related to Techmseh and his many recollections of the man were of the first hand as were those of Stephen (Big Fish) Ruddell, taken prisoner as a boy with his brothers and raised as a Shawnee. It was they who reported the following familiar fact about a great man: “[T]hroughout his life Tekamthi, wherever he settled, usually had a young, attractive woman with him ‘in the capacity of a wife.’ He seems to have found them easily and frequently changed these companions.”
It was not only those who straddled the two societies who had regard for the Shawnee chief. In his early and middle life Techmseh traveled openly among Americans who almost universally praised him as intelligent, magnetic, and inevitably as articulate. An example of his ease and humor: An Ohio frontiersman, Abner Barrett, had a social gathering in his cabin that included a fat land speculator from Kentucky.
Unexpectedly Tekamthi, dressed and armed for a hunt, appeared at the farm. After staring silently and impassively at him for a few moments, he stepped forward and tapped the cringing Kentuckian on the shoulders, saying, ‘a big baby, a big baby.’ Then Tekamthi, Barrett, and the others in the room . . . began howling with laughter at the cowering real-estate speculator who had imagined a massacre was imminent.
But the book is more than a retelling of social anecdotes. It is unmistakably a political history. Gilbert takes some effort, for example, to contrast George Washington’s nonconfrontational policy toward the savages with Jefferson’s “inveterate” social engineering which consisted of trying to convince them to abandon their nomadic life and essentially become yeoman farmers. This was, in fact, catalytic of Tekumseh’s eventual resolution to rally all the tribes of Indians into a racial union to oppose the American “Long Knives” during the War of 1812. (Gilbert, incidentally, remarks that the decision to join the war “divided reds more along generational and class lines than ethnic ones.”) Actually, peace between the two societies had never been complete and Gilbert does a wonderful job of explaining how the stage was ultimately set for the final confrontation as early as the Battle of Fallen Timbers (1795) won by “Mad” Anthony Wayne and the subsequent Greenville Treaty which drew an imaginary line over which the whites were supposedly not to cross.
The author furnishes several useful glimpses of William Henry Harrison as a young soldier. No genius, but nobody’s fool, Harrison comes across as an honest man and cautious commander who simply did not make mistakes when others could almost be relied upon to make them. He was respected by his troops and personally brave.
But this book is really only about one man, Tekumpseh, whose virtues, Gilbert says,
came to be associated with Indians in general. . . . Somewhat as would later be the case with Robert E. Lee, the perceived nobility of Tecumpseh ennobled his followers and his cause. . . . Tecumpseh and Lee are generally remembered better and more sympathetically than are any of the men who defeated them.
This book is a satisfying demonstration of why that is.
John Gillingham, The Wars of the Roses, --
The irritating thing about this book (apart from the author's pedantic and gratuitous "correcting" of Shakespeare) is how he fails to see what Shakespeare instinctively saw, i.e. that there are no end of stories in a civil war.
For an academic historian, of course, the story is secondary to the facts and the theory, but the point is that this is not an academic history; it is a popular history. In a popular history the historian has some responsibility to the narrative. I am not saying that Gillingham's default is complete, but only that he is neither academic nor popular. Hence such natural topics as the personalities of Queen Margaret and Warwick or the escape of Edward from the French are not portrayed as recognizable, or vital, or fascinating. They are reported and that is all. Meantime, I am at least grateful to Gillingham for one fact I should have known but didn't: Edward's morganatic marriage. It explained the sarcasm in Olivier's pronunciation of "Lord Rivers," etc. in Richard III.
Michael Grant, The Twelve Caesars --
Grant does not have a very fluent style, but in connection with the original and some additional materials about the period, this piece is helpful and even periodically vivid.
Michael Grant, The Rise Of The Greeks --
In his introduction, Grant explains his title by saying that although there really was no "Greece" in the ancient world, there were plenty of Greeks, not only in Attica and the Peloponnese, but in Sicily, Anatolia, etc. The book itself is a discussion of all of the aspects of these Greeks up to about 480 B.C.
The truly unfortunate thing about this book, however, is the simple fact that Grant is a weak writer. He is persistently published, I gather, because of his erudition and eminence as a scholar. But his writing is a jumble of donnish concessions to the contrary opinions of other scholars, fussy parentheses containing the original Greek word or pronunciation, footnotes,
etc. He lacks, in short, any sense of narrative or drama, leaving this book closer to a work of archeology than one of history, though that does not appear to have been his intent. The following non sequitur is a fair example of his style:
From Lesbos they spread slowly (because of resistance from the native Mysians) over north-western Asia Minor and its islands (c. 1130 to after 1000), all the way from the entrance to the Hellespont (Dardanelles) right down to the mouth of the River Hermus; and in consequence this region became known as Aeolis.
I was interested in Grant's thumbnail sketch of Solon, the Athenian leader of the 6th Century, particularly in his passing observation in that section that a society of rich men is far more democratic than one of nobility, since the former offers at least an opportunity of advancement, unlike the latter. But the problem here is much like the one encountered in Grant's The Twelve Caesars -- viz. it reads like little more than an updating of the original ancient sources, Plutarch and Suetonious. Worse than that, it reads like an encyclopedia.
Michael Grant, The Classical Greeks --
I believe that I have remarked elsewhere that Michael Grant writes like an encyclopedia, though it might be kinder to call him something like a modern Plutarch. This volume, which concentrates on the magnificent period between the ancient Greeks of Ilium, etc. and the Greek world of Alexander and the Ptolemys, certainly follows Plutarch’s method of organizing his observations around the lives of prominent men. Every chapter is the life and influence of a single named individual, bringing all the advantages and disadvantages that can be imagined by following such a methodology.
As Grant points out, if these men had not existed, there would not be much of value in the period. And so he meticulously examines their accomplishments and influence. Sometimes this works quite well, particularly in reference to those names which were unfamiliar or only dimly recalled by me. (A nice touch is Grant’s subtitle to each chapter, giving the essence of the man: e.g. “Isocrates: Panhellenic Educationalist.”) It is of only anecdotal interest, however, when he visits more familiar territory such as “Socrates: Ironical Questioner,” or “Aristophanes: Comedy of Protest.” Of course what is always sacrificed by Grant — he may not have it in him — is a very coherent sense of chronology and even much enthusiasm. You may get more facts about this period from Grant; but you will truly understand the classical Greeks if you read Edith Hamilton.
Edith Hamilton, The Roman Way --
As in The Greek Way, Miss Hamilton pays considerable attention to the playwrights -- in this case Plautus and Terrence -- on the reasonable basis that the popular entertainment offers one of the best windows on a society. Her description of Terrence (who evidently died quite young) as a freed slave whose talents were so conspicuous that his circle of friends consisted of noteworthy intellectuals of the period has a very familiar sound to it. (Oscar Wilde comes to mind.)
Also interesting to me was her passing summary of the first triumvirate because she points out that, though we know it was of great significance, it was nevertheless accomplished behind the scenes, and not trumpeted with alarums and excursions -- hardly the impression one gets reading later historians. Miss Hamilton also spends a moment on another Roman phenomenon, again one that we hear about more than witness in the histories -- the virtue of a Roman woman. After all, the only Roman women we know about are the libertines, Pompeia, Livia, Julia, Agripina, etc. For that matter, Hamilton herself passes on some gossip about Portia, Brutus's wife. But her point is quite the opposite, that there really was the ideal of a Roman woman and that it was taken seriously (though not in the palace, apparently).
And then for me are Hamilton's most wonderful passages, those that discuss Cicero. Cicero has never been a particular hero of mine. Perhaps this derives from Arthur Kahn's biography of Julius Caesar in which he repeatedly and contemptuously refers to Cicero as "the new man," presumably based on his undistinguished family background. In any event, I have always envisioned Cicero as the Roman version of Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. -- too smart to be ignored, too geeky to be taken seriously. Here that picture is not entirely dispelled, but a far more three-dimensional image is also conveyed.
In her introduction Hamilton comments that she began reading Latin at age seven and yhroughout her life was able to relax by reading the Romans in their original language -- including Cicero's more than 800 extant letters. From them she concludes that Caesar always desired Cicero's friendship and that the latter unaccountably withheld it. (Perhaps this matches Cicero's personality, but it does not seem like Caesar to me.)
Edith Hamilton, The Greek Way --
This book is a series of Miss Hamilton's essays on aspects of Greek civilization, with literary and artistic criticism, as well as her ruminations about the philosophers and historians. She has a wonderfully distinct point of view which is more insightful than strictly academic. In short, she is a "noticer." She sees relationships and coincidences that might escape a more professorial writer.
Although her lifetime of reading the ancient Greeks is completely apparent, the novelty of what she brings to this book are her wonderful observations about how they connect to the rest of the world -- Egypt, India, early Christianity, Victorian England -- in short, whatever has made her life worthwhile. It would never have occurred to me to compare Aristophanes to W.S. Gilbert or Pindar to Rudyard Kipling. (The Gilbert connection, in particular, is her pet. It’s a nice observation, not earth-shattering in itself, but unique and presented with so much eagerness that who can deny it.)
I once listened to a lecturer who contrasted the Greeks with the Hebrews, noting that while the former were great thinkers the latter were great dreamers. Hamilton would not disagree, but it is she who notes that the Greeks were also exuberant players of games -- not the bloody Roman gladiatorial slaughters, but simple athletic contests[1]. The Hebrews, she says, never troubled in the Bible to concern themselves about slavery, but the Greeks eventually came to grips with it. Life in Egypt was brutal and short and so that civilization was centered around the rituals of the dead; Greece by contrast was free and alive and became the foundation of the modern world.
Ultimately, the reason why I found this book to be so rewarding was the feeling which Miss Hamilton conveys, not urgently, but almost confidentially, that an intelligent person need never entirely despair since the Greeks are always there to provide sanctuary as well as nourishment.
ENDNOTES
1. I found an antidote to this in Thucydides -- although admittedly the games he describes were conducted in the middle of the war.
Herodotus, The Histories (tr. Aubrey de Selincourt)
About a decade after I had graduated from college, I remember saying to someone that ancient history to me was a vast featureless sea. All that I could see were distant tiny islands which were random unrelated facts.
I must have surprised myself when I said this, because the image has remained in my mind ever since, even though my reading has remained more or less at random. At most, over time one title will have vaguely led to another. I am unwilling to tackle science, mistrustful of contemporary literature, too impatient to concentrate on poetry, and mostly incapable of understanding the great philosophers. Did I say I was generally contemptuous of modern pundits?
Not to say that this explains how I got to Herodotus, except to say that he is eternally “mentioned” in what I have read, often in the footnotes. Three or four years ago I took considerable time with Thucydides, where Herodotus is not to be found except in the introduction. Ditto with the afterword in the Iliad. Some lectures I have heard on Periclean Athens and on Greek myth might touch on Herodotus. A biography on Alexander’s route east cannot avoid what Herodotus must have seen or heard hundreds of years before. Gradually the vague outlines of a narrative took shape for me within which Herodotus the historian is treated with respect -- tinctured with some doubt[1]. Is he reliable? Gullible? Slyly humorous?[2] Naturally by the time I got to reading The Histories, these questions were all in my memory without the faintest possibility of my being able to answer them.
But what does it matter? I am a lay reader. If my interest is held, I am not demanding. What The Histories have done for me is to lower the sea level just a bit, bringing more into view at the base of those islands. Herodotus adds detail, dimension, and intelligence to the emerging narrative. Like Vergil and Sophocles, and Ovid, he puts me in touch with the ancient places and the stories that go with them. And notwithstanding the blizzard of unfamiliar names, he held my interest because he himself is interested in his subject, his subject being to recall “great and marvelous deeds . . . and especially to show why the two great peoples [Greeks and Persians] fought with each other.”
Troy. As Herodotus sees it, enmity between Greece and Persia predated even the Trojan War. To the Persians (and probably Herodotus), the rape of Helen was only one more silly chapter in a series of girl-stealing episodes which were a routine part of sea trade in the eastern Mediterranean.
“. . . [I]t is stupid after the event to make a fuss about avenging [such an abduction]. The only sensible thing is to take no notice; for it is obvious that no young woman allows herself to be abducted if she does not wish to be.”
But the Greeks’ complete over-reaction to the capture of Helen – a 10-year war and the savage destruction of Priam’s entire kingdom – was the root, in Herodotus’s phrase, from which sprang the Persians’ belief in Greece’s perpetual enmity towards them, “because the Persians claim Asia and the barbarian races dwelling in it as their own.” (At the time of Darius and Xerxes the coast of western Anatolia was decidedly Greek.)
Lydia. Herodotus identifies himself as a native of Halicarnassus in Ionia. Expelled in times past from the Greek peninsula by the Achaeans (and leaving Athens behind), the Ionians were comparatively weak among the Greeks. Clinging then to the coast of Asia Minor, Ionia was immediately adjacent to the non-Greek state of Lydia and this necessarily bound the affairs of the two regions.
Over the years, all I had known of Lydia was that it was in Anatolia but I could not have added another fact. As for Croesus, he was a myth used as a standard of great wealth (“as rich as Croesus”) -- not king of Lydia or even one whose wealth was remembered only because of the irony of his death compared to Solon’s remark to him about the mistake of prematurely evaluating one’s life at mid-point.
In Herodotus not only is Croesus a real historical person, he also has a personality. True, The Histories relate many incidents about Croesus (complete with dialogue) which sound like myths and wives’ tales[3]. On the other hand, there is reason to reckon the point. Croesus reigned 14 years in Lydia, dying no more than half a century before Herodotus himself was born in the neighboring Ionian state. Stories about this great king were surely in circulation during his own life and the physical corroboration of what Croesus had done and where he had gone was available throughout the region.
Herodotus gives several examples of the latter. From many of the stories, we can easily conclude that Croesus the Lydian had a genuine interest in the Greek world, traveled and made alliances there (this was evidently novel for an Asian), and even consulted the oracle at Delphi[4]. It was a Lydian migration – spurred by famine and led by the king’s son Tyrrhenus – which finally came to rest in Umbria and became the source of the Etruscans[5]. In the event, Croesus was taken prisoner by Cyrus the Persian and spared death. The balance of Book One relates the Persian conquest of Asia Minor and the life of Cyrus, whom Herodotus accounts a great ruler.
Egypt. How did Herototus travel to these distant places? He never really says, although from time to time he does describe in detail and with confidence the river traffic on routes such as the Tigris and Euphrates. When it comes to Egypt, the trade between Greece (and Ionia) and Egypt was ancient even in his time, but it is obvious that his travels took him well beyond the coastal ports. He speaks first hand of this country, also giving descriptions of neighboring Arabia and Lybia -- and although he does not exactly put himself at the cataracts and Elephantine, he speaks of them with as much assurance as he does about the features of Babylon. He also relates conversations he supposedly had with learned men at these places.
Of more significance to his mission, he gives Egypt great credit as being a source of much Greek culture, particularly in religious heritage. And yet he demurs when it comes to detailing religious principles, which he wishes to avoid. This does not prevent him from describing certain cultural practices – including mummification (which in terms of pricing sound remarkably contemporary). Most of what he relates about Egyptian history Herodotus frankly admits that he heard from the priests – and he fortifies it by references to various temples and statues that have been displayed to him. He does not try to hide the remarkable antiquity of the stories he relates, particularly in comparison to the short (to him) Greek history that he can point to.
Once he has finished with his interlude of early Egyptian history, the historian returns to the Persian tide, focusing now on Cambyses, the apparently unbalanced son and heir of Cyrus. Cambyses did have a presence in Egypt (including a foray into Ethiopia), although it is not treated with much respect. More interesting to me is that Croesus continues to appear, now a wise adviser to this new monarch.
The World Surrounding Greece. By this point the stories Herodotus tells of imperial magnanimity have become as common of those he also tells of indifferent cruelty and murder, and while he duly notes the former, he is rarely troubled by the latter. I will say, however, that as yet he has had very little to say about Greece itself. These are reports of Asians and Egyptians, kingdoms and rulers, and an interesting, though mostly speculative, account of the Scythians[6]. (The latter report includes the Scythian tactic, still familiar in those quarters, of persistent retreat to the frustration of the invader.) His survey of Lybia (Africa) is similarly founded on hearsay, but more reportorial and less infused with curiosity. When he speaks of Europe, it is the trans-Hellespont he has in mind, and apart from Greece itself, the tales are of Thrace and the area north to the Danube.
Darius. After these somewhat lengthy digressions, Book Five returns to Darius’s continuing fascination with the Greeks, particularly Ionia[7]. The more than 30 years in which Diarius, Cambyses’s successor, ruled Persia, seems to have ended about 485 B.C., meaning, I think, that Darius himself would have been no more than two or three generations older than the historian and that there would have been close to living memories which Herodotus called upon in his tale. This does not make him an eyewitness in any way, but I am far less skeptical than a professional historian might be about the general narrative.
Herodotus tells us how Darius got the throne after a brief interregnum of Magi, followed by the interesting tale of the physician Democedes, a Greek prisoner whom he came to trust. It was this man, Herodotus says, who contrived through the wife of Darius to have himself sent on a scouting mission to Greece in preparation for the famous first invasion[8]. The stories do have a faintly fantastic element, but in part I imagine that this is because these were times when power could change hands abruptly and populations were sufficiently small that eminent men may well have encountered each other on their ways up or down.
The catalyst for the famous first invasion, however, seems to have arisen from strictly Greek enmities and politics. For example, an Athenian and Spartan contest over the control of Athens (in which Athens was led by Cleisthenes), led to an Athenian delegation to the Persian governor of Lydia seeking help. The ambassadors, without warrant from home, foolishly agreed (symbolically) to Persian subordination in return for the requested assistance. But Athens had recently thrown off a tyrant, resisted the Spartans, and evidently had no taste for foreign domination. And so without Persian help they defended themselves, proving as Herodotus says,
“how noble a thing equality before the law is, not in one respect only, but in all; for while they were repressed under tyrants, they had no better success in war than any of their neighbors, yet, once the yoke was flung off, they proved the finest fighters in the world. This clearly shows that . . . when freedom [is] won, then every man amongst them was interested in his own cause.”
When an Ionian rebellion against Persia erupted, Athens seems to have made an impotent attempt to assist, and this attracted Persia’s lingering enmity. Much of what followed was lost on me because of the details -- which must be fascinating to historians. For that matter, given contemporary geography, it only slowly dawned on me that what we call “Greece” in that epoch was more or less a confederation of Aegean and Ionian island states, strung along the Anatolian coast and that Miletus was its first city. Eventually I concluded that it was probably the fall of Miletus to the Persians which at this time turned that empire's attention to the mainland and which contributed to the emergence of Athens (then in the hands of a clan called the Pisistratidae) as the premier city.
And now, Herodotus writes, it was that
“during the three generations comprising the reigns of Darius . . . and of his son Xerxes and his grandson Artaxerxes, Greece suffered more evils than in the twenty generations before Darius was born – partly from the Persian wars, partly from her own internal struggles for supremacy.”
In just a few pages he tells the story of Marathon -- almost matter-of-factly – as the culmination of a Persian effort to revenge the burning of Sardis (the Lydian capital) in the Ionian revolt. This tale, although interlarded with stories of dreams and visits by Pan, is related in detail and with the confidence of one who knows the facts. The Persians were led by Hippias, an exiled son of Pisistratus, and they confronted an Athenian force led by Miltiades (one of many who had this name). Unable to secure help in time from the Spartans who were distracted by a religious holiday, the Athenians were obliged to fight with only the help of the Plateans who had just recently fallen under their influence. An important feature of the fight, in which the defenders were outnumbered, is that the Athenians actually attacked the Persian center – and at a dead run. The two flanks then enveloped the enemy. The Greek losses were minimal and by the time the Spartans arrived, it was over.
Xerxes and the Second Invasion. Darius was not amused and spent the ensuing three years raising an army to return, his effort being complicated by a palace argument between his sons about who would be the successor to the father. The victor, Xerxes, fell under the influence of a cousin, Mardonius, who fired the new king’s desire for domination of Greece just as Darius died. Xerxes is by no means depicted as vainglorious, however. Initially the young man is portrayed as irresolute because of his dreams, but in time he assembled an enormous army and began the march west in 480 B.C. His army crossed the Hellespont (after he has lashed and chastised it into submission) taking seven days and nights in the process[9]. It was clearly a stupendous sight which Herodotus describes in colorful detail[10]. Thinking beyond the pageantry, however, I imagine a week of dust, endless starts and stops, short tempers, a cacophony of languages, and animal dung.
Once in Europe with his mammoth army, Xerxes supposedly summoned Demaratus, a deposed Spartan king who had lived in gratitude in the Persian court, and had accompanied the army as a faithful Persian adviser. The conversation which the historian gives between the two men must be an invention, but its theme is all Greek as we know it. It could as easily have been written by Aeschylus. The question is, How well will the Greeks stand up to Persia’s overwhelming force? The answer comes back, with particular emphasis on the Spartans, that the uneven numbers are irrelevant: Xerxes is about to confront the best soldiers in the world who will never be slaves; their only master is the law whose only command is never to retreat – conquer or die.
Marathon having been an Athenian victory all the way, it is natural to credit Sparta with returning the favor 10 years later at Thermopylae. This narrow pass, significantly north of Athens, was much farther away from Sparta than Marathon and it took these incredible warriors well out of their territory. Furthermore, although the Spartan King Leonidas had brought his best soldiers with him, he had also been obliged to leave troops at home for a defense.
For Herodotus’s readers, Thermopylae was obviously a well-known story. He tells it with the same unemotional attention to detail which characterizes most of this work, a technique which however underlines the momentous battle it was. Xerxes, situated on high ground, spent four days before the encounter watching the Spartans -- whom he expected to withdraw in the face of overwhelming numbers -- prepare for combat. But instead he saw them impassively bide their time combing their hair, a Spartan ritual for those who expect to die. Finally the frustrated king orders an attack by his Medean forces who, the historian says, “made it plain enough to anyone, and not least to the king himself, that he had in his army many men indeed, but few soldiers.” And “[o]n the Spartan side, it was a memorable fight; they were men who understood war pitted against an inexperienced enemy.”
Eventually, of course, a Greek traitor revealed a mountain trail around the pass at Thermopylae. The Persians took it, shrugged off the defending Phocians, and killed the Spartans to the last man in the surround. In later years columns were erected to this incredible defense. The epitaph to the Spartans said,
“Go tell the Spartans, you who read,
We took their orders, and here lie dead.”
For good reason, it is still seen as a victory.
This story told, Herodotus points out that Sparta could equally never have stood up to Xerxes by waiting at the Corinthian isthmus. So he turns then to naval affairs, to the famous Delphic oracle about Athens’s “wooden wall,” and to Themistocles’s interpretation of the “wall” as being the Athenian fleet. I was prepared for Salamis, but what followed was the naval battle of Artemesium (unfamiliar to me) off the northern tip of Euboea, actually fought at the same time as Thermopylae. Technically a draw, this too might be accounted a victory, assisted in no small part by a storm which ruined much of the Persian fleet.
But neither Thermopylae nor Artemisium suggested any faltering of the invasion. In three months the Persian army had rolled down the Greek peninsula from Thrace, essentially destroying everything before it, except for those turbulent Greek cities whose enmity toward rival communities was so bitter that they would even join this foreign invader to destroy their neighbors. The Persian army was therefore actually growing. Once past Thermopylae, all seems to have fallen before them and the inevitability of their victory was so complete that Athens was completely abandoned by its population in advance, leaving only a few keepers of the Acropolis -- which was then lost and destroyed. (This was before the Parthenon had been built.) Attica next fell into Persian hands and the only Greek debate was now whether to make a naval defense or to retreat and fight it out to the last ditch on the Peloponnesean isthmus.
The gravity of the situation was unimaginable and the debate swayed back and forth. On learning of the defeat at Thermopylae, Themistocles had moved the largely Athenian fleet south from Artemesium and took up around Salamis, a small island in the Saronic Gulf west of the now-occupied Athens. On the climactic night in question, Themistocles had supposedly lost the argument favoring a naval engagement in the narrow strait at Salamis. Herodotus reports that he was only able to bring about the eventual battle by means of a ruse directed at Xerxes himself, carried out privately and at his own initiative, by which he essentially arranged for the enemy navy to surround the Greeks while they debated, making a naval battle the only possibility. By necessity, therefore, the defense had to be made at sea – the narrow sea at Salamis which favored the Greek fleet[11].
The ensuing victory (which nevertheless left the Persian army completely intact – and uninvolved) was incontestable. So much so, in fact, that Xerxes determined to take the army back to Persia -- an enterprise which would require retracing the land route back up to the Hellespont to cross the magnificent bridge back into Asia. When this became clear, the Greeks first saw it as a golden opportunity. By sea the victorious Athenian navy could surely reach the Hellespont first, destroy the bridge, and trap Xerxes in Greece.
As often happens, the second thought was the better one – why would they deprive a sizeable enemy of an escape route? (Those who criticize Meade after Gettysburg should think of this.) Herodotus says that Themistocles – the first to have urged an immediate move on the bridge – was also quick in counsel to sense how the wind had changed when the risks came to be discussed. Resourceful and devious, he contrived to get an immediate message to Xerxes that he would ensure the king’s escape by discouraging any assault at the Hellespont. It may have been this – and his earlier deception which brought on the decisive battle of Salamis – which was the reason why Athens soon after ostracized and expelled Themistocles. But it also gave him a soft place to fall. He went over to the Persians.
But this is to end the story too soon. Book Nine, the final volume of The Histories, tells the much more detailed story of the Persian army under Mardonius. Under virtually no pressure whatsoever, Mardonius occupied Athens a second time, and moved more or less unopposed into Attica, receiving offers of collaboration from the smaller cities and offering a larger alliance with the Athenians against the hold-out Sparta. As Mardonius bided his time to see what Athens would do -- what it did was it send an urgent message to Sparta to stop dithering or Athens would join with Xerxes – Sparta itself seems to have temporized its answer while it completed its fortifications at the Corinthian isthmus.
In the event, its local defenses prepared, Sparta finally came into the field. This was the prelude to Plataea, the fourth great battle of the war. Not to say it was a well-executed victory. The allied Greeks do not seem to have been capable of any coordination without initial squabbling and posturing, insults, and then flattery. This was certainly true at Plataea, with the added element of treachery on the other side when the Macedonia king, an ethnic Greek fighting with the Persians, secretly presented himself on the Greek lines at midnight to advise them of an attack to come at dawn.
As described by Herodotus, the battle of Plataea does not seem anything like a set-piece. There were 10 days of waiting across lines, troops moving from position to position, insults flung across the gap, cavalry raids, and finally a traveling fight ending in the predictable slaughter and headlong flight. At the end of the day, the Greeks had won and Mardonius was dead. To the extent that Herodotus attributes reasons for the outcome, he appears to be more or less evenly divided between the proper reading of oracular signs and the eventual impatience of Mardonius who finally forced the battle. Whatever the reasons, history gives the victory to Pausanius, Spartan king and relative of Leonidas.
Having now finished The Histories, I think I see those ancient islands somewhat more clearly, maybe dimly taking shape as an archipelago. But this is still difficult. Many times the historian has taken the trouble to quote various Greeks rousing themselves and their rival cities (and taunting the Persians) with their “freedom” and the need to defend the Greek nation and peoples. Indeed the final words of the book reflect on the superior virtue of living free “in a rugged land” over cultivating rich plains and being enslaved to others.
And yet these are not the free people we are accustomed to thinking of. The Greeks described by Herodotus are small minded, jealous, boastful, treacherous, and dishonest. Warring among themselves seems to have been a routine of life. Even when they are valiant, it arises chiefly from a narrow self-interest or at most for the sake of their reputation. To call them clannish is an understatement. Even the episodes of what we might wish to think of as wisdom seem closer to calculation and craftiness. They are far more the heirs of Odysseus than of Aesop.
It would take a reader with far more insight than I have to sense from The Histories what a colossal world these distasteful rogues were about to bring forth. True, a 30-year war between Athens and Sparta can easily be envisioned. An enforced Delian League and an arrogant Melian dialogue are entirely conceivable. But how did it happen that Athens, of all places, should produce in the interim a Periclean Age? That, after all, was the age in which Herodotus lived. It was the time of Sophocles and Aeschylus. Socrates was his contemporary.
And so for me, the islands are still unconnected. They are facts that remain out of context. If they are united, it is still below the surface.
ENDNOTES
1. The volume I read was studded with footnotes by an academic named John Marincola. Although I am sure that he is well-credentialed, his footnotes were often pedantic, with a condescending sense of “correcting” the historian with later discoveries and calling attention to obvious errors.
2. After three days, Herodotus says, Persian priests were finally successful in stopping a disastrous storm “by sacrificial offerings, and by putting spells on the wind, and by further offerings to Thetis and the sea-nymphs – or, of course, it may be that the wind just dropped naturally."
3. Herodotus may also be the source of the myth that the ancient Greeks were giants compared to modern men. In Book One he tells the story of the search for the body or Orestes which when discovered turned out to be the equivalent of 10 feet in length. Later he mentions a Scythian landmark: a 3-foot long footprint left by Heracles.
4. Another scrap integrated into the whole: it was Croesus who misunderstood the message that destroying a great empire referred to his own Lydia and not Persia
5. I remember years ago innocently asking my fellow lawyers at lunch what was meant by the name, the Tyrrhenian Sea. They didn’t know – or care either.
6. To get to Scythia, Darius had to bridge the Bosporus (and later the Danube) anticipating the later crossing of the Hellespont by Xerxes
7. There is a rough chronology in The Histories, but many of the individual stories are told in an erratic time frame
8. The somewhat later Ionian rebellion against Darius appears to have been initiated by Histiaeus, a similar Greek counselor (and semi-prisoner) at the Persian court. He seems to have been the Talleyrand of his day, though he finally did meet his destiny
9. They constructed and crossed two boat bridges, the engineering for which seems very impressive.
10. Within his catalog of nations, Herodotus finds it important to give their earlier ancestral names. This obviously makes sense to a historian but for the lay reader it also indirectly emphasizes the unfixed nature of an ancient world of migrations and captivities.
11. At this point Herodotus reports that Artemisia, an Ionian woman admiral allied with Persia, reminded Xerxes that he had already achieved his principal objective, the destruction of Athens, and really needed no further consequential battle. Logistics and the passage of time would surely bring the Peloponnese under his control.
Donald R. Hickey, The War of 1812 --
The value of reading a solid work of scholarship like this (though it is also a popular history) is that it provides a very accessible window on an event which is almost overlooked by Americans today. I certainly remember from college the two or three things that you are expected to remember about this war -- national anthem, Battle of News Orleans, "We have met the enemy . . ., " etc. -- but what makes the book interesting reading is that in the beginning it makes wide use of homely materials such as local newspaper accounts, letters, and the ephemera that historians so love.
We may think the partisanship of today's press is contemptible, but compare the Baltimore riots in which the editor of the Republican Baltimore Sun literally manned the cannon against the competing Federalist paper in an incident so ugly that by the next dawn several of the offenders had been tortured and killed. (The competing editor, a man in his young 20's, died of his injuries seven years later). Less fascinating is Hickey's account of the Congressional maneuvers on financing the war. But while as a younger person I would have found this a tedious patch, today, for reasons I am afraid to contemplate, I found it all familiar and for that reason significant.
The book comes with some wonderful paintings and engravings of the portraits of many of the men whose stories are featured in it, including an unbelievably young Winfield Scott, the same man who was Lincoln's chief of staff at the outset of the Civil War almost 50 years later. The dashing portrait of William Henry Harrison is equally impressive. The chief flaw of the book is Hickey's organizational style. For his own reasons he has chosen to use topical divisions with the result that there is no sense of chronological movement and the war ends about midway through.
A parting recollection is that Madison, who was President throughout the war, comes off as weak and indecisive, a de-mythologizing also to be found in Novus Ordo Seclorum (q.v.) respecting a different time period.
David Howarth, The Greek Adventure --
Unlike his Norman invasion and Spanish armada books, this effort by Howarth never becomes very interesting. Part of the problem, I assume, is that he apparently does not read Greek and the material therefore is devoid of the sort of "new documents" that historians use to justify a new history. The bigger problem might be that instead of a single story to tell about how Greece threw off Turkish rule in the 1820's, there are many, mostly unrelated. It seems to me, however, that this latter feature is likely to be a recurring problem in telling the story of any revolution and that in this case Howarth was just overmatched by the material.
This is not to say that the reading was not instructional. For example, I learned the details -- if not the glory -- of the Byron story and I still maintain a rough sense of the unavoidably confusing narrative. But at the end of the day it is the confusion that prevails. Howarth attempted to tell the tale of one more Balkan war. A nice try, but who's on first?
David Howarth, Trafalgar: The Nelson Touch --
Howarth is the ultimate popular historian, with no footnotes and no bibliography. He is, in short, more a journalist than a scholar. On the other hand, when he deals with an interesting subject as he does here, he has a dramatic storytelling ability. Maybe every English schoolboy knows the tale of Mrs. Hamilton, Trafalgar, etc., but I did not. It's a great story and Howarth did it justice.
David Howarth, Waterloo: The Day of Battle --
I got this book with enthusiasm, having so enjoyed Howarth's efforts in his Nelson book and particularly his history of the Norman Conquest. But Waterloo is a dud, at least considering the drama it describes. The idea is that the history is told from the point of view of the foot soldiers. In itself, not a bad idea, but Bruce Catton retired the trophy on that one.
Hammond Innes, The Conquistadores --
Although this history of the Spanish conquest of the New World is about both Cortez and Pissaro, it is the account of Cortez which dwells in my memory.
Innes, I take it, is a novelist who could not shake his fascination with the historical narrative and felt compelled to provide his own version of it. I am grateful to him for having done so. I rely on popular histories for my sense of the past and this is one of the very few histories of Latin America that I have read. There is no reason that I know of why Innes's conclusion that Cortez was a very great general is wrong. His idea of deliberately wrecking his ships on the beach to prevent any second thoughts about return is the sort of gesture that you might expect from a Caesar (or a Ulysses). So was his unflinching ability to brazen out the most desperate of circumstances.
Today Cortez is universally reviled in Mexico and it is hard to think that this unjust judgment will ever be reversed. But as Innes makes clear, it was the Aztecs who were the bloody interlopers and the Indians of all other tribes who were their regular victims. Cortez would eventually leave, but it was they who risked everything by helping him on his way to Tenochitlan.
The situation in Peru was similar only in this respect: the Incas too were a recent oppressor, more recent by far than the Aztecs in Mexico. But Pissaro was by all accounts a beast with no redeeming qualities. The story is interesting, but only because of the strangeness of the locale and the staggering amount of wealth that was discovered and plundered. But the history of Peru lacks all the glory and valor that glimmers through the tale of Cortez and his fated meeting with the distracted Monctezuma.
Paul Johnson, A History of the American People —
This is the most recent of Johnson’s many histories that I have read. As with the others, the book is alternately captivating, boring (Johnson is often in thrall to statistics), and refreshing.
Since Johnson is rarely subtle, the famous people he must describe in telling his tale he will inevitably characterize as either heroes or scoundrels -- the evidence in support of which he piles on in mesmerizing yet often dubious detail. But there is something more -- or rather, less -- to it than that. As much as he is an historian, Johnson is also a gossip (see Intellectuals). The virtue of this dangerous combination is that it routinely propels him into genuine insights about famous people. But since gossip always has its malicious side, the unavoidable drawback is that Johnson himself is unnecessarily malicious a good portion of the time.
Combined with his carelessness about details (a trait that I have noticed in each of his other books), this lends a superficiality to the overall effort that Johnson’s insights never entirely efface. A case in point is his contemplation of the Kennedys in the last segment of the book. True, there is so much that is tawdry in the clan’s history and so little accomplishment [1], that any portrait of Joe Kennedy and his sons will be on the whole discouraging. But Johnson is so careless in his facts (e.g. Jack Kennedy went to Harvard, not Princeton) or so biased in reporting them (Arthur Krock is portrayed as little more than Jack’s pimp) that anyone disposed to discount the entire segment would have no end of things to justify such a decision.
But as an Englishman, Johnson is not beholden to the party line of any American political organization. Thus he embraces Truman and all of the “cold warriors” from his times, plausibly calling them the greatest group of Americans serving the public since the Founding Fathers.
ENDNOTES
1. Johnson quotes Harold MacMillan upon returning from Washington shortly after the Kennedys took office. “It’s rather like watching the Borgia brothers take over a respectable North Italian city.”
Paul Johnson, Modern Times --
Although this is a popular history, it is written with such a distinct point of view that it borders upon becoming a tract. The scope of the book is the modern world from the 1920's to the 1980's, which gives an essayist of Johnson's pronounced views plenty of controversy to report on.
Although it may not be original with Johnson, the most interesting insight to me was his conclusion that Lenin resembled a religious fanatic as compared to Hitler who was a seducer of the German people. It's a long book and contains plenty of such observations. For example, Johnson repeatedly views Roosevelt as "frivolous" and frankly admires Calvin Coolidge as one of America's best presidents. I also learned from Johnson that the ethos of the Cambridge Bloomsbury Group (which Johnson compares to the atmosphere in Tennyson's "The Lotos Eaters") led more or less into the Guy Burgess/Anthony Blunt treachery.
But Johnson does not merely tell the story of the War and Europe's problems. He recounts (and with not a little sarcasm) the evolution of the Third World which he calls the "Bandung generation" and its mastery of "the higher humbug." Except for Coolidge and de Gaulle, no one is spared Johnson's gimlet eye, including Churchill and Eisenhower who are nevertheless treated with general admiration. Probably because of the density of the material (the book is over 700 pages and chockablock with footnotes) there are factual errors. Roosevelt, for example, didn't die at Palm Springs. But whenever such lapses are apparent to a lay reader, there will be a residuum of concern that other data are also defective.
Paul Johnson, A History of Christianity –
This book is a very detailed retrospective of Christianity (more precisely Roman Christianity) from the beginning, written like any other sober history. From the outset, Johnson gives his readers credit for knowing something about his subject. This is the ultimate flattery, though it gave me more credit than I was entitled to. If you don't know who the Montanists were, this is not Johnson's concern, for he spends virtually no time comparing them with other early Churchmen whose precise dogma he also more or less assumes you know.
This is not to say that he stints on the history or analysis. There is a story line (roughly chronological) and Johnson's always decisive point of view. It has always been my belief that Christianity took fire because it was an idea which offered at least a rough equality at the end of a life and whose time thus had come in an increasingly sophisticated world for which the pagan myths had become utterly unsatisfactory. Without touching this point directly, Johnson argues that the primary inducement of the religion was the promise of an afterlife and he adds that
. . . by the fourth century Christianity had completely penetrated all classes. Historical writers of this period do not treat any belief as characteristic of the masses, the vulgar, the uneducated. Where doctrinal divisions arose, they cut across the social pyramid. Now this was in marked contrast to paganism. Any religion tends to be a combination of intellectual theorizing among the elite, and popular belief (or superstition). Roman paganism did not hang together and therefore was ultimately a failure because the intellectual elite could not transmit their theoretical justifications to the masses; and the reason why they failed was that they could not, in practice, share the beliefs of the masses. Cicero's defence of the gods was that of a skeptic, a man of the world, a political conservative; it meant nothing to the man in the street. Thanks to St. Paul . . . the resurrection of Christ could be presented to the sophisticates and thanks to Origen it could be woven into a complete philosophical system and so become part of the normal intellectual furniture of the upper classes. Christian intellectuals, in turn, starting from the same foundation of belief as the masses, could transmit their formulations downwards.
This is a fair example of Johnson's style, which is both intellectually rigorous and thoughtful. As a bonus this book leaves aside the tendentiousness that can be found in Modern Times and Intellectuals. Which is not to say that Johnson does not have a point of view. He is never "kind," as such, but he does not disguise his respect for some of the people he writes about, from the unnamed abbots of the Dark Ages (whom he generally sees as resourceful and dedicated) to specific popes and church fathers who could easily be dismissed as simply intolerant or barbarian.
This open attitude gives Johnson the latitude to assess without flinching some of the early church's greatest dilemmas. For example, he points out that Charlemagne was a spiritual as well as a temporal leader, one who could and did mediate between papal claimants. For Johnson, this is how it should be, because it was sensible. If Christ was the head of society, its two equal arms were the state and the church, each claiming its rights directly from God. This was far preferable to having the Pope as the head of the entire body of society, preeminent over the temporal power, for the latter approach would mean that the church would take the benefit of civil society without bearing its burdens. This is in fact what happened in the 200-300 years between Charlemagne and Innocent III, and Johnson finds it to have been disastrous, for both church and state.
And Johnson never blinks the fact that his own interpretation implies an acceptance of (if not a belief in) the divine right of kings, certainly a point of view not frequently heard these days. This is a subject which Johnson returns to in his discussion of the Protestant Reformation, which he says was largely a matter of indifference to all but the most high ranking of church officials (Protestant and Catholic). Hence, the resolutions of so many of those struggles came down to which religion was adopted by the leader of the country. That was the leader's natural role, Johnson points out, and it was more or less accepted without question that he could make such a determination with no dissent except from the most important of his subjects -- who would generally be left undisturbed, along with their own tenants, if they should follow a different course. For a country to have two or more religions would make as much sense as its having two kings, or two armies.
But why does Johnson, with his chosen title -- A History of Christianity -- give such short shrift to the Eastern rite and even to the Great Schism of 1054, which is barely mentioned? Modern Times might be called upon as an example of Johnson's supposed ethnocentricity, but even there he fully explored the Third World he excoriated. Here, he explores Protestantism at length [1] but virtually pretends that Greek and Russian Orthodoxy do not exist. Furthermore, in the exploration of the divisions within the Western religion, Johnson indulges a tendency he also showed in both Intellectuals and Modern Times: he betrays his own vulgarity by revealing the vulgarities of the prominent people he writes about. Thus it is important to him to state that Luther wrote his theses while on the privy and that he used barnyard words in describing his enemies.
Sometimes this is useful in understanding -- I found it amusing that an exasperated Erasmus ended up calling Luther a "Goth" -- but for the most part it upsets the prevailing scholarly tone to no apparent end. Speaking of Erasmus, he is obviously admired by Johnson for his moderation as well as his modernism. Something of an early and unofficial Protestant, Erasmus was the progenitor of what Johnson calls "the third force," a minuscule group of Counter
Reformation modernists who were irenic (or "eirenic," as Johnson spells it) proponents of an ecumenical Christianity who were never specifically allied with either Rome or any Protestant sect.
The final quarter of the book, dwelling on more modern (i.e. post-Renaissance) events, is chiefly interesting for its exploration of the missionary work of the Roman Catholics, successful in Latin America and generally a failure elsewhere. Johnson sees the church as having unnecessarily lost its flexibility and thus unable to present itself in Asia as universalist and adaptable; instead it had become a European institution competing against entrenched and traditional Asian institutions -- and competing against itself in the form of Jesuit-Franciscan rivalries in Japan.
ENDNOTES
1. It is a Protestant notion that James the apostle was the brother of Jesus. They certainly didn't teach it at Catechism. (If Mary was a virgin, what was she doing with a second child?)
Paul Johnson, The Birth of the Modern –
Paul Johnson is a gossip and yet his interest in the details of a man’s life often brings his popular histories to life and, to lesser readers like me, enliven and even inform the story that he tells. In this lengthy history of the years from 1815 to 1830, for example, Johnson early on takes the time to give the personal backgrounds of the major personages at the Congress of Vienna, Castelreagh, Metternich, Talleyrand, and even the oddball Tsar Alexander of Russia.
For me, this was enormously interesting. I knew, of course, of the remarkable maneuverings of Talleyrand – even including Napoleon’s famous remark that he was “shit in a silk stocking” – but I never dreamed that Castelreagh and Metternich, so different in personality, became boon companions on first meeting. It is this sort of irrelevant detail that makes Johnson’s social histories so interesting to me. And by this I do not mean to say that Johnson’s larger conclusions are not also significant. For instance, probably every historian knows by instinct that the untimely Battle of New Orleans was ultimately as significant in its way as the Battle of Waterloo – it preserved the Mississippi Valley for the United States – but it was new (though logical) to me.
Another element of Johnson’s presentation that I find very attractive is his ability to weave in contemporary literary references to illustrate his points. Jane Austen is as prominent as any other source to tell the story of the thriving British empire. Why tell about Russia’s travails in the Caucasas if you cannot draw upon Tolstoy or Pushkin? Our idea of the American frontier owes as much to the romances of Fennimore Cooper as it does to geography and Indian tribes.
But to my surprise Johnson, who has always held my interest, has not produced as interesting a book in this one as in his others. Eventually there is a sense that this book is a pastiche of various discrete efforts he made over the years and that he was finally fortunate in contriving a title – The Birth of the Modern – to provides a unifying theme. But in the end the unity is not strong enough. The topics pop up more or less at random. For example, Johnson has a longish and rather boring segment on the domestic radical politics of England during the Liverpool era. The subject matter is loosely consistent with the thesis of the overall book, but the extensive discussion of politicians and public of the day, Brougham, Hunt, etc., involves so much detail that an American reader like me will eventually lose interest – but for the culminating description of the 1819 Peterloo Massacre near Manchester.
Similarly, I will also say that an extensive (and often tedious) history of England’s and Scotland’s industrial revolution is also redeemed by an interesting idea, for which Johnson gives examples, of the relationship between science and art. It had never occurred to me, but the presentation – with examples – is compelling. (This is not to say that Johnson gets to the debate that science is the new religion. He is a popular historian, not a philosopher.)
Eventually, although I am sorry to say it, much of what Johnson writes about here bears little obvious relationship to his theme. The story of things that didn’t mature, such as the chaotic alarums and excursions in early 19th Century Italy, could easily have been omitted. A digression on the supposed emergence of modern professional sports is equally sketchy and not at all compelling. He ventures a tantalizing idea of an English veterinarian as the origin of the “Great Game” and eventually the fall of the Soviet Union, but if that is plausible at all it certainly needs much more work, possibly a book of its own. Ultimately, this is a work of "social history” in bad need of an editor. There are snippets on pets, opium, professional sports, cockfighting, child rearing, quack medicine, etc. etc., all pretty much from an English point of view.
No comments:
Post a Comment