Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 17.djvu/534

492 N I E B U H R the uprising of the German people against Napoleon ; he entered the landwehr, and ineffectually sought admission into the regular army. He edited for a short time a patriotic journal, The Prussian Correspondent, joined the headquarters of the allied sovereigns, and witnessed the battle of Bautzen, and was subsequently employed in some minor negotiations. In 1815 he lost his father, whose life he subsequently wrote; and in July his beloved wife, whose health had long been declining, expired, enjoining him to finish his History. He next accepted the post of ambassador at Rome, which he probably thought would assist his historical labours, and departed to assume that office in July 1816. On his way he discovered in the cathedral library of Verona the long-lost Institutes of Gaius, afterwards edited by Savigny, to whom he communicated the discovery under the impression that he had found a portion of Ulpian. Before his departure for Rome he had married his wife s niece, an amiable young person, but inferior intellectually to his first wife, and almost equally delicate in constitution. Although devoted to him, she could in no way replace her predecessor. Nor was he happy in other respects. He disliked the Italians, and found himself unable to proceed as he wished with his History. These causes, acting upon a naturally querulous and despondent temper, produced a general dissatisfaction and discouragement which coloured all his views of human affairs, and deprived the world of the benefit that it might have received from the observations of one endowed with such profound insight and such noble sympathies. While his distrust made him ungenerous to those who were con tending for a better order of things, his appreciation of the lessons of history withheld him equally from siding with the reactionary party. His position in his latter years was hence one of great isolation, not uncheered, however, by the sympathy of friends and disciples such as Savigny and Bunsen. During his residence in Rome he discovered and published f ragments of Cicero and Livy, aided Cardinal Mai in his edition of Cicero De RepubUca, and shared in framing the plan of Bunsen and Platner s great work on the topography of ancient Rome, to which he contributed several chapters. He also, on a journey home from Italy, deciphered in a palimpsest at St Gall the fragments of Flavius Merobaudes, a Roman poet of the 5th century. In 1823 he resigned the embassy and established himself at Bonn, where the remainder of his life was spent, with the exception of some visits to Berlin as councillor of state. He here rewrote and republished (1827-28) the first two volumes of his History, and composed a third volume, bringing the narrative down to the end of the First Punic War, which he did not himself entirely complete, but which, with the help of a fragment written in 1811, was edited after his death by Professor Classen. He also assisted in Bekker s edition of the Byzantine historians, and delivered courses of lectures on ancient history, ethnography, and geography, and on the French Revolution, which were published from notes after his death. In February 1830 his house was burned down, but the greater part of his books and manuscripts were saved. The revolution of July in the same year was a terrible blow to him, and filled him with the most dismal anticipations of the future of Europe. He died on January 2, 1831, from a chill taken in coming home from a news-room where he had been eagerly studying the trial of the ministers of Charles X. His wife survived him only nine days. He left several children by her ; his first marriage had been childless. Niebuhr s great work counts among epoch-making histories both as marking an era in the study of its special subject, and for its momentous influence on the general conception of history. " The main results," says Dr Schmitz, "arrived at by the inquiries of Niebuhr, such as his views of the ancient population of Rome, the origin of the plebs, the relation between the patricians and plebeians, the real nature of the ager publicus, and many other points of interest, have been acknowledged by all his successors." Other alleged discoveries, such as the construction of early Roman history out of still earlier ballads, have not been equally fortunate ; but if every positive conclusion of Niebuhr s had been refuted, bis claim to be considered the first who dealt with the ancient history of Rome in a scientific spirit would remain unimpaired, and the new principles introduced by him into historical research would lose nothing of their importance. He suggested, though he did not elaborate, the theory of the myth, so potent an instrument for good and ill in modern historical criticism. He brought in infer ence to .supply the place of discredited tradition, and showed the possibility of writing history in the absence of original records. By his theory of the disputes between the patricians and plebeians arising from original differences of race be drew attention to the immense importance of ethnological distinctions, and con tributed to the revival of these divergences as factors in modern history. More than all, perhaps, since his conception of ancient Roman story made laws and manners of more account than shadowy lawgivers, he undesignedly influenced history by popu larizing that conception of it which lays stress on institutions, tendencies, and social traits to the neglect of individuals. History, so treated, always inclines to degenerate into mere disquisition ; and if Niebuhr were weighed in the scales of Livy it might be questioned whether he could even claim to rank among historians. That his rank should be so high is a proof of the extension which the defini tion of history has received in our day. An historian should before all things tell a story. Niebuhr is often engaged in proving that there is no story to tell. The peculiar character of his work is incidentally expressed by himself. "That," lie says, "which would be harmonious in a national and poetical historian would be out of tune in a work written more than eighteen hundred years later by a foreigner and a critic. His task is to restore the ancient tradition." He is not, that is to say, an historian but an historical critic. It would therefore be unjust to try him by the standard of great artists in history like Gibbon, eminent in narrative, in character-painting, in historical grouping and light and shade. His intense admiration for Livy proves how greatly he himself valued such accomplishments, but he makes no attempt to emulate them. Such an endeavour could have had no place in the treat ment of early Roman history according to the principle he had prescribed for himself ; and it is perhaps fortunate for his fame that the pen dropped from his hand as he was slowly emerging from the regions of historic twilight into a clear day where the actions of statesmen and generals are no longer a matter of uncertainty, and only require to be interpreted by their motives. There are indeed in the latter pages of his history evidences of deep human sympathy, and a capacity for viewing men and things in the concrete, as, for instance, in his treatment of Pyrrhus ; but this tendency is continually checked and controlled by his propensity to analytical criticism. Had his work been carried down, as he designed, to the period of Augustus, he would have given a masterly study of such episodes as the legislation of the Gracchi, he would have thrown the clearest light on the constitutional questions between Caesar and his adversaries, he would now and then haw illuminated the character of a great man by a flash of inspiration ; but as a whole his history would have lacked life, colour, and movement. It must be added that, if his stylo is not precisely inelegant, even the refined literary skill of his English translators has failed to render it attractive. Whence, then, is this history not merely valuable, but delightful ? The answer must be from its freshness, its elation of real or supposed discovery, the impression it conveys of actual contact with a great body of new and unsuspected truth. "We seem to be at once learning and unlearning ; we see many new things, and old things as we never saw them before. It is an intellectual emancipation, momentous for the world and the individual, even if particular conclusions should prove to be hasty, and particular details inaccurate. In this sense Niebuhr was justified in his proud assumption that "the discovery of no ancient historian would have taught the world so much as my work." His further prediction " that all that may hereafter come to light from ancient and uncorruptcd sources will only tend to confirm or develop the principles I have advanced " has not received equal confirmation. The theory on which he laid so much stress of the derivation of ancient Roman history from popular ballads has been refuted by Sir George Lewis, and now finds little acceptance. The general scepticism as to the credibility of ancient history implied in his method went too far, and has been succeeded by a legitimate reaction fortified by such practical arguments as the recent archaeological discoveries at 11 ion and Mycenae, and more lately at Samos, in the deserts of Moab, and even on the confines of Ethiopia. Writing, it is evident, was more ancient and more practised ; oral tradition was more disciplined (as might have been inferred from a memorable passage in Plato s Timseus) ; there was more even of a judicial and critical spirit in antiquity than was surmised by Niebuhr. The testimony of Xanthus to the Lydian origin of