man whose actions influenced subsequent developments along a quite different course than would have been followed if these actions had not been taken. The event-making man is an eventful man whose actions are the consequences of outstanding capacities of intelligence, will, and character rather than of accidents of position. This distinction tries to do justice to the general belief that a hero is great not merely in virtue of what he does but in virtue of what he is. From this point on, unless otherwise specified, when we speak of the hero or great man in history we shall mean the event-making man.
The merely eventful men in history play a role that may be compared to that of the little Dutch boy who kept his finger in the hole of the dike and saved the town. Without meaning to strip the legend of its glamour, we can point out that almost anybody in the situation could have done it. All that was required was a boy, a finger, and the lucky chance of passing by. The event itself in the life of the community was of tremendous significance. It saved the town just as a little Dutch boy at Pearl Harbour might have saved the fleet if his alarm had been acted upon in time. But the qualities required to cope with the situation were of a fairly common distribution. Here, so to speak, one stumbles upon greatness just as one might stumble on a treasure that will ransom a town. Greatness, however, is something that must involve extraordinary talent of some kind and not merely the compounded luck of being born and of being present at the right place at a happy moment.
In the year 313, the Emperor Constantine, in the word of Gibbon, changed his status from that of “protector” to that of “proselyte” of the Church.[1] Few events have been more important in the development of western Europe than the reversal of previous Roman policy toward Christianity and its adoption by the official head of the Roman Empire. But not a single one of the qualities of Constantine’s character, which enter into the disputed question of the reasons for his conversion, indicate that he was much more than a politician with an eye on the main chance. Whatever religious piety he had was not strong enough to prevent him from murdering his own son on a trumped-up charge. Constantine was an eventful man independently of whether Christianity would have become the official religion several centuries later, under quite different conditions and with
- ↑ Edward Gibbon, History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Modern Library edition, vol. I., p. 636.
