1,99 €
Niedrigster Preis in 30 Tagen: 1,99 €
Niedrigster Preis in 30 Tagen: 1,99 €
Mehr erfahren.
- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
In "The Chief Periods of European History," Edward A. Freeman presents a sweeping overview of the pivotal eras that have shaped European civilization from ancient times through the mid-19th century. With meticulous attention to detail, Freeman employs a narrative style that is both scholarly and accessible, weaving together historical facts with engaging prose. The book is structured thematically, addressing the political, social, and cultural transformations that define each period, making it a valuable resource for students and enthusiasts of history alike. Freeman's work reflects the Victorian interest in social progress and the development of national identities, placing it firmly within the intellectual framework of its time. Edward A. Freeman (1823-1892) was a distinguished historian and scholar whose academic career influenced generations of students. His exposure to classical education and his tenure as a professor at Oxford University allowed him to cultivate a keen understanding of European history's complexities. Freeman's writings are deeply informed by his belief in the importance of historical context; his approach emphasizes the interconnectedness of events and ideas across time, which has enriched our understanding of Europe's multifaceted past. This volume is not simply an account of dates and events; it is a thought-provoking exploration of how historical periods inform contemporary society. Recommended for anyone seeking a deeper appreciation of European history, Freeman's work is essential reading for both academic scholars and casual readers aiming to comprehend the forces that have shaped modern Europe. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A succinct Introduction situates the work's timeless appeal and themes. - The Synopsis outlines the central plot, highlighting key developments without spoiling critical twists. - A detailed Historical Context immerses you in the era's events and influences that shaped the writing. - A thorough Analysis dissects symbols, motifs, and character arcs to unearth underlying meanings. - Reflection questions prompt you to engage personally with the work's messages, connecting them to modern life. - Hand‐picked Memorable Quotes shine a spotlight on moments of literary brilliance. - Interactive footnotes clarify unusual references, historical allusions, and archaic phrases for an effortless, more informed read.
Das E-Book können Sie in Legimi-Apps oder einer beliebigen App lesen, die das folgende Format unterstützen:
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019
Ähnliche
The Chief Periods of European History
Table of Contents
Introduction
Uniting sweep and structure, The Chief Periods of European History tracks how a continent’s restless past can be divided into meaningful eras without losing sight of the slow continuities that bind them, proposing that the very act of periodization is both a map for travelers and a claim about what matters in the journey, an approach that weighs ruptures against inheritances, measures institutions alongside ideas, and treats the passage from antiquity through the Middle Ages to the modern world as a set of interconnected passages whose boundaries are argued rather than assumed, inviting readers to test the scheme as they traverse it, all presented from a late nineteenth-century vantage that makes its criteria as visible as its conclusions.
Written by the English historian Edward A. Freeman, this work belongs to the tradition of historical synthesis and public lectures, offering a compact, classroom-bred survey rather than an exhaustive monograph. It originated as a series of talks delivered at the University of Oxford in the mid-1880s and was issued in book form soon thereafter, giving wider circulation to the arguments first tested before an academic audience. Its canvas is continental Europe across a long chronological arc, and its method is to outline the main divisions of that story while explaining the grounds on which those divisions rest.
As a reading experience, the book provides a guided tour through successive epochs, moving from foundational legacies toward the political configurations of Freeman’s own day, with the tone of an experienced lecturer who balances clarity with interpretive firmness. It favors an analytic overview—sketching patterns, turning points, and lines of descent—over granular local narratives. The style is measured and formal, enlivened by the cadence of the lecture hall and by recurring signposts that orient the reader within the larger scheme. The mood is constructive and purposeful, aiming to equip rather than dazzle, to frame questions rather than settle every debate.
At its core lies the problem of periodization: when does one age end and another begin, and by what criteria—institutions, beliefs, frontiers, or forms of power? Freeman treats continuity and change as partners in dialogue, attending to the legacies of classical civilization, the reconfiguration of authority in medieval Europe, and the emergence of more centralized polities and international systems. Alongside political structures, he notes the roles of law, faith, language, and geography in shaping a shared, if contested, European framework. The result is a scheme that emphasizes both unity and plurality, allowing different regions to move at uneven tempos.
For contemporary readers, the value of this book lies as much in its questions as its answers. It models how a historian constructs a map of the past, revealing the assumptions that lurk inside deceptively familiar labels like ancient, medieval, and modern. Read critically, it becomes a case study in how a nineteenth-century scholar organized European history and why those choices mattered for teaching and public understanding. It invites reflection on present-day period boundaries, on what belongs inside a European narrative, and on how shifting our categories can surface new connections or eclipse important experiences.
Freeman’s organizing impulse lends the lectures a clear architecture: each major phase is introduced, bounded, and then linked to the next through recurring themes of sovereignty, community, and communication. He foregrounds the interaction of states and empires, the transformation of institutions, and the relations between local freedoms and overarching authorities, setting a political and constitutional spine to the story without excluding broader cultural forces. The emphasis is on coherence rather than comprehensiveness, offering a navigable outline that readers can carry into more detailed studies, and a reminder that every survey rests on choices that merit scrutiny.
Approached in this spirit, The Chief Periods of European History becomes both a primer and a provocation: an accessible pathway into a vast subject and a prompt to reconsider how we divide the whole. Students will find a steady orientation to major contours; general readers will gain a compact framework that rewards comparison with other surveys. Rather than replacing close study, it prepares the ground for it, equipping readers with landmarks, cautions, and durable questions. In bringing a lecture-room clarity to the grand sweep, the book offers a disciplined vantage from which to revisit Europe’s past with renewed purpose.
Synopsis
Edward A. Freeman’s The Chief Periods of European History offers a compact map of the continent’s development from classical antiquity to the nineteenth century. Presented as a series of lectures, the book divides the past into distinct, connected eras, showing how institutions, peoples, and beliefs carried forward through change. Freeman outlines his organizing principles: the enduring legacy of Rome, the role of Christianity, the emergence of Germanic peoples, and the formation of the European state system. Rather than narrating every event, he identifies turning points that mark shifts in political authority and cultural unity, establishing a framework for understanding Europe’s continuous historical thread.
Freeman begins with the classical foundation, contrasting the civic freedom of the Greek city-states with Rome’s expanding commonwealth. He stresses how Rome transformed a Mediterranean world into a political unity, extending citizenship, law, and administrative practice across provinces. The pairing of Latin West and Greek East created a dual heritage, while the spread of Christianity introduced a new universal bond. By emphasizing the Roman idea of the res publica and later empire, the book sets the stage for understanding later claims to legitimacy. The classical world furnishes Europe with law, language, urban governance, and the concept of a supranational authority.
With the weakening of Western imperial structures, Freeman describes the settlement of Germanic peoples within Roman lands. Instead of a sudden collapse, he characterizes a transition in which Roman law, municipal life, and the episcopate survived under new rulers. Visigoths, Ostrogoths, Vandals, and Lombards established kingdoms that adapted Roman frameworks to their own customs. Meanwhile, the imperial center at Constantinople endured, maintaining the idea of a continuous empire. The bishop of Rome and other ecclesiastical authorities gained wider social roles, bridging communities. The period illustrates persistence amid transformation, as late Roman and Teutonic elements combined to shape early medieval political life.
Turning eastward, the narrative examines the Eastern Roman Empire, which preserved imperial institutions, classical learning, and a centralized administration. Justinian’s reign, marked by codification of law and temporary reconquests, represents a high point of continuity with Rome. The rise of Islam introduced a lasting geopolitical realignment: Arab conquests transformed the Mediterranean balance and narrowed Byzantine territory, while also reshaping trade and culture. Freeman underscores the Eastern Empire’s defensive role as a shield for Europe and a custodian of Roman statecraft. This stage highlights endurance under pressure, as the imperial ideal persisted in the East while the West evolved along new lines.
In the West, the Frankish power becomes the primary vehicle for reconstituting broader political order. The Merovingian foundations give way to Carolingian leadership, with Charles Martel’s military consolidation and Pepin’s alliance with the papacy reinforcing secular-ecclesiastical cooperation. Charlemagne’s coronation signals a revived imperial title in the West, integrating Frankish rule with Roman and Christian symbolism. Freeman treats this act as a pivotal moment in Western Christendom’s organization, forging ties between empire and church that would shape later conflicts. The Carolingian realm also accelerates the feudal arrangement, while promoting learning and administration that sought to standardize governance across a vast territory.
After the Carolingian division, the imperial idea passes chiefly to the German kings, forming the Holy Roman Empire. Freeman follows the Ottonian consolidation, the empire’s claims in Italy, and the recurring entanglement with papal authority. The Investiture controversy exemplifies the struggle over spiritual and temporal jurisdictions within a unified Christian community. Alongside these contests, the Crusades mobilize Western Europe for external campaigns, displaying both shared religious purpose and emerging political diversity. Municipal growth, knightly orders, and legal development accompany these movements. The period defines medieval Europe’s core institutions: empire, papacy, feudal relations, and the corporate bodies that mediate power.
As medieval structures mature, the book tracks the strengthening of territorial monarchies and representative practices. In England, the convergence of Norman institutions with older customs fosters parliamentary forms; in France, Capetian centralization expands royal authority; in Spain, dynastic unions advance unification. Italy and Germany remain politically divided, despite cultural prominence and imperial claims. Freeman situates the Renaissance within this consolidation, noting revived learning and urban wealth. Overseas exploration by Iberian powers opens new routes and colonies, shifting Europe’s economic axis. The Ottoman advance reorients strategic concerns, while Europe’s internal arrangements move toward a system of interacting, self-conscious states.
The Reformation introduces confessional plurality, reshaping allegiance and governance across the continent. Freeman summarizes how religious and political motives intertwine, leading to civil and international conflicts that weaken imperial cohesion and elevate sovereign states. The Dutch Republic and England exemplify maritime and commercial ascendancy, while absolutist models take firmer shape elsewhere. The Thirty Years’ War and the Peace of Westphalia mark a settlement recognizing state autonomy and legal equality within a European society of states. Thereafter, diplomacy develops the balance of power as a guiding principle, mediating rivalry and cooperation among kingdoms, republics, and empires across early modern Europe.
In closing, the narrative moves from eighteenth-century rivalries to revolutionary transformation. The French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars reorder territorial arrangements, spread new legal codes, and stimulate national sentiment. The nineteenth century witnesses restoration, concert diplomacy, and waves of reform, culminating in the national unifications of Italy and Germany. Constitutional experiments broaden participation in several states, while empires manage diverse populations and expanding interests. Freeman presents this modern system as heir to ancient and medieval legacies: Roman law, Christian institutions, and Germanic polity. The book’s central message is Europe’s continuous development through distinct periods, each redefining but preserving its common inheritance.
Historical Context
Edward A. Freeman’s The Chief Periods of European History emerged in late-Victorian Britain, principally from lectures he delivered as Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford in the mid‑1880s. The work reflects a milieu shaped by the professionalization of history, archival methods popularized by Leopold von Ranke, and a British imperial vantage that prized constitutional development. It was conceived amid public debates on nationalism and empire—the Eastern Question, the 1876 Bulgarian atrocities controversy, and Gladstonian liberalism—alongside Oxford reforms that expanded historical study. From this context, Freeman organized Europe’s past into decisive political epochs, emphasizing institutional continuity from Rome through the Middle Ages to modern nation‑states.
Freeman anchors his first period in the transformation of the Roman world. Diocletian’s reforms (284–305) and Constantine’s rule (306–337) reshaped administration and Christianity’s place in imperial life, while the empire’s division deepened after Theodosius I (d. 395). Barbarian pressures culminated in the battle of Adrianople (378), the sack of Rome (410), and the deposition of Romulus Augustulus by Odoacer (476). Yet Roman law, municipal life, and the Eastern Empire at Constantinople endured. The book treats this as a matrix in which Germanic peoples—Goths, Franks, Lombards—built successor kingdoms atop Roman frameworks. Freeman uses the continuity of institutions to periodize the passage from antiquity to medieval Europe.
The Carolingian consolidation and its legacies form a central medieval hinge. Charlemagne’s imperial coronation at Rome in 800 and governance from Aachen created a Latin Christian commonwealth, later fractured by the Treaty of Verdun (843) into West, Middle, and East Francia—seeds of France, Lotharingia–Italy, and Germany. The Ottonian revival culminated with Otto I’s imperial coronation (962), while the Papacy–Empire struggle defined the political map: Gregory VII’s challenge to Henry IV, Canossa (1077), and the Concordat of Worms (1122). With Frederick I Barbarossa and the Lombard League at Legnano (1176), the balance between city liberties, papal authority, and imperial claims took shape. Freeman frames these contests as a period that forged European pluralism.
For Freeman, the Norman Conquest of England (1066) and the constitutional evolution it set in motion constitute a decisive European turning point. Edward the Confessor’s death in January 1066 triggered rival claims; Harold Godwinson’s victory at Stamford Bridge (25 September) was followed by William of Normandy’s triumph at Hastings (14 October). William I was crowned at Westminster on Christmas Day 1066. The settlement combined harsh measures—the Harrying of the North (1069–1070) and the Domesday survey (1086)—with institutional continuity: shires, hundreds, and the king’s court survived, now embedded in a feudal landholding order. Under Henry II (1154–1189), the Assize of Clarendon (1166), itinerant justices, and the emergence of jury trial built the common law; the Becket conflict (1170) dramatized church–crown tensions. King John’s concessions at Runnymede produced Magna Carta (1215), asserting rule-of-law limits on royal power. Mid‑century baronial reform (Provisions of Oxford, 1258) and Simon de Montfort’s Parliament (1265) prefaced Edward I’s Model Parliament (1295), widening the political community. Freeman reads this arc—fusion of Norman energy with English legal traditions—as emblematic of European constitutional development: conquest tempered by law, local institutions harnessed to central authority, and representative structures emerging within a feudal framework. In the book’s periodization, 1066 demarcates not merely a national watershed but a model for how polities across Europe reconciled aristocratic power, royal administration, and communal liberties to create enduring states.
The Crusades (1095–1291) and shifting frontiers between Latin Christendom and Byzantium, and later the Ottomans, supply another organizing period. The First Crusade captured Jerusalem in 1099; the Fourth Crusade sacked Constantinople in 1204, creating a Latin Empire until 1261. The Ottoman advance—from Kosovo (1389) to the fall of Constantinople (1453), the sieges of Vienna (1529, 1683), and the Treaty of Karlowitz (1699)—recast southeastern Europe. Freeman’s book situates Christendom’s east–west realignments within long political rhythms. His companion writings, The Ottoman Power in Europe (1877) and Balkan travel, link the narrative to contemporary crises (the 1877–1878 war and Congress of Berlin), using medieval frontiers to interpret 19th‑century national claims.
The Renaissance and Reformation reorder Europe’s polity and belief. Luther’s Wittenberg theses (1517), the Diet of Worms (1521), and the Peace of Augsburg (1555) institutionalized confessional pluralism; Calvin’s Geneva influenced transnational Protestantism. England’s Act of Supremacy (1534) and the Elizabethan Settlement (1559), resisted by the 1588 Armada, set a distinct path. The Council of Trent (1545–1563) structured Catholic renewal. The Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648) ended with Westphalia, codifying state sovereignty and noninterference. Freeman deploys these moments as a period boundary separating a united Latin Christendom from a state system whose legitimacy rests on territorial rulers and legal order—an axis essential to his constitutional narrative.
Modern nation‑states and revolutions complete the sequence. The French Revolution (1789) and Napoleon’s empire (1804–1815) dissolved old regimes; Vienna (1814–1815) constructed the Concert of Europe. The 1830 and 1848 revolutions pressed constitutional claims; Italian unification (1861, Rome 1870) and German unification (1871 at Versailles) embedded nationhood in power politics, while the Austro‑Hungarian Compromise (1867) reconfigured imperial governance. The Franco‑Prussian War (1870–1871) recast the balance of power, and the Russo‑Turkish War (1877–1878) with the Congress of Berlin (1878) reopened the Eastern Question. Freeman integrates these events as the culmination of medieval legacies—cities, estates, and law—arguing that modern national polities stand on institutional continuities reaching back to Rome and the Germanic kingdoms.
As social and political critique, the book advances a constitutional ethic against Caesarism, imperial absolutism, and clerical overreach. By elevating municipal liberties, representative assemblies, and the rule of law—from Magna Carta (1215) to the post‑Westphalian state—it challenges the legitimacy of arbitrary authority and inherited privilege detached from civic consent. His treatment of the Papacy–Empire struggle exposes the dangers of monopolized sovereignty; his emphasis on national self‑determination implicitly rebukes multiethnic despotisms such as Ottoman rule in Europe. While marked by Victorian assumptions, the work uses periodization to interrogate his own age: urging parliamentary governance, legal accountability, and the primacy of civic communities over dynastic or bureaucratic domination.
The Chief Periods of European History
PREFACE.
These are the Lectures referred to in the last paragraph of the Preface to the course on the “Methods of Historical Study,” lately published. I have added to them the second of two articles which appeared in the Contemporary Review for 1884. The former of them, “Some Neglected Periods of European History,” I have not reprinted, as its substance will be found in the present course. The second, “Greek Cities under Roman Rule,” as dealing somewhat more in detail with some points which are barely glanced at in the present course, seemed to make a fitting Appendix to it.
I find that the same thought as to the political result of modern scientific inventions which is brought out at pp. 184, 185 of these Lectures is also brought out in the Lecture at Edinburgh, reprinted in my little book “Greater Greece and Greater Britain,” published last May. This kind of thing is always likely to happen in lectures given in different places. It seemed to me that the thought came naturally in both lectures, and that either would lose something by its being struck out. As for those who may be so unlucky as to read both, I can only say that a thought which is worth suggesting once is worth suggesting twice. At least I have often found it so in the writings of others, specially in those of Mr. Grote.
The two courses of Oxford lectures which have now been printed are both introductory. In this present course the division into periods which is attempted is, on the face of it, only one among many which might be made. Another man might divide on some principle altogether different; I might myself divide on some other principle in another course of lectures. My present object was to set forth as strongly as possible, at the beginning of my teaching here, the main outlines of European history, as grouped round its central point, the Roman power. The main periods suggested by such a view of things are those which concern the growth and the dying-out of that power—Europe before the growth of Rome—Europe with Rome, in one shape or another, as her centre—Europe since Rome has practically ceased to be. When this main outline, a somewhat formal one, has once been established, it is easy at once to fill in and to subdivide in an endless number of ways and from an endless number of points of view. Thus I have at present little to do with the political developement of particular nations. Of some branches of that subject I have treated at some length in other shapes; I may, in the course of my work here, have to treat of others. But they are not my subject now. Nor have I now to deal with the great events and the great institutions of Europe, except so far as they helped to work out the one main outline which I have tried to draw. The power of the Popes may be looked at in a thousand ways; it concerns me now only in its strictly Roman aspect, as one, and the greatest, of the survivals of Roman power. The great French Revolution again may be looked on in a thousand ways. It concerns me now as having led to the sweeping away of the last relics of the old Roman tradition, and as having set up for a while the most memorable of conscious imitations of the Roman power. I say all this, that no one may be disappointed if he fails to find in this thin volume even a summary of all European history, much less a philosophical discussion of all European history. My business now is simply to draw an outline, ready either for myself or for others to fill up in various ways.
These two introductory courses make up the result of my public work as Professor during my first year of office, 1884-5. Besides these, there was the minute study of Gregory of Tours[1] with a smaller class, followed by the like study of Paul the Deacon. In my second year, 1885-6, I have, besides this study of texts, been engaged, as I said in my former Preface, with public lectures of a much more minute kind, on the history of the Teutonic nations in Gaul. These I do not design to publish as lectures. If I live long enough, I trust to make my way through them to an older subject of mine, the Teutonic settlements in Britain. Neither the history of Gaul nor the history of Britain in the fifth century A.D. can be fully understood—it follows that the whole later history of the two lands cannot be fully understood—without comparing it with the history of the other land. In dealing with Goths, Burgundians, and Franks, the comparison and contrast with Angles, Saxons, and Jutes, if it sometimes passes out of the immediate sight, must never be allowed to pass out of the mind’s eye. The broad light of the history of Gaul is the best comment on the yet more instructive darkness of the history of Britain.
This subject brings me at once within the range of controversy. I believe that the doctrine for which I have struggled so long, the doctrine, as I have somewhere put it epigramatically, that we, the English people, are ourselves and not somebody else, is now often held to be altogether set aside. Only a few old-fashioned people like myself are thought likely to maintain it. Yet, whenever I come across these new lights, I always begin to doubt whether those who kindle them have ever minutely contrasted the circumstances or the results of the Teutonic settlements in Britain with those of the better known Teutonic settlements in Gaul. Now this is the very root of the matter; in discoursing of the phænomena of Gaul, I have always had an eye to the phænomena of Britain, and I trust some day, if I am ever able to work through my materials, to set forth the contrast in full. To this object the lectures which I am now gradually giving will, I hope, serve; but it will be best to put no essential part of them forth to the world till I can deal with the subject as a whole. Till then I will simply put on record, for the benefit of those who may have heard statements attributed to me which they have certainly not read in my writings, that I have nowhere said, because I never thought, that every one Briton was necessarily killed, even in those parts of Britain which became most thoroughly Teutonic. At the same time, I think that every one who really reads his Gregory and his Bæda, every one who carefully compares the map of Gaul with the map of Britain, every one who stops to think over the history of the French and the English tongues—and the history of the Welsh tongue too will not do him any harm—may possibly come to the conclusion that the doctrine that Englishmen after all are Englishmen has really some little to be said for it.
16, St. Giles’, Oxford,October 18, 1886.
LECTURE I. EUROPE BEFORE THE ROMAN POWER.
In my first course of public lectures I did my best to speak in a general way of the nature of historical study, of its kindred pursuits, of the difficulties by which it is beset and of the most hopeful means of overcoming them. I spoke of the nature of the evidence with which we have to deal in the search after historic truth, and of the nature of the witnesses by whom that evidence is handed down to us. In future courses I trust to apply the principles which I then strove to lay down to the study of some of the most memorable periods since the point at which, if at any point, the special business of this chair begins. That we have ruled to be the point at which the Teutonic and Slavonic nations[2] first began to play a chief part in the great drama of the history of Western man. In the present term I ask your attention to a course which will attempt to fill a place intermediate between these two, and which may naturally serve as a link between them. Now that we have laid down rules for the general guidance of our studies, while we are looking forward to a more minute dealing with the history of some specially memorable lands and times, we may, as the intermediate stage, do our best to part off the history of man, such parts of it at least as concern us, into a few great and strongly-marked periods. In my former course, while taking a very general view of my whole subject, I did not feel myself bound to keep within any artificial limits, whether of my own fixing or of any other man’s. When speaking of evidence and of authorities, I drew my illustrations as freely from centuries before our æra as from centuries after it. In my present course I must make a yet more direct and open raid into the territories of my ancient brother. The history of the Teuton and the Slave, since the days when those races came to the forefront of the nations in the fourth, fifth, sixth, and seventh centuries of our æra, will be simply unintelligible if we do not attempt at least a general picture of that elder world into which they made their way, and of the course of events which gave that world the shape in which they found it. But my sojourn in the lands which are ruled to belong to another will not be a long one; before a ξενηλασία or an Alien Act[6] can be hurled at me, I shall be gone. It will be only for the space of about a thousand years that I need tarry beyond the frontier which after all is a frontier of my own choosing. And I shall always welcome my ancient brother on a return visit of at least the same length. If I claim to walk lightly at his side through the ages between the first Olympiad[5] and the great Teutonic invasion of Gaul, I bid him walk more steadily, more abidingly, at my side through the ages between the Teutonic invasion of Gaul and the Ottoman conquest of Trebizond. In my next academic year I shall not need to ask leave to play truant even for so short a space as I have spoken of. My main subject will then lie fully within the barrier. We shall cross the Rhine and the Channel with the Vandal and the Saxon of the fifth century. And if it may still be sometimes needful to look back to Arminius and Ariovistus, to remember that men of our own stock fought against Gaius Julius and Gaius Marius, we can in return again call on our elder brethren to look forward for a far longer space, to assure them that we hold them thoroughly at home, not only in the Rome, Western or Eastern, of any age, but in the Aquæ Grani of Frankish Cæsars and in the Jerusalem of Lotharingian Kings.
There is one truth which in one sense I need not set forth again—it has been my lot to set it forth so often—but which I must none the less set forth almost every time that I open my mouth among you, for it must be the groundwork of my whole teaching, as it is the groundwork of all sound historic teaching. This is the truth that the centre of our studies, the goal of our thoughts, the point to which all paths lead and the point from which all paths start again, is to be found in Rome and her abiding power. It is, as I said the first time I came before you, one of the greatest of the evils which spring from our artificial distinctions where there are no distinctions in nature, from our formal barriers where there are no barriers in fact, that this greatest and simplest of historic truths is thereby wholly overshadowed. He who ends his work in 476 and he who begins his work in 476 can neither of them ever understand in its fulness the abiding life of Rome, neither can fully grasp the depth and power of that truest of proverbial sayings which speaks of Rome as the Eternal City. And none but those who have thoroughly grasped the place of Rome in the history of the world can ever fully understand the most notable historic feature of the age in which we ourselves live. We live in an age from which Rome has passed away, an age at least in which Rome has lost her headship. And, by one of the wonderful cycles of history, the Romeless world from which Rome has passed away is in not a few points a return to the elder Romeless world on which Rome had not yet risen. In both alike the European world lacks a centre; in both alike, each city or nation does what is right in its own eyes, without even the theory of a controlling power. The fuller carrying out of this analogy I keep for the last lecture of the present course. I have now only to divide my subject into three great and marked periods. We have Europe before the headship of Rome arose. We have Europe under the headship of Rome, even if that headship was sometimes disputed and divided. Lastly, we have Europe since the headship of Rome has altogether passed away. It is the first of these three periods of which I wish to give such a sketch to-day as may at least put it in its right relation to the periods which follow it.
But there is one aspect in which all those periods form one whole; there is one tie which binds all three together; there has been one abiding duty which has been laid on Aryan Europe[4] in all her phases, before Rome, under Rome, and after Rome. One “question” has, in the cant of the day, been “awaiting its solution,” from the beginning of recorded history, and from a time long before recorded history. That is the question on which a shallow sneerer, in the lucky wisdom of his blindness, bestowed the epithet of “Eternal.” Happily indeed did he transfer to that abiding strife the epithet of the city whose sons bore so long and mighty a part in it. It is the “Eternal Eastern Question[3],” the undying question between the civilization of the West and the barbarism of the East, a question which has here and there taken into its company such side issues as the strife between freedom and bondage, between Christendom and Islam, but which is in its essence simply that yet older strife of whose earlier stages Herodotus so well grasped the meaning. It is a strife which has, as far as we can look back, put on the familiar shape of a strife between East and West. And in that abiding strife, that Eternal Question, the men of the Eternal City, Scipio and Sulla, Trajan and Julian, played their part well indeed; but it was waged before them and after them as far back as the days of Agamemnôn and Achilleus, as near to the present moment as the days of Codrington and Skobeleff. In all ages, from the earliest to the latest, before the championship passed to Rome and after it had passed away from Rome, two great and abiding duties have been laid on Aryan Europe and on the several powers of Aryan Europe. They have been called on to develope the common institutions of the great family within its own borders; and they have been called on to defend those borders and those institutions against the inroads of the barbarian from without.
When our historic scene first opens, those twofold duties were laid on a small branch of the European family, and that the branch that dwelled nearest to the lands of the enemy. It is not without a cause that those lands of Europe which lie nearest to Asia—we might almost add, those lands of Asia which are historically part of Europe—are in their physical construction the most European of European lands. Europe is the continent of islands, peninsulas, and inland seas; the lands round the Ægæan, its Asiatic as well as its European shore, form more thoroughly a world of islands, peninsulas, and inland seas than any other part of Europe or of the world. The Greek land was made for its people, and the Greek people for their land. I remember well the saying of one in this place with whom geographical insight is an instinct, that neither the Greeks in any other land nor any other people in Greece could have been what the Greeks in Greece actually were. The mission of the Greek race was to be the teachers, the lights, the beacons, of mankind, but not their rulers. They were to show what man could be, in a narrow space and in a short space of time; they were to show every faculty developed to its highest point, to give models of every form of political constitution, of every form of intellectual life, to bring to perfection among themselves and to hand on to all future ages that most perfect form of human speech, a living knowledge of which is still the one truest test of the highest culture. Greece was given to be the mistress of the world in the sense of being the world’s highest intellectual teacher;[1q] it was not hers to be the mistress of the world in the sense in which that calling fell to another of the great peninsulas of southern Europe. Deep and abiding as has been the influence of old Greece on every later age, her influence has been almost wholly indirect; it has been an influence of example, of precept, of warning; it has not been an influence of direct cause and effect. In one sense the world could never have been what it now is if the men of old Hellas had not lived and fought and thought and sung. But it is in another sense from that in which we say that the world could not be what it now is if the men of old Rome had not lived and fought, and—we will not say thought and sung, but ruled and judged the nations. It is indeed no small thought, it is one of the most quickening and ennobling of thoughts, that those men of Hellas were our kinsfolk, men of the same great family as ourselves,[2q] men whose institutions and whose speech are simply other and older forms of the speech and institutions of our own folk. The ancient lore alike of Greece and of England puts on a keener charm when we see in the Agorê before Ilios the same gathering under well nigh the same forms as we see in the Marzfeld beneath the walls of Rheims and in the Gemót beneath the walls of London. We seem more at home alike in either age when we see the ἑταῖροι, the θεράποντες, that fought around Achilleus rise again in the true gesiðas, the faithful þegnas, of our own folk, in Lilla who gave his life for Eadwine and in the men who died, thegn-like, their lord hard by, around the corpse of Brihtnoth at Maldon. Still all this is but likeness, example, analogy, derivation from a common source; we are dealing, not with forefathers but with elder brethren. The laws of Lykourgos and Solôn have passed away; it is the laws of Servius and Justinian that still abide. The empire of Mykênê, the democracy of Athens, the league of Achaia, are all things of the past. If the Empire of Rome is no longer a thing of the present, if it has passed away, if it is dead and buried, it is well to remember that there are still men living who have seen its funeral. I am myself not old enough to have seen its funeral; but I have before now seen some look amazed when I told them that I had lived on the earth for twelve years along with a man who had once been Emperor of the Romans.
The days before the Roman power may be looked on as in some sort the preface to a volume the last page of which is not written, as the porch of a building which still stands and which architects to come may still add to or take from. It is with Rome that the chapters of the book itself begin; it is Rome that reared the first still inhabited chambers of the house. Or we may rather say that the tale of the days before Rome is a summary, short and brilliant, of all that man has done or can do. The tale of Hellas shows us a glorified ideal of human powers, held up to the world for a moment to show what man can be, but to show us also that such he cannot be for long. And herein is the highest glory of Greece; herein is the highest value of the tongue and history of Greece as supplying the truest and noblest teaching for the mind of man. In no other study are we so truly seeking knowledge simply to raise and school the mind; in none do we so sharply draw the still abiding line between those who have gone through the refining furnace of those immortal studies and the barbarians—sometimes the self-condemned barbarians—who stand without. When we study the tongue, the laws, the history, of our own people, of any people of our immediate kindred, of that people who, whether conquering or conquered, were still the masters of us all, we are as it were engaged in our own work, we are busy with the toil of our own daily life; it is still something of a business, something of a calling. In our Hellenic studies we stand on a loftier height, we breathe a purer air, even as the peak of Olympos overtops the height of Alba. We master the tongue of Latium, because it is still the tongue of no small part of the business of practical life, because it meets us at every turn as an essential part of our own law, our own history, our very daily being. We master the tongue of Hellas as being in itself the first and noblest form of the common speech, as the tongue which, in its native and unborrowed strength, brought forth the greatest master-pieces of every form of lettered utterance, those master-pieces which none can know save those who can follow the very words of the poet, the orator, the philosopher himself, and who are not at the mercy of some blind guide who vainly strives to reproduce those living words in ruder tongues. After long years of familiar knowledge, we need hardly sigh for the days when those deathless works were fresh to us. The tale of Ilios and Ithakê, the oldest inheritance of the common folk, the oldest picture of the common household, is ever living, ever fresh. We can but pity the doom of those who, by their own act or by the act of others, are shut out from it.
The beginnings then of European history, more strictly perhaps the beginnings of the brilliant prologue to unbroken European history, will be found in the borderlands of Europe and Asia, among the islands and peninsulas of the Ægæan sea. I am speaking now of history in the narrower sense, of the continuous political history of man. With the strangers who lay without the great brotherhood, ancient as may have been their power, mighty as may have been their works, we have to deal only when they come across the men of our own household. We begin in short with the first beginnings of the recorded history of Greece, with the first Olympiad as a conventional date, but not forgetting times before the first Olympiad so far as our earliest pictures carry us back to yet older times. I cleave to the date which I proposed in my Inaugural Lecture. I have to be sure come across a singular objection from a critic in this place. I have been told that, by beginning with the first Olympiad, I leave out all Mahometan history. There are then, one must think, those who believe that all Mahometan history took place before the first Olympiad. “Felices errore suo.” I can only heartily wish that it were so, and that the Ottoman was a thing as dead and gone as the Hittite. I fear that, beginning with 776 B.C., nay even if we begin with the mystic year 476 A.D., we shall still have all Mahometan history in front of us, and that the needs of our tale will drive us to take not a few glimpses at that side of the world. From the very beginning we have to do with powers which filled the same place in the world which the Mahometan powers filled in after ages, the powers against which our eldest brethren had to wage the earlier stages of the strife which still is waging. With ingenious speculations as to the earliest origin, the earliest settlements, the earliest forms of speech, of the Hellenic folk, I am not, in such a summary as this, called on to concern myself. I gladly leave them to my ancient brother. I have to deal with the Greek when he appears on the stage of the world as the first champion of the great cause and as waging a strife against worthy rivals. One people alone in the barbarian world have even the shadow of a right to be placed side by side, to be dealt with as ebenbürtig, with the men of Hellas. In the men of Canaan the men of Hellas had to acknowledge rivals who were largely forerunners and in some sort masters. Greece had ships, colonies, and commerce; but Phœnicia had ships, colonies, and commerce in days earlier still. How high in all the material arts the Phœnician stood above the earliest Greek we see in our earliest picture of Hellenic life. Not to speak of lesser gifts, we all bear in our minds that it was from the Phœnician that Hellas must first have learned to carve the abiding records of man’s thought on the stone, on the brazen or wooden tablet, on the leaves of Egypt and on the skins of Pergamon. The political life of Greece was her own; that assuredly was no borrowed gift from Tyre or Sidon; yet Tyre and Sidon and that mightier Carthage whose institutions Aristotle studied had a political life of their own which brought them nearer to the Hellenic level than any other people beyond the Aryan fold. Only, if we must admit that the men of Canaan were on some points the teachers of the men of Hellas, yet it was the men of Hellas and not the men of Canaan to whom destiny had given the call to be the teachers of the world. It is a strange destiny by which the people who gave Greece the art of writing should have left to us no writings to hand down to us the thoughts and deeds of a world of their own that has passed away. Strange destiny that, while so large a part of the acts of the Phœnician are recorded by Greek and Roman enemies, while the tongue of the Phœnician may be said still to live for us in the speech of the kindred Hebrew, yet the direct memorials of so great a people should not go beyond a few coins, a few inscriptions, a few ruins of cities which once held their place among the mightiest of the earth.
