The Chief Periods of European History. Edward A. Freeman

Table of Contents

      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 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 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 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 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,” 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; 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