"Ab initio rerum Romanarum,"says the same interlocutor,"usque ad P.Mucium pontificem maximum,res omnes singulorum annorum mandabat literis pontifex maximus,efferebatque in album,et proponebat tabulam domi,potestas ut esset populo cognoscendi;idemque etiam nunc annales maximi nominantur."But,my lord,be pleased to take notice,that the very distinction I make is made here between a bare annalist and a historian:"erat historia nihil aliud,"in these early days,"nisi annalium confectio."Take notice likewise,by the way,that Livy,whose particular application it had been to search into this matter,affirms positively that the greatest part of all public and private monuments,among which he specifies these very annals,had been destroyed in the sack of Rome by the Gauls:and Plutarch cites Clodius for the same assertion,in the life of Numa Pompilius.Take notice,in the last place,of that which is more immediately to our present purpose.These annals could contain nothing more than short minutes or memorandums hung up in a table at the pontiff's house,like the rules of the game in the billiard-room,and much such history as we have in the epitomes prefixed to the books of Livy or of any other historian,in lapidary inions,or in some modern almanacs.Materials for history they were no doubt,hut scanty and insufficient;such as those ages could produce when writing and reading were accomplishments so uncommon,that the praetor was directed by law,"clavum pangere,"to drive a nail into the door of a temple,that the number of years might be reckoned by the number of nails.Such in short as we have in monkish annalists,and other ancient chroniclers of nations now in being:but not such as can entitle the authors of them to be called historians,nor can enable others to write history in that fulness in which it must be written to become a lesson of ethics and politics.The truth is,nations,like men,have their infancy:and the few passages of that time,which they retain,are not such as deserved most to be remembered;but such as,being most proportioned to that age,made the strongest impressions on their minds.In those nations that preserve their dominion long,and grow up to manhood,the elegant as well as the necessary arts and sciences are improved to some degree of perfection;and history,that was at first intended only to record the names,or perhaps the general characters of some famous men,and to transmit in gross the remarkable events of every age to posterity,is raised to answer another,and a nobler end.
II.Thus it happened among the Greeks,but much more among the Romans,notwithstanding the prejudices in favor of the former,even among the latter.
I have sometimes thought that Virgil might have justly ascribed to his countrymen the praise of writing history better,as well as that of affording the noblest subjects for it,in those famous verses,where the different excellences of the two nations are so finely touched:but he would have weakened perhaps by lengthening,and have flattened the climax.Open Herodotus,you are entertained by an agreeable story-teller,who meant to entertain,and nothing more.Read Thucydides or Xenophon,you are taught indeed as well as entertained:and the statesman or the general,the philosopher or the orator,speaks to you in every page.They wrote on subjects on which they were well informed,and they treated them fully:they maintained the dignity of history,and thought it beneath them to vamp up old traditions,like the writers of their age and country,and to be the trumpeters of a lying antiquity.The Cyropaedia of Xenophon may be objected perhaps;but if he gave it for a romance,not a history,as he might for aught we can tell,it is out of the case:and if he gave it for a history,not a romance,I should prefer his authority to that of Herodotus,or any other of his countrymen.But however this might be,and whatever merit we may justly ascribe to these two writers,who were almost single in their kind,and who treated but small portions of history;certain it is in general,that the levity as well as loquacity of the Greeks made them incapable of keeping up to the true standard of history:and even Polybius and Dionysius of Halicarnassus must bow to the great Roman authors.
Many principal men of that commonwealth wrote memorials of their own actions and their own times:Sylla,Caesar,Labienus,Pollio,Augustus,and others.
What writers of memorials,what compilers of the materia historica were these?
What genius was necessary to finish up the pictures that such masters had sketched?Rome afforded men that were equal to the task.Let the remains,the precious remains,of Sallust,of Livy,and of Tacitus,witness this truth.
When Tacitus wrote,even the appearances of virtue had been long proscribed,and taste was grown corrupt as well as manners.Yet history preserved her integrity and her lustre.She preserved them in the writings of some whom Tacitus mentions,in none perhaps more than his own;every line of which outweighs whole pages of such a rhetor as Famianus Strada.I single him out among the moderns,because he had the foolish presumption to censure Tacitus,and to write history himself:and your lordship will forgive this short excursion in honor of a favorite author.
