T

BARTHOLD GEORG NIEBUHR

(1776-1831)

HE history of belles-lettres could very well be written without the inclusion of Niebuhr's name. He has not left any important masterpiece of artistic form, nor appreciably enriched the imagination of mankind. Indeed, we might rather consider ourselves to have been impoverished, on that happier side of life, by the investigator who forbade us to regard Æneas, Romulus, and Numa, or even the Tarquins and the Horatii, as in any sense realities. Yet certainly the development of a wiser historical method, the study of human institutions, the higher education generally, will always owe him a mighty debt. He was, in the truest sense of a word commoner in its Teutonic than in its Anglo-Saxon form, "epochemachend"- epoch-making. Until his time, students had merely read Livy and Dionysius, accepting all save the super-human elements of early Roman story, or merely doubting and caviling over this and that detail. Niebuhr was the first who relegated the whole mass of traditional tales in Livy's first five books to the realm of the imagination, and showed how the historic institutions of later Rome must be studied for the light they, and they alone, could throw upon their own origin in the age previous to authentic record. Even for the ablest application of this critical method we no longer turn to Niebuhr's fragmentary publications, but rather to the more picturesque and vivid pages of his successor, Mommsen. Yet it may well be questioned whether he who uses the tool deserves higher credit than he who forges it; the man in whom the school culminates rather than its founder. Certainly no one could recognize more loyally than Mommsen himself the man whose lectures on Roman history were the most brilliant work done in the newly founded University of Berlin in 1810 and the next following years.

The story of Niebuhr's life is delightfully told, chiefly by himself, in his Life and Letters,' edited by the Chevalier Bunsen. It is full of singular contradictions. Though the son of a famous traveler, he complains that he was brought up in seclusion, fed on words instead of knowing things. But indeed a certain querulousness is a constant weakness of this noble nature. He was certainly a prodigy of learning. When he was barely of age his father reckons up twenty languages which the youth had mastered. His memory seems to have

XVIII-667

been both accurate and unlimited in its scope. Along with it went a power of combination and brilliant deduction still more unusual.

Though Niebuhr was a Dane, his education was apparently more than half German. His last student-year, 1798-9, was passed at Edinburgh. To his English and Scotch experience he felt that he owed his insight into business affairs. Perhaps in that epoch of upheaval an ambitious young scholar could hardly keep out of political life. Certainly Niebuhr made his first career as a man of affairs. More difficult still to understand is his acceptance of a call from Denmark to Prussia. He arrived just in time to share the disasters of the Napoleonic invasion in 1806. He was perhaps Stein's most trusted assistant in preparing for the revival of Prussia.

Niebuhr was unable to settle down as a university scholar. His hold on political affairs was indeed never wholly relaxed, and six years after the university was opened he bade farewell to Berlin, being sent as Prussian ambassador to the Pope. Returning to Germany in 1823, Niebuhr passed the last years of his life quietly as a professor, student, and author, at Bonn.

His death was felt to be premature. His varied and crowded life up to his fiftieth year had seemed like a long education, and a gathering of materials for the great constructive work which he might have accomplished. No modern scholar, perhaps, has had so firm a grasp on the records and isolated facts of ancient life. None, surely, ever had firmer confidence in his own ability to redraw the great picture of that life in truthful outlines. Yet his name lives chiefly as the creator of a method, and his disciples' books are more indispensable to us than his own. Perhaps this is after all a cheerful epitaph on a great teacher; and all later students of history, of institutions, of antiquity, are in varying degree his pupils. Lanciani, who would revive our faith even in Romulus, owes to Niebuhr little less than Mommsen, who hardly mentions Livy or Livy's heroes in his chapters on early Rome.

Besides the excellent Life and Letters' by Bunsen (Harpers, 1852), Niebuhr's works on ancient history are accessible in English, partly in authentic form, partly in very fragmentary shape pieced out from note-books. The most adequate impression will be gained from his 'History of Rome,' Vols. i., ii., iii., as translated by Hare and Thirlwall, London, 1851.

PLAN FOR A COMPLETE HISTORY OF ROME

From the Introduction to the History of Rome.' Translation of Hare and

I

Thirlwall

HAVE undertaken to relate the history of Rome.

I shall begin

in the night of remote antiquity, where the most laborious researches can scarcely discern a few of the chief members of ancient Italy, by the dim light of late and dubious traditions; and I wish to come down to those times when, all that we have seen spring up and grow old in the long course of centuries being buried in ruins or in the grave, a second night envelops it in almost equal obscurity.

This history in its chief outlines is universally known; and by very many, at least in part, immediately from the classical works of Roman authors, so far as their remains supply us with a representation of several of the most brilliant and memorable periods of republican and imperial Rome. If the whole of these works were extant,-if we possessed a continuous narrative in the histories of Livy and Tacitus, extending, with the exception of the last years of Augustus, from the origin of the city down to Nerva, it would be presumptuous and idle to engage in relating the same events with those historians: presumptuous, because the beauty of their style must ever lie beyond our reach; and idle, because, over and above the historical instruction conveyed, it would be impossible to have a companion through life better fitted to fashion the mind in youth, and to preserve it in after age from the manifold barbarizing influences of our circumstances and relations, than such a copious history of eight hundred and fifty years written by the Romans for themselves. We should only want to correct the misrepresentations during the earlier ages, and to sever the poetical ingredients from what is historically sure and well grounded; and without presumptuously appearing to vie with the old masters, we might draw a simple sketch of the constitution, and of the changes it underwent at particular times, where Livy leaves us without information, or misleads us. But as those works are only preserved in fragments; as they are silent concerning periods perhaps still more prominent in the importance of their events than those which we see living in their pages; as the histories of those periods. by moderns are unsatisfactory, and often full of error,- I have deemed it expedient to promote the knowledge of Roman history