BOOKS OF THE DAY
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Th. t Cambridge Ancient History (The Warden of Wadham College) . . 676 Eastern Religions and Western Thought (C. E. M.
Joad) ... 678 The Military Strength of the Powers (W. T. Wells) 68o Education in Germany (Con O'Neill) ... 68o Searchlight on Social Credit (Honor Croome) 682 Fiction (Forrest Reid)
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THE CAMBRIDGE ANCIENT HISTORY
By C. M.-BOVVRA WITH the publication of its twelfth volume of text and its fifth volume of plates the Cambridge Ancient History has reached, with commendable speed, its close, and the majestic design of the great Lord Acton is now complete with the three series of ancient, mediaeval and modem histories. This East volume covers the period A.D. 193-324, from the death of Commodus to the triumph of Constantine over Licinius and the transference of his capital from Rome to Constantinople. It tells of that century and a half in which the Roman world was first torn by the competing ambitions of military leaders and then recovered its unity through reforms which altered its whole character and culture and ended in the extraordinary compromise which made the revolutionary force of Christi- anity an ally of the sovereign power. This period, so much more interesting to us than the Golden Age of the Antonines, has been immortalised by Gibbon, and the different authors of this volume can hardly have hoped to compete with that master of acute insight and telling phrase. Their task is not his. For much has been added to knowledge since Gibbon's time, and these modern historians widen our vision of the Roman world from the interchange of war and politics to something vaster and of more general interest. They give a picture of the empire in all its aspects—political, military, economic, cultural, religious and artistic. There are separate chapters on Persia and Britain, on economic life, on paganism and Christianity, on art, literature and philosophy.
No one can complain that the editors have taken a narrow view of their task, nor has the narrative been sacrificed in the interests of purely scientific history. Professor Alfoldi's account of Gallienus may contradict Gibbon's account of him as an "excellent cook and most contemptible prince," but it creates a new figure, energetic and resourceful, against the overwhelming difficulties of his time, while Professor Baynes' Constantine, seen with extremely sympathetic eyes, is a fine substitute for the adroit manipulator of men and policies in whom some of us may have believed. In a different way, Professor Rand's account of later Latin literature breathes warmth into such forbidding characters as Arnobius and Lactantious and removes them from the shelves of Des Esseintes' exotic library to a place nearer to the Romans of the classical age. In fact, this volume has a special charm because it uses research to enable us to unlearn what we learned at school, to see familiar characters in a new light, and to ask whether, after all, the rise of the Christian Church was so simple a matter as we may have believed.
Now that Lord Acton's dream has been realised, we may perhaps look round and see how his plan works for ancient history. From pre-glacial times to the triumph of Constan- tine is an enormous period, and even in strictly historic times the editors have included in their scope not merely Babylonia and Egypt, Greece and Rome, but outlying peoples like Scvthians and Persians and the many races ruled by Rome. In so wide a field we cannot expect, and we do not get, such a -unity as belonged to old-fashioned histories. The work is scientific in the sense that it preaches no lessons from the past, and though some of the chapters on Rome suggest an authoritarian bias in their writers, the editors are clearly innocent of all desire to make the past interesting for any- thing else than its own sake. In fact, they have left such freedom to their contributors that we are sometimes em- barrassed by finding quite different views held on a single question, as when Professor Conway, supported by Herodotus, says that the Etruscans came from Asia Minor, while Pro-
The Cambridge Ancient History, Vol. XII. (Cambridge University Press. 35s.) Plates, Vol. V. (15s.) fessor Last, in the true spirit of Italian imperialism, says
that they were indigenous Italians. Of course such dis- agreements are natural between scholars, but the less in- structed reader cannot fail to be perplexed and to wonder which view is more likely to be right. But for the solution of his problems he will not always find help.
It may, however, be wrong to assume that the Cambridge Ancient History is meant for the average reader. It is true that he is not often confronted with quotations in ancient tongues, that he is helped by what is often an intelligible narrative, by chronological tables, and by volumes of informa- tive plates. But what is he to make of pages devoted to Egyptian or Assyrian kings whose chief virtue is that next to nothing is known about them or of problems in the Roman constitution which may not have been understood even by Romans? The average reader will find many pages beyond his understanding and patience, and it cannot be for him that they were written. But the expert, too, will perhaps not be perfectly happy or find here the history which tells him what he wants to know. For him the essential charm of ancient history lies in its problems, and to find them solved, often without a statement of the evidence, will seem to him am- scholarly. In fact, it is not quite clear for whom the Cambridge Ancient History is intended, and we must assume that the editors know men, neither too ignorant nor too learned, for whom it provides a golden mean. In a composite work of this kind we cannot expect every- one to write history in the same way or equally well. While some of the contributors seem to have thought that their task is to present unadorned facts without thought of their interest or significance, others have succeeded in writing truly dramatic and illuminating pages. It is a pity that the glories and agonies of the Peridean Age were left to Dr. Walker and the fascinating question of paganism in the Roman Empire to Professor Nock ; for neither of these indicates any real appreciation of what they are writing about. But against these unillumined passages we may set such fine exhibitions of historical writing as Mr. Wade-Gery's account of the Dorian States or Mr. Tam's chapters on Alexander and Antony and Cleopatra, which may be ranked with the best history of our time in their sense of the importance of what happened and its dramatic interest to all students of men.
Still less should we expect all ancient historians to write equally good English. Of the foreign scholars who have con- tributed this is not the place to speak, though Professor Weber's rhetorical appeal for a virtuous Commodus sounds curiously unconvincing in its English translation. Not many of the English scholars offend by their writing. Some seem to think it wrong to be too interesting, but their language is at least decent. But others fall below the low standard that we expect of scholars, and try to find an uneasy mixture of pomposity and slang. When, for instance, in the middle of a long-winded account of provincial administration we find a reference to "the parish pump" (Vol. XI, p. 449), we can only assume that the author is trying to be funny. Such defects are probably inherent in Lord Acton's plan. It would, no doubt, be delightful to have the whole panorama unrolled by a great historian who was also a man of letters. But that is asking the impossible. Few historians are men of genius, and in any case hardly the greatest of them could deal with the enormous amount of material which has been collected through years of research. In these circumstances we must be reasonable and thank the Cambridge Ancient History for providing an interesting assortment of chapters about a long period of time.
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