The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 2

Had this been otherwise—had the two nations met freely before the light of history had strengthened into broad daylight—it is certain that the controversies upon chronology would have been far more and more intricate than they are. This profound30 separation, therefore, has been beneficial to the student in one direction. But in another it has increased his duties; or, if not increased, at all events it serves to remind him of a separate chapter in his chronological researches. Had Rome stood in as close a relation to Greece as Persia did, one single chronology would have sufficed for both. Hardly one event in Persian history has survived for our memory, which is not taken up by the looms of Greece and interwoven with the general arras and texture of Grecian history. And from the era of the Consul Paulus Emilius, something of the same sort takes place between Greece and Rome; and in a partial sense the same result is renewed as often as the successive assaults occur of the Roman-destroying power applied to the several members of the Græco-Macedonian Empire. But these did not commence until Rome had existed for half-a-thousand years. And through all that long period, two-thirds of the entire Roman history up to the Christian era, the two Chronologies flow absolutely apart.

Consequently, because all chronology is thrown back upon Europe, and because the pre-Christian Europe is split into two collateral bodies, and because each of these separate bodies must have a separate head—it follows that chronology, as a pre-Christian chronology, will, like the Imperial eagle, be two-headed. Now this accident of chronology, on a first glance, seems but too likely to confuse and perplex the young student.

How fortunate, then, it must be thought, and what a duty it imposes upon the teacher, not to defeat this bounty of accident by false and pedantic rigour of calculation, that these two heads of the eagle—that head which looks westward for Roman Chronology, that which looks eastward for Grecian Chronology—do absolutely coincide as to their nativity. The birthday of Grecian authentic history everybody agrees to look upon as fixed to the establishment [the final establishment] of the Olympic games. And when was that? Generally, chronologers have placed this event just 776 years before Christ. Now will any teacher be so 'peevish' [as hostess Quickly calls it]—so perversely unaccommodating—as not to lend herself to the very trivial alteration of one year, just putting the clock back to 7 instead of 6, even if the absolute certainty of the 6 were made out? But if she will break with her chronologer, 'her guide, philosopher and friend,' upon so slight a consideration as one year in three-quarters of a millennium, it then becomes my duty to tell her that there is no such certainty in the contested number as she chooses to suppose. Even the era of our Saviour's birth oscillates through an entire Olympiad, or period of four years; to that extent it is unsettled: and in fifty other ways I could easily make out a title to a much more considerable change. In reality, when the object is—not to secure an attorney-like31 accuracy—but to promote the liberal pursuit of chronology, a teacher of good sense would at once direct her pupil to record the date in round terms as just reaching the three-quarters of a thousand years; she would freely sacrifice the entire twenty-six years' difference between 776 and 750, were it not that the same purpose, viz., the purpose of consulting the powers or convenience and capacity of the memory, in neglect and defiance of useless and superstitious arithmetic punctilios, may be much better attained by a more trifling sacrifice. Three-quarters of a millennium, that is three parts in four of a thousand years, is a period easily remembered; but a triple repetition of the number 7, simply saying 'Seven seven seven' is remembered even more easily.32

Suppose this point then settled, for anything would be remarkable and highly rememberable which comes near to a common familiar fraction of so vast a period in human affairs as a millennium [a term consecrated to our Christian ears, (1) by its use in the Apocalypse; (2) by its symbolic use in representing the long Sabbath of rest from sin and misery, and finally (3) even to the profane ear by the fact of its being the largest period which we employ in our historical estimates]. But a triple iteration of the number 7, simply saying 'Seven seven seven,' would be even more rememberable. And, lastly, were it still necessary to add anything by way of reconciling the teacher to the supposed inaccuracy (though, if a real33 and demonstrated inaccuracy, yet, be it remembered, the very least which can occur, viz., an error of a single unit), I will—and once for all, as applying to many similar cases, as often as they present themselves—put this stringent question to every woman of good sense: is it not better, is it not more agreeable to your views for the service of your pupils, that they should find offered to their acceptance some close approximation to the truth which they can very easily remember, than an absolute conformity to the very letter of the truth which no human memory, though it were the memory of Mithridates, could retain? Good sense is shown, above all things, in seeking the practicable which is within our power, by preference to a more exquisite ideal which is unattainable. Not, I grant, in moral or religious things. Then I willingly allow, we are forbidden to sit down contented with imperfect attempts, or to make deliberate compromises with the slightest known evil in principle. To this doctrine I heartily subscribe. But surely in matters not moral, in questions of erudition or of antiquarian speculation, or of historical research, we are under a different rule. Here, and in similar cases, it is our business, I conceive with Solon legislating for the Athenians, to contemplate, not what is best in an abstract sense, but what is best under the circumstances of the case. Now the most important circumstances of this case are—that the memory of young ladies must be assumed as a faculty of average power, both as to its apprehensiveness and as to its tenacity; its power of mastering for the moment, and its power of retaining faithfully; that this faculty will not endure the oppression of mere blank facts having no organization or life of logical relation running through them; that by 'not enduring' I mean that it cannot support this harassing and persecution with impunity34; that the fine edge of the higher intellectual powers will be taken off by this laborious straining, which is not only dull, but the cause of dulness; that finally, the memory, supposing it in a given and rare case powerful enough to contend successfully with such tasks, must even as regards this time required, hold itself disposable for many other applications; and therefore, as the inference from the whole, that not any slight or hasty, but a most intense and determinate effort should be made to substitute some technical artifices for blank pulls against a dead weight of facts, to substitute fictions, or artificial imitations of logical arrangement, wherever that is possible, for blind arrangements of chance; and finally, in a process which requires every assistance from compromise and accommodation constantly to surrender the rigour of superstitious accuracy, (which, after all its magnificent pretensions, must fail in the performance), to humbler probability of a reasonable success.

I have dwelt upon this point longer than would else have been right, because in effect here lies the sole practical obstacle to the realization of a very beautiful framework of chronology, and because I consider myself as now speaking once for all. Let us now move forward. I now go on to the other head of the eagle—the head which looks westward.

Here it will be objected that the Foundation of Rome is usually laid down in the year 753 b.c.; and therefore that it differs from the foundation of the Olympiads by as much as 23 or 24 years; and can I have the conscience to ask my fair friends that they should put the clock back so far as that? Why, really there is no knowing; perhaps if I were hard pressed by some chronological enemy, I might ask as great a favour even as that. But at present it is not requisite; neither do I mean to play any jugglers' tricks, as perhaps lawfully I might, with the different computations of Varro, of the Capitoline Marbles, etc. All that need be said in this place is simply—that Rome is not Romulus. And let Rome have been founded when she pleases, and let her secret name have been what it might—though really, in default of a better, Rome itself is as decent and 'sponsible a name as a man would wish—still I presume that Romulus must have been a little older than Rome, the builder a little anterior to what he built. Varro and the Capitoline Tables and Mr. Hook will all agree to that postulate. And whatever some of them may say as to the youth of Romulus, when he first began to wield the trowel, at least, I suppose, he was come to years of discretion; and, if we say twenty-three or twenty-four, which I am as much entitled to say as they to deny it, then we are all right. 'All right behind,' as the mail guards say, 'drive on.' And so I feel entitled to lay my hand upon my heart and assure my fair pupils that Romulus himself and the Olympiads did absolutely start together; and for anything known to the contrary, perhaps in the same identical moment or bisection of a moment. Possibly his first little wolfish howl (for it would be monstrous to think that he or even Remus condescended to a vagitus or cry such as a young tailor or rat-catcher might emit) may have symphonized with the ear-shattering trumpet that proclaimed the inauguration of the first Olympic contest, or which blew to the four winds the appellation of the first Olympic victor.

That point, therefore, is settled, and so far, at least, 'all's right behind.' And it is a great relief to my mind that so much is accomplished. Two great arrow-headed nails at least are driven 'home' to the great dome of Chronology from which my whole golden chain of historical dependencies is to swing. And even that will suffice. Careful navigators, indeed, like to ride by three anchors; but I am content with what I have achieved, even if my next attempt should be less satisfactory.

It is certainly a very striking fact to the imagination that great revolutions seldom come as solitary cases. It never rains but it pours. At times there is some dark sympathy, which runs underground, connecting remote events like a ground-swell in the ocean, or like the long careering35 of an earthquake before it makes its explosion. Abyssus abyssum invocat—'One deep calleth to another.' And in some incomprehensible way, powers not having the slightest apparent interconnexion, no links through which any casual influence could rationally be transmitted, do, nevertheless, in fact, betray either a blind nexus—an undiscoverable web of dependency upon each other, or else a dependency upon some common cause equally undiscoverable. What possible, what remote connexion could the dissolution of the Assyrian empire have with the Olympiads or with the building of Rome? Certainly none at all that we can see; and yet these great events so nearly synchronize that even the latest of them seems but a more distant undulation of the same vast swell in the ocean, running along from west to east, from the Tiber to the Tigris. Some great ferment of revolution was then abroad. The overthrew of Nineveh as the capital of the Assyrian empire, the ruin of the dynasty ending in Sardanapalus, and the subsequent dismemberment of the Assyrian empire, took place, according to most chronologers, 747 years b.c., just 30 years, therefore, after the two great events which I have assigned to 777. These two events are in the strictest and most capital sense the inaugural events of history, the very pillars of Hercules which indicate a ne plus ultra in that direction; namely, that all beyond is no longer history but romance. I am exceedingly anxious to bring this Assyrian revolution also to the same great frontier line of columns. In a gross general way it might certainly be argued that in such a great period, thirty years, or one generation, can be viewed as nothing more than a trifling quantity. But it must also be considered that the exact time, and even the exact personality,36 of Sardanapalus in all his relations are not known. All are vast phantoms in the Assyrian empire; I do not say fictions, but undefined, unmeasured, immeasurable realities; far gone down into the mighty gulf of shadows, and for us irrecoverable. All that is known about the Assyrian empire is its termination under Sardanapalus. It was then coming within Grecian twilight; and it will be best to say that, generally speaking, Sardanapalus coincided with Romulus and the Greek Olympiad. To affect any nearer accuracy than this would be the grossest reliance on the mere jingle of syllables. History would be made to rest on something less than a pun; for such as Palus and Pul, which is all that learned archbishops can plead as their vouchers in the matter of Assyria, there is not so much as the argument of a child or the wit of a punster.

Upon the whole, the teacher will make the following remarks to her pupils, after having read what precedes; remarks partly upon the new mode of delivering chronology, and partly upon the things delivered:

I. She will notice it—as some improvement—that the three great leading events, which compose the opening of history not fabulous, are here, for the first time, placed under the eye in their true relations of time, viz., as about contemporary. For without again touching on the question—do they, or do they not, vary from each other in point of time by twenty-three and by thirty years—it will be admitted by everybody that, at any rate, the three events stand equally upon the frontier line of authentic history. A frontier or debateable land is always of some breadth. They form its inauguration. And they would do so even if divided by a much wider interval. Now, it is very possible to know of A, B, and C, separately, that each happened in such a year, say 1800; and yet never to have noticed them consciously as contemporary. We read of many a man (L, M, N, suppose), that he was born in 1564, or that he died in 1616. And we may happen separately to know that these were the years in which Shakespeare was born and died. Yet, for all that, we may never happen consciously to notice with respect to any one of the men, L, M, N, that he was a contemporary of Shakespeare's. Now, this was the case with regard to the three great events, Greek, Roman, and Assyrian. No chronologer failed to observe of each in its separate place that it occurred somewhere about 750 years b.c. But every chronologer had failed to notice this coincident time of each as coincident. And, accordingly, all failed to converge these three events into one focus as the solemn and formal opening of history. It is good to have a beginning, a starting post, from which to date all possible historical events that are worthy to be regarded as such. But it is better still to find that by the rarest of accidents, by a good luck that could never have been looked for, the three separate starting posts—which historical truth obliges us to assume for the three great fields of history, Roman, Grecian, and Asiatic37—all closely coincide in point of time; or, to use the Greek technical term, all closely synchronize.

II. With respect to Greece and the Olympiad in particular, she will inform her pupil that the Olympic games, celebrated near the town of Olympia, recurred every fifth year; that is to say, there was a clear interval of four years between each revolution of the games. Each Olympiad, therefore, containing four years, it is usual in citing the particular Olympiad in which an event happened, to cite also the year, should that be known, or, being known, should that be of importance. Thus Olymp. CX. 3 would mean that such a thing, say X, occurred in the third year of the 110th Olympiad; that is, four times 110 will be 440; and this, deducted from 777 (the era of the Olympiads), leaves 337 years b.c. as the era when X occurred. Only that, upon reviewing the case, we find that the 110th Olympiad was not absolutely completed, not by one year; which, subtracted from the 337, leaves 336 b.c. as the true date. If her pupil should say, 'But were there no great events in Greece before the Olympiads?' the teacher will answer, 'Yes, a few, but not many of a rank sufficient to be called Grecian.' They are merely local events; events of Thessaly, suppose; events of Argos; but much too obscure, both as to the facts, as to the meaning of the facts, and as to the dates, to be worth any student's serious attention. There were, however, three events worthy to be called Grecian; partly because they interested more States than one of Greece; and partly because they have since occupied the Athenian stage, and received a sort of consecration from the great masters of Grecian tragedy. These three events were the fatal story of the house of Œdipus; a story stretching through three generations; and in which the war against the Seven Gates of Thebes was but an episode. Secondly, the Argonautic expedition (voyage of the ship Argo, and of the sailors in that ship, i.e., the Argonauts), which is consecrated as the first voyage of any extent undertaken by Greeks. Both these events are as full of heroic marvels, and of supernatural marvels, as the legends of King Arthur, Merlin, and the Fairy Morgana. Later than these absolute romances comes the semi-romance of the Iliad, or expedition against Troy. This, the most famous of all Pagan romances, we know by two separate criteria to be later in date than either of the two others; first, because the actors in the Iliad are the descendants of those who figured as actors in the others; secondly, from the subdued tone of the romantic38 which prevails throughout the Iliad. Now, with respect to these three events in Grecian history, anterior to the Olympiads, which are all that a young student ought to notice, it is sufficient if generally she is made aware of the order in which they stand to each other, or, at least, that the Iliad comes last in the series, and if as to this last and greatest of the series, she fixes its era precisely to one thousand years before Christ. Chronologers, indeed, sometimes bring it down to something lower. But one millennium, the clear unembarrassed cyphers of 1,000, whether in counting guineas or years, is a far simpler and a far more rememberable era than any qualifications of this round number; which qualifications, let it not for a moment be forgotten, are not at all better warranted than the simpler expression. One only amongst all chronologers has anything to stand upon that is not as unsubstantial as a cloud; and this is Sir Isaac Newton. And the way in which he proceeded it may be well to explain, in order that the young pupil may see what sort of evidences we have prior to the Olympiads for any chronological fact. Sir Isaac endeavoured by calculating backwards to ascertain the exact time of some celestial phenomenon—as, suppose, an eclipse of the sun, or such and such positions of the heavenly bodies with regard to each other. This phenomenon, whatever it were, call X. Then if (upon looking into the Argonautic Expedition or any other romance of those elder times) he finds X actually noticed as co-existing with any part of the adventures, in that case he has fixed by absolute observation, as it were, what we may call the latitude and longitude of that one historical event; and then using this, as we use our modern meridian of Greenwich, as a point of starting, he can deduce the distances of all subsequent events by tracing them through the sons, grandsons, and great-grandsons of the several actors concerned. The great question which will then remain to be settled is, how many years to allow for a generation; and, secondly, in monarchies, how much to allow for a reign, since often two successive reigns will not be two successive generations, because whilst the two reigns are distinct quantities, the two lives are coincident through a great part of their duration. Now, of course, Sir Isaac is very often open to serious criticism, or to overpowering doubts. That is inevitable. But on the whole he treads upon something like a firm footing. Others, as regards that era, tread upon mere clouds, and their authority goes for nothing at all.

Such being the state of the case, let the pupil never trouble her memory for one moment with so idle an effort as that of minutely fixing or retaining dates that, after all, are more doubtful, and for us irrecoverable, than the path of some obscure trading ship in some past generation through the Atlantic Ocean. Generally, it will be quite near enough to the truth if she places upon the meridian of 1000 years b.c. the three Romances—Argonautic, Theban, Trojan; and she will then have the satisfaction of finding that, as at the opening of authentic history, she found the Roman, the Greek, and the Asiatic inaugural events coinciding in the same exact focus, so in these semi-fabulous or ante-Olympian events, she finds that one and the same effort of memory serves to register them, and also the most splendid of the Jewish eras—that of David and Solomon. The round sum of 1000 years b.c., so easily remembered, without distinction, without modification, 'sans phrase' (to quote a brutal regicide), serves alike for the Seven-gated Thebes,39 for Troy, and for Jerusalem in its most palmy days.

V. A Perplexity Cleared Up.—Before passing onward here, it is highly important to notice a sort of episode in history, which fills up the interval between 777 and 555, but which is constantly confounded and perplexed with what took place before 777.

The word Assyria is that by which the perplexity is maintained. The Assyrian empire, as the pupil is told, was destroyed in the person of Sardanapalus. Yet, in her Bible, she reads of Sennacherib, King of Assyria. 'Was Sennacherib, then, before Sardanapalus?' she will ask; and her teacher will inform her that he was not.

Such things puzzle her. They seem palpable contradictions. But now let her understand that out of the Assyrian empire split off three separate kingdoms, of which one was called the Assyrian, not empire, but kingdom; there lurks the secret of the error. And to this kingdom of Assyria it was that Sennacherib belonged. Or, in order to represent by a sensible image this derivation of kingdoms from the stock of the old superannuated Assyrian empire (to which belonged Nimrod, Ninus, and Semiramis—those mighty phantoms, with their incredible armies); let her figure to herself some vast river, like the Nile or the Ganges, with the form assumed by its mouths. Often it will happen, where such a river is not hemmed in between rocks, or confined to the bed of a particular valley, that, perhaps, a hundred or two of miles before reaching the sea, upon coming into a soft, alluvial soil, it will force several different channels for itself. As these must make angles to each other, in order to form different roads, the land towards the disemboguing of the river will take the arrangement of a triangle. And as that happens to be the form of a Greek capital D (in the Greek alphabet called Delta), it has been usual to call such an arrangement of a great river's mouth a Delta.

Now, then, let her think of the Assyrian empire under the notion of the Nile, descending from far distant regions, and from fountains that were concealed for ages, if even now discovered. Then, when it approaches the sea, and splits up its streams, so as to form a Delta, let her regard that Delta as the final state of the Assyrian power, the kingdom state lasting for about two centuries until swallowed up altogether, and remoulded into unity by the Persian empire.

The Delta, therefore, or the Nile dividing into three streams, will represent the three kingdoms formed out of the ruins of the Assyrian empire, when falling to pieces by the death of Sardanapalus. One of these three kingdoms is often called the Median; one the Chaldæan; and the third is called the Assyrian kingdom. But the most rememberable shape in which they can be recalled is, perhaps, by the names of their capitals. The capital cities were as follows: of the first, Ecbatana, which is the modern Hamadan; of the second, Babylon, on the Euphrates, of which the ruins have been fully ascertained in our own times; at present, nothing remains but ruins, and these ruins are dangerous to visit, both from human marauders prowling in that neighbourhood, and from wild beasts of the most formidable class, which are so little disturbed in their awful lairs, that they bask at noon-day amongst the huge hills of half-vitrified bricks. Finally, of the third kingdom, which still retained the name of Assyria, the metropolis was Nineveh, on the Tigris, revealed by Layard.