§ I.
Definition of History.

History is the recital of facts represented as true. Fable, on the contrary, is the recital of facts represented as fiction. There is the history of human opinions, which is scarcely anything more than the history of human errors.

The history of the arts may be made the most useful of all, when to a knowledge of their invention and progress it adds a description of their mechanical means and processes.

Natural history, improperly designated “history,” is an essential part of natural philosophy. The history of events has been divided into sacred and profane. Sacred history is a series of divine and miraculous operations, by which it has pleased God formerly to direct and govern the Jewish nation, and, in the present day, to try our faith. “To learn Hebrew, the sciences, and history,” says La Fontaine, “is to drink up the sea.”

Si j’apprenois l’Hébreu, les sciences, l’histoire,

Tout cela, c’est la mer à boire.

— La Fontaine, book viii, fable 25.
The Foundations of History.

The foundations of all history are the recitals of events, made by fathers to their children, and afterwards transmitted from one generation to another. They are, at most, only probable in their origin when they do not shock common sense, and they lose a degree of probability at every successive transmission. With time the fabulous increases and the true disappears; hence it arises that the original traditions and records of all nations are absurd. Thus the Egyptians had been governed for many ages by the gods. They had next been under the government of demi-gods; and, finally, they had kings for eleven thousand three hundred and forty years, and during that period the sun had changed four times from east and west.

The Ph?nicians, in the time of Alexander, pretended that they had been settled in their own country for thirty thousand years; and those thirty thousand years were as full of prodigies as the Egyptian chronology. I admit it to be perfectly consistent with physical possibility that Ph?nicia may have existed, not merely for thirty thousand years, but thirty thousand millions of ages, and that it may have endured, as well as the other portions of the globe, thirty millions of revolutions. But of all this we possess no knowledge.

The ridiculous miracles which abound in the ancient history of Greece are universally known.

The Romans, although a serious and grave people, have, nevertheless, equally involved in fables the early periods of their history. That nation, so recent in comparison with those of Asia, was five hundred years without historians. It is impossible, therefore, to be surprised on finding that Romulus was the son of Mars; that a she-wolf was his nurse; that he marched with a thousand men from his own village, Rome, against twenty thousand warriors belonging to the city of the Sabines; that he afterwards became a god; that the elder Tarquin cut through a stone with a razor, and that a vestal drew a ship to land with her girdle, etc.

The first annals of modern nations are no less fabulous; things prodigious and improbable ought sometimes, undoubtedly, to be related, but only as proofs of human credulity. They constitute part of the history of human opinion and absurdities; but the field is too immense.
Of Monuments or Memorials.

The only proper method of endeavoring to acquire some knowledge of ancient history is to ascertain whether there remain any incontestable public monuments. We possess only three such, in the way of writing or inscription. The first is the collection of astronomical observations made during nineteen hundred successive years at Babylon, and transferred by Alexander to Greece. This series of observations, which goes back two thousand two hundred and thirty-four years beyond our vulgar era, decidedly proves that the Babylonians existed as an associated and incorporated people many ages before; for the arts are struck out and elaborated only in the slow course of time, and the indolence natural to mankind permits thousands of years to roll away without their acquiring any other knowledge or talents than what are required for food, clothing, shelter, and mutual destruction. Let the truth of these remarks be judged of from the state of the Germans and the English in the time of C?sar, from that of the Tartars at the present day, from that of two-thirds of Africa, and from that of all the various nations found in the vast continent of America, excepting, in some respects, the kingdoms of Peru and Mexico, and the republic of Tlascala. Let it be recollected that in the whole of the new world not a single individual could write or read.

The second monument is the central eclipse of the sun, calculated in China two thousand one hundred and fifty-five years before our vulgar era, and admitted by all our astronomers to have actually occurred. We must apply the same remark to the Chinese as to the people of Babylon. They had undoubtedly, long before this period, constituted a vast empire and social polity. But what places the Chinese above all the other nations of the world is that neither their laws, nor manners, nor the language exclusively spoken by their men of learning, have experienced any change in the course of about four thousand years. Yet this nation and that of India, the most ancient of all that are now subsisting, those which possess the largest and most fertile tracts of territory, those which had invented nearly all the arts almost before we were in possession even of any of them, have been always omitted, down to our time, in our pretended universal histories. And whenever a Spaniard or a Frenchman enumerated the various nations of the globe, neither of them failed to represent his own country as the first monarchy on earth, and his king as the greatest sovereign, under the flattering hope, no doubt, that that greatest of sovereigns, after having read his book, would confer upon him a pension.

The third monument, but very inferior to the two others, is the Arundel Marbles. The chronicle of Athens was inscribed on these marbles two hundred and sixty-three years before our era, but it goes no further back than the time of Cecrops, thirteen hundred and nineteen years beyond the time of its inscription. In the history of all antiquity these are the only incontestable epochs that we possess.

Let us attend a little particularly to these marbles, which were brought from Greece by Lord Arundel. The chronicle contained in them commences fifteen hundred and seventy-seven years before our era. This, at the present time, makes an antiquity of 3,348 years, and in the course of that period you do not find a single miraculous or prodigious event on record. It is the same with the Olympiads. It must not be in reference to these that the expression can be applied of “Gr?cia mendax” (lying Greece). The Greeks well knew how to distinguish history from fable, and real facts from the tales of Herodotus; just as in relation to important public affairs, their orators borrowed nothing from the discourses of the sophists or the imagery of the poets.

The date of the taking of Troy is specified in these marbles, but there is no mention made of Apollo’s arrows, or the sacrifice of Iphigenia, or the ridiculous battles of the gods. The date of the inventions of Triptolemus and Ceres is given; but Ceres is not called goddess. Notice is taken of a poem upon the rape of Proserpine; but it is not said that she is the daughter of Jupiter and a goddess, and the wife of the god of hell.

Hercules is initiated in the Eleusinian mysteries, but not a single word is mentioned of the twelve labors, nor of his passage to Africa in his cup, nor of his divinity, nor of the great fish by which he was swallowed, and which, according to Lycophron, kept him in its belly three days and three nights.

Among us, on the contrary, a standard is brought by an angel from heaven to the monks of St. Denis; a pigeon brings a bottle of oil to the church of Rheims; two armies of serpents engage in pitched battle in Germany; an archbishop of Mentz is besieged and devoured by rats; and to complete and crown the whole, the year in which these adventures occurred, is given with the most particular precision. The abbé Langlet, also condescending to compile, compiles these contemptible fooleries, while the almanacs, for the hundredth time, repeat them. In this manner are our youth instructed and enlightened; and all these trumpery fables are put in requisition even for the education of princes!

All history is comparatively recent. It is by no means astonishing to find that we have, in fact, no profane history that goes back beyond about four thousand years. The cause of this is to be found in the revolutions of the globe, and the long and universal ignorance of the art which transmits events by writing. There are still many nations totally unacquainted with the practice of this art. It existed only in a small number of civilized states, and even in them was confined to comparatively few hands. Nothing was more rare among the French and Germans than knowing how to write; down to the fourteenth century of our era, scarcely any public acts were attested by witnesses. It was not till the reign of Charles VII. in France, in 1454, that an attempt was made to reduce to writing some of the customs of France. The art was still more uncommon among the Spaniards, and hence it arises that their history is so dry and doubtful till the time of Ferdinand and Isabella. We perceive, from what has been said, with what facility the very small number of persons who possessed the art of writing might impose by means of it, and how easy it has been to produce a belief in the most enormous absurdities.

There have been nations who have subjugated a considerable part of the world, and who yet have not been acquainted with the use of characters. We know that Genghis Khan conquered a part of Asia in the beginning of the thirteenth century; but it is not from him, nor from the Tartars, that we have derived that knowledge. Their history, written by the Chinese, and translated by Father Gaubil, states that these Tartars were at that time unacquainted with the art of writing.

This art was, unquestionably, not likely to be less unknown to the Scythian Ogus-kan, called by the Persians and Greeks Madies, who conquered a part of Europe and Asia long before the reign of Cyrus. It is almost a certainty that at that time, out of a hundred nations, there were only two or three that employed characters. It is undoubtedly possible, that in an ancient world destroyed, mankind were acquainted with the art of writing and the other arts, but in our world they are all of recent date.

There remain monuments of another kind, which serve to prove merely the remote antiquity of certain nations, an antiquity preceding all known epochs, and all books; these are the prodigies of architecture, such as the pyramids and palaces of Egypt, which have resisted and wearied the power of time. Herodotus, who lived two thousand two hundred years ago, and who had seen them, was unable to learn from the Egyptian priests at what periods these structures were raised.

It is difficult to ascribe to the oldest of the pyramids an antiquity of less than four thousand years, and, it is necessary to consider, that those ostentatious piles, erected by monarchs, could not have been commenced till long after the establishment of cities. But, in order to build cities in a country every year inundated, it must always be recollected that it would have been previously necessary in this land of slime and mud, to lay the foundation upon piles, that they might thus be inaccessible to the inundation; it would have been necessary, even before taking this indispensable measure of precaution, and before the inhabitants could be in a state to engage in such important and even dangerous labors, that the people should have contrived retreats, during the swelling of the Nile, between the two chains of rocks which exist on the right and left banks of the river. It would have been necessary that these collected multitudes should have instruments of tillage, and of architecture, a knowledge of architecture and surveying, regular laws, and an active police. All these things require a space of time absolutely prodigious. We see, every day, by the long details which relate even to those of our undertakings, which are most necessary and most diminutive, how difficult it is to execute works of magnitude, and that they not only require unwearied perseverance, but many generations animated by the same spirit.

However, whether we admit that one or two of those immense masses were erected by Menes, or Thaut, or Cheops, or Rameses, we shall not, in consequence, have the slightest further insight into the ancient history of Egypt. The language of that people is lost; and all we know in reference to the subject is that before the most ancient historians existed, there existed materials for writing ancient history.
§ II.

As we already possess, I had almost said, twenty thousand works, the greater number of them extending to many volumes, on the subject, exclusively, of the history of France; and as, even a studious man, were he to live a hundred years, would find it impossible to read them, I think it a good thing to know where to stop. We are obliged to connect with the knowledge of our own country the history of our neighbors. We are still less permitted to remain ignorant of the Greeks and Romans, and their laws which are become ours; but, if to this laborious study we should resolve to add that of more remote antiquity, we should resemble the man who deserted Tacitus and Livy to study seriously the “Thousand and One Nights.” All the origins of nations are evidently fables. The reason is that men must have lived long in society, and have learned to make bread and clothing (which would be matters of some difficulty) before they acquired the art of transmitting all their thoughts to posterity (a matter of greater difficulty still). The art of writing is certainly not more than six thousand years old, even among the Chinese; and, whatever may be the boast of the Chald?ans and Egyptians, it appears not at all likely that they were able to read and write earlier.

The history, therefore, of preceding periods, could be transmitted by memory alone; and we well know how the memory of past events changes from one generation to another. The first histories were written only from the imagination. Not only did every people invent its own origin, but it invented also the origin of the whole world.

If we may believe Sanchoniathon, the origin of things was a thick air, which was rarified by the wind; hence sprang desire and love, and from the union of desire and love were formed animals. The stars were later productions, and intended merely to adorn the heavens, and to rejoice the sight of the animals upon earth.

The Knef of the Egyptians, their Oshiret and Ishet, which we call Osiris and Isis, are neither less ingenious nor ridiculous. The Greeks embellished all these fictions. Ovid collected them and ornamented them with the charms of the most beautiful poetry. What he says of a god who develops or disembroils chaos, and of the formation of man, is sublime.

Sanctius his animal, mentisque capacius alt?

Deerat adhuc, et quod dominari in c?tera posset.

Natus homo est . . . .

— Ovid, Metam., i, v. 76.

A creature of a more exalted kind

Was wanting yet, and then was man designed;

Conscious of thought, of more capacious breast,

For empire formed, and fit to rule the rest.

— Dryden.

Pronaque cum spectent animalia c?tera terram;

Os homini sublime dedit c?lumque tueri

Jussit, et erectos ad sidera tollere vultus.

Metam., i, v. 84.

Thus, while the mute creation downward bend

Their sight, and to their earthly mother tend,

Man looks aloft, and with erected eyes

Beholds his own hereditary skies.

— Dryden.

Hesiod, and other writers who lived so long before, would have been very far from expressing themselves with this elegant sublimity. But, from the interesting moment of man’s formation down to the era of the Olympiads, everything is plunged in profound obscurity.

Herodotus is present at the Olympic games, and, like an old woman to children, recites his narratives, or rather tales, to the assembled Greeks. He begins by saying that the Ph?nicians sailed from the Red Sea into the Mediterranean; which, if true, must necessarily imply that they had doubled the Cape of Good Hope, and made the circuit of Africa.

Then comes the rape of Io; then the fable of Gyges and Candaules; then the wondrous stories of banditti, and that of the daughter of Cheops, king of Egypt, having required a hewn stone from each of her many lovers, and obtained, in consequence, a number large enough to build one of the pyramids.

To this, add the oracles, prodigies, and frauds of priests, and you have the history of the human race.

The first periods of the Roman history appear to have been written by Herodotus; our conquerors and legislators knew no other way of counting their years as they passed away, than by driving nails into a wall by the hand of the sacred pontiff.

The great Romulus, the king of a village, is the son of the god Mars, and a recluse, who was proceeding to a well to draw water in a pitcher. He has a god for his father, a woman of loose manners for his mother, and a she-wolf for his nurse. A buckler falls from heaven expressly for Numa. The invaluable books of the Sibyls are found by accident. An augur, by divine permission, divides a large flintstone with a razor. A vestal, with her mere girdle, draws into the water a large vessel that has been stranded. Castor and Pollux come down to fight for the Romans, and the marks of their horses’ feet are imprinted on the stones. The transalpine Gauls advanced to pillage Rome; some relate that they were driven away by geese, others that they carried away with them much gold and silver; but it is probable that, at that time in Italy, geese were far more abundant than silver. We have imitated the first Roman historians, at least in their taste for fables. We have our oriflamme, our great standard, brought from heaven by an angel, and the holy phial by a pigeon; and, when to these we add the mantle of St. Martin, we feel not a little formidable.

What would constitute useful history? That which should teach us our duties and our rights, without appearing to teach them.

It is often asked whether the fable of the sacrifice of Iphigenia is taken from the history of Jephthah; whether the deluge of Deucalion is invented in imitation of that of Noah; whether the adventure of Philemon and Baucis is copied from that of Lot and his wife. The Jews admit that they had no communication with strangers, that their books were unknown to the Greeks till the translation made by the order of Ptolemy. The Jews were, long before that period, money-brokers and usurers among the Greeks at Alexandria; but the Greeks never went to sell old clothes at Jerusalem. It is evident that no people imitated the Jews, and also that the Jews imitated or adopted many things from the Babylonians, the Egyptians, and the Greeks.

All Jewish antiquities are sacred in our estimation, notwithstanding the hatred and contempt in which we hold that people. We cannot, indeed, believe them by reason, but we bring ourselves under subjection to the Jews by faith. There are about fourscore systems in existence on the subject of their chronology, and a far greater number of ways of explaining the events recorded in their histories; we know not which is the true one, but we reserve our faith for it in store against the time when that true one shall be discovered.

We have so many things to believe in this sensible and magnanimous people, that all our faith is exhausted by them, and we have none left for the prodigies with which the other nations abound. Rollin may go on repeating to us the oracles of Apollo, and the miraculous achievements of Semiramis; he may continue to transcribe all that has been narrated of the justice of those ancient Scythians who so frequently pillaged Africa, and occasionally ate men for their breakfast; yet sensible and well-educated people will still feel and express some degree of incredulity.

What I most admire in our modern compilers is the judgment and zeal with which they prove to us that whatever happened in former ages, in the most extensive and powerful empires of the world, took place solely for the instruction of the inhabitants of Palestine. If the kings of Babylon, in the course of their conquests, overrun the territories of the Hebrew people, it is only to correct that people for their sins. If the monarch, who has been commonly named Cyrus, becomes master of Babylon, it is that he may grant permission to some captive Jews to return home. If Alexander conquers Darius, it is for the settlement of some Jew old-clothesmen at Alexandria. When the Romans join Syria to their vast dominions, and round their empire with the little district of Jud?a, this is still with a view to teach a moral lesson to the Jews. The Arabs and the Turks appear upon the stage of the world solely for the correction of this amiable people. We must acknowledge that they have had an excellent education; never had any pupil so many preceptors. Such is the utility of history.

But what is still more instructive is the exact justice which the clergy have dealt out to all those sovereigns with whom they were dissatisfied. Observe with what impartial candor St. Gregory of Nazianzen judges the emperor Julian, the philosopher. He declares that that prince, who did not believe in the existence of the devil, held secret communication with that personage, and that, on a particular occasion, when the demons appeared to him under the most hideous forms, and in the midst of the most raging flames, he drove them away by making inadvertently the sign of the cross.

He denominates him madman and wretch; he asserts that Julian immolated young men and women every night in caves. Such is the description he gives of the most candid and clement of men, and who never exercised the slightest revenge against this same Gregory, notwithstanding the abuse and invectives with which he pursued him throughout his reign.

To apologize for the guilty is a happy way of justifying calumny against the innocent. Compensation is thus effected; and such compensation was amply afforded by St. Gregory. The emperor Constantius, Julian’s uncle and predecessor, upon his accession to the throne, had massacred Julius, his mother’s brother, and his two sons, all three of whom had been declared august; this was a system which he had adopted from his father. He afterwards procured the assassination of Gallus, Julian’s brother. The cruelty which he thus displayed to his own family, he extended to the empire at large; but he was a man of prayer, and, even at the decisive battle with Maxentius, he was praying to God in a neighboring church during the whole time in which the armies were engaged. Such was the man who was eulogized by Gregory; and, if such is the way in which the saints make us acquainted with the truth, what may we not expect from the profane, particularly when they are ignorant, superstitious, and irritable?

At the present day the study of history is occasionally applied to a purpose somewhat whimsical and absurd. Certain charters of the time of Dagobert are discovered and brought forward, the greater part of them of a somewhat suspicious character in point of genuineness, and ill-understood; and from these it is inferred, that customs, rights, and prerogatives, which subsisted then, should be revived now. I would recommend it to those who adopt this method of study and reasoning, to say to the ocean, “You formerly extended to Aigues-Mortes, Fréjus, Ravenna, and Ferrara. Return to them immediately.”
§ III.
Of the Certainty of History.

All certainty which does not consist in mathematical demonstration is nothing more than the highest probability; there is no other historical certainty.

When Marco Polo described the greatness and population of China, being the first, and for a time the only writer who had described them, he could not obtain credit. The Portuguese, who for ages afterwards had communication and commerce with that vast empire, began to render the description probable. It is now a matter of absolute certainty; of that certainty which arises from the unanimous deposition of a thousand witnesses or different nations, unopposed by the testimony of a single individual.

If merely two or three historians had described the adventure of King Charles XII. when he persisted in remaining in the territories of his benefactor, the sultan, in opposition to the orders of that monarch, and absolutely fought, with the few domestics that attended his person, against an army of janissaries and Tartars, I should have suspended my judgment about its truth; but, having spoken to many who actually witnessed the fact, and having never heard it called in question, I cannot possibly do otherwise than believe it; because, after all, although such conduct is neither wise nor common, there is nothing in it contradictory to the laws of nature, or the character of the hero.

That which is in opposition to the ordinary course of nature ought not to be believed, unless it is attested by persons evidently inspired by the divine mind, and whose inspiration, indeed, it is impossible to doubt. Hence we are justified in considering as a paradox the assertion made under the article on “Certainty,” in the great “Encyclop?dia,” that we are as much bound to believe in the resuscitation of a dead man, if all Paris were to affirm it, as to believe all Paris when it states that we gained the battle of Fontenoy. It is clear that the evidence of all Paris to a thing improbable can never be equal to that evidence in favor of a probable one. These are the first principles of genuine logic. Such a dictionary as the one in question should be consecrated only to truth.
Uncertainty of History.

Periods of time are distinguished as fabulous and historical. But even in the historical times themselves it is necessary to distinguish truths from fables. I am not here speaking of fables, now universally admitted to be such. There is no question, for example, respecting the prodigies with which Livy has embellished, or rather defaced, his history. But with respect to events generally admitted, how many reasons exist for doubt!

Let it be recollected that the............