The Rise of Historical Criticism: Summary

Wilde opens by placing historical criticism inside the larger 'revolt against authority', valuing it less for its results than for its method. It cannot grow among the despotisms of Asia or in stationary Egypt, whose inscriptions are only the material for history; the Chinese annals are sober, but free criticism is as unknown there as free trade, and in India legend and fact are hopelessly mingled. It appears among the Greeks, part of the illumination that broke on them about the sixth century B.C. Since men doubt religion first, Wilde will treat sacred and secular history separately, taking writers in chronological order.

Greek mythology, full of immoral stories about the gods, was first attacked on ethical grounds by Xenophanes and Heraclitos. The orthodox took shelter in allegory, turning Apollo's arrows into rays of the sun, until the method refuted itself by reading the web of Penelope as a lesson in formal logic. Plato instead tests the old stories by moral rules: God is good, just and true. Euhemeros explains the gods as exaggerated men, the centaurs as sporting youths and Actaeon as a master of hounds ruined by his kennel. Wilde objects that stripping away the marvellous and calling the husk history is to mistake plausibility for truth.

Herodotus, the father of history, sees events governed by Providence and nemesis, yet he also shows the first historic sense. He rejects the Phoenix and the goat-footed men, reasons that Priam would have given Helen up, doubts that the famous diver swam rather than came in a boat, and values inscriptions and documents. Thucydides, though his contemporary, reads like a modern: the long siege of Troy is explained by poor supplies, the Harmodios legend is corrected from inscriptions, and nothing supernatural is allowed. His fault is anachronism and a narrow interest in politics and war that leaves out society and the position of women. Neither history nor art, Wilde adds, should set out to teach moral lessons.

Part III turns to the origin of society. Against Hesiod's golden age, Thucydides pictures primitive Greece as unsettled and piratical, arguing from Homeric epithets, from backward tribes that still carry arms, and from ruins, while warning that a deserted Sparta would mislead any antiquarian. The ancients, Wilde notes, reasoned deductively, used philology badly and missed the survival of old customs. Plato derives society from the division of labour; Aristotle, from man's nature as a political animal, building from family to village to state. Wilde then introduces the philosophy of history, whose first requisite is uniform sequence, seen as nemesis in Herodotus and as the sameness of human nature in Thucydides' account of the revolution at Corcyra.

Part IV follows that idea. Plato deduces a cycle of constitutions from timocracy to tyranny; Aristotle answers with facts, showing that tyrannies at Sicyon, Syracuse and Carthage changed in other ways, and insists that theory must be joined to observation of things in their growth. He leaves no room for providence and sees the will shaped by habit and circumstance. Polybius finds the ideal balanced state already realised in Rome, explains why the Greeks valued order above progress, and foresees the rise of the Empire from mob rule.

Polybius is the culmination. After an age of rhetoric, of romance around Alexander and of bookish Alexandria, he declares chance and miracles mere names for ignorance: Herodotus would have believed in Scipio's dream, Thucydides ignored it, Polybius explains it. He traces the depopulation of Greece to men's reluctance to marry, separates the true cause of the war with Perseus from its pretexts and occasions, and mocks Timaeus for writing history in a library, like painting from a stuffed animal. Wilde draws from him a portrait of the ideal historian, while noting that he missed the spread of new religions from the East.

Plutarch completes the movement by granting that miracles are impossible while insisting that the natural is itself divine, so that Greek history ends, as it began, in faith. Rome, bound to tradition and to gods too dull to believe in, produces antiquarians rather than critics: Livy records every version, Tacitus imagines. The Renaissance revives Greek method, and Wilde concludes that the Greek spirit is modern, that later ages have added few new canons, and that the first torch-bearers of free thought deserve their prize.