When all social relations are poisoned...

 

It is strikingly obvious that Greek life fell into decay during the Peloponnesian War. What led up to it was the mood prevailing among the Greeks; since the Persian Wars they had been conscious of their own tremendous strength (in the individual polis or party, this bore little relation to whether they had fought in the wars, or even sided with the Persians) and in this consciousness they tended to live recklessly. It was then that the power struggle began, something formerly characteristic only of Sparta. The impulse for it came from democracy, which was now almost universal.

Peoples who had conquered, or persuaded themselves that they had, were now consolidating their own states, but the unsettled condition of home affairs of course expressed itself externally too in violent acts. By the new criterion, which applied to everything, no-one felt they had enough power, just because they had felt so powerful in the Persian War. Ambition and vanity were no longer satisfied by the proclamations and applause for agonal victors; there was a need to direct self-assertion outwards, against other poleis, other groups who were very easily provoked, and in extreme cases might have to be destroyed if they were to be rendered harmless and incapable of revenge. In this situation, since all that had once been venerated was now worthless - myth, shrines, agonal fame in the cities - the power politicians had the last word. In Greece and in Sicily the whole of the fifth century from then on was nothing but the preparation for and prelude to the Peloponnesian War, that is to the grouping under two banners of the poleis who wielded power and those who submitted to it, and to establishing which were the stronger. While the poleis had hitherto been intent on independence, they were now forced to join alliances and hegemonies.
Individually, but momentarily united, they had defeated Xerxes and Mar donius; now they were the victims o f a general restlessness both within and without. But the war within the nation, to which this unrest was irresistibly tending, meant that the Persians, if they had any policy at all, could be sure of dominating Greece.

The terrible martial law that dated from mythical times was not simply still alive: it was only now methodically and hideously put into practice. Extermination, selling prisoners into slavery, laying crops to waste, scorched earth and ravaging were commonplace. Ambition was not hindered by the weakening of energies: the proof of it is the Athenians’ Sicilian venture while they were hourly under threat of war breaking out again. Athens well deserved total ruin as the reward of its cruelty and destructiveness.

Thucydides is our authority for the effect all this had on the national character. In a famous section of Book Three he links the description of pervasive rottenness with the horrors committed on Corcyra, because the revolution there was among the first, and so made a particularly terrible impression. Later ‘the whole Hellenic nation was in turmoil’, with the democrats all pro-Athenian and the oligarchs all pro-Spartan. It was now they learned how much more easily revolutions could be made in wartime than in peace, since during a war foreign help could be called in by those who wanted to overturn the constitution. In peacetime, the state as well as individuals had been inclined to mild behaviour as they were not suffering privation; war robs people of their earnings and their pleasures, and they turn vicious under this violent teacher (biaios didaskalos). But where the party split came later, it was all the more aggressive, hate-filled and retaliat ory, as past atrocities were discovered and avenged. Thucydides speaks too of the changes in the meanings of words, and gives the whole political jargon as it developed, especially in the hetaireia, or cliques [cf. p. 204 above]. Here, incidentally, we get an insight into the ruinous effect of political cabals like these, not only on the state and morality, but on all social life. Apart from the dimming of the intellect caused by belonging to dubs, they make any intellectual exchange on a decently objective level impossible, and not only for one particular evening; all social relations are poisoned. Each is condemned to spending his whole existence in the worst company in the world, and bound to it by complicity.

Thucydides goes further in explaining the mutual reliance of partners in crime. Men swore to stick together, but kept their word only when it was unavoidable and expedient; the diabolical development was that people found it not only safer, but more fun, to take revenge on their defenceless opponents by misusing their confidence (that is by having previously pretended to be their friends). Getting the upper hand by deceit demonstrated their cleverness; they preferred to be known as bad and cunning rather than as good and gullible, and in spite of their fine names the two factions would use any and every means in their contest (Thucydides does not betray his own allegiance by a single word). Having won power by an illegal vote or by force, they satisfied the current discontents by acting against their enemies. Special hatred was felt for citizens of moderate views: they were persecuted either because they would not take sides or out of envy of their honesty. Vicious ideas flourished, and the simplicity that is so much the mark of a noble nature was derided and despised. Enmity and bad faith abounded; no sacred word was safe, no sacred oath respected: self-interest was the sole preoccupation; the worst people of all, who had risen to the top, launched into action at once for fear they might be outwitted in argument or intrigue, and destroyed their more reasonable opponents while these were off their guard.

These imperishable chapters in Thucydides show us the fearful immorality common to all parties, both the horror of the conflict and the cold, inhuman calculation that informed it. Prudence was forgotten, for nothing could have been more favourable to the Persians, and Alcibiades encouraged them to let the two sides rage on; it was the simplest policy for the Persians to follow. During the precarious peace of Nicias (in 421), when everything was in ferment, primitive minority peoples began to make opportunistic raids (a development which was to become a terrible threat a century and a half later in the shape of the Aetolian League): Dolopians, Aenians and Malians attacked Heraclea Trachinia, won a battle, besieged the city and were driven off only by a unit of Theban auxiliaries. Both sides remained determined to fight to the last, and if we felt inclined to moderate what Thucydides says, his words are confirmed by the echoes we hear from Euripides’ Eteocles in Phoenician Women and his Creusa in Ion [pp. 244 and 256 above]. Here too we learn what risks power seekers would run to retain the mastery.

The poets shed light on many things. For instance, though predatory communism first appeared in the time of Polybius, its very own arguments, pressing for universal equality of property, must already have been heard during the Peloponnesian War. We gather this from a tirade in Euripides, proclaiming that life would become impossible if there were only poor people, and that general wellbeing needs a mixture of rich and poor, since they depend on one. another. It is also characteristic of the time that the simple patriotism that still speaks so convincingly in Aeschylus’ Seven against Thebes now sometimes rings false in Euripides. This is so in the long tirade of Erechtheus, when he is threatened by Eumolpus and the Thracians, and in his misguided noblemindedness proposes to sacrifice his daughter for his country. In another fragment the same poet tells how people now began to perceive that custom was better than law, because no orator could distort it; law could be abused and damaged by oratory.

For a guardian of morals, Aristophanes’ tone perhaps seems strange; but in all literature there is no text to compare with the dialogue, in Clouds, (961 ff.) of the just Word and the unjust. Both speeches, to be understood, must have been recognized by a large number of Athenians as images of the older and the younger Athens; the audience must also have been in silent agreement on things the poet necessarily speaks aloud. In Frogs (1014 f.) Aristophanes makes Aeschylus say that the present generation are shirkers when it comes to civic duties, mean, dishonest, and shabby (remember that this is just before the battle of Aegospotami); from Eurip ides they have learned the love of talk that is emptying the palaiestrai and causing mutiny among the sailors of the ship of state; the city swarms with forgers and frivolous pretenders, but they take so little exercise that none has the strength to carry the torches at the procession. Here and there the authorities are accused of corruption; or there is talk of the wickedness of men in general, backed up with mention of theft from public funds, desertion from the army or even kidnapping (Thesmophoriazusae 811 ff.) - though in this play it is the wretchedness and vice of women that are most harshly shown. Their infidelity, passing off their bastard children and so forth, are brought in as frequent occurrences, and there is talk of the increasing suspiciousness o f husbands (perhaps not much exaggerated) with Euripides blamed as the cause of it.214 In Plutus the good fortune of the wicked appears at the very beginning as a matter beyond doubt; Carion and his master Chremylus are each as bad as the other in their cold-blooded talk of dishonesty as the only way to get on in the world.

Old comedy itself is in reality part of the crisis of Greek life, and, as has been said [p. 230 above], is the proof that Athens was permanently charged with an electric force of scandal which was bound to break out like a thunderstorm, not only at the Dionysia, but throughout the year.215 As a source for cultural history comedy is indispensable, and the digressions (parabases), where the poet speaks directly, are of particular documentary importance; Aristophanes may be totally slanderous where he is dealing with certain individuals, but, where he depicts general conduct, can only have said what everyone knew and felt to be recognizable.

Jacob-Burckhardt The Greeks

(Oswyn-Murray-Sheila-Stern)

On Jacob Burckhardt

Life Burckhardt was born in 1818 into a family which was a minor branch of one of the great burgher clans of Basle: the name of Burckhardt had been prominent in the city since the fifteenth century.2 His father was a Protestant minister who had been much influenced by Schleiermacher’s theology.

Basle was a patrician city, conservative and increasingly prosperous, at the same time as being detached from the turbulence of European political events; Burckhardt belonged to its intelligentsia. He completed a degree in theology at Basle, but ceased to be religious, having become convinced by his youthful studies that the life of Christ was a myth. In 1839 he went to Berlin to study history under Ranke, Boeckh and Droysen; but his closest friend and greatest influence was Franz Kugler, the bohemian professor in    the new subject of art history. In another friend, Gottfried Kinkel, he found one of the last of the great Romantics; he moved into the circle of Kinkel’s mistress, the divorced Johanna Matthieux, and of Bettina von Amim, who had once loved Goethe and who lived in Berlin with her sister, the widow of the great legal historian F. C. von Savigny. Burckhardt was Kinkel’s best man at his wedding with Johanna in 1844; but he distanced himself from him during Kinkel’s subsequent career as a revolutionary. Kinkel was con- demned to death in 1848, and escaped with his wife’s help to exile in London, where Johanna finally committed suicide.

Burckhardt was safely back in Basle in 1844, where he served for eighteen months as editor of the main conservative newspaper, the Basler Zeitung.

He was already lecturing at the university on the history of painting, where he caused offence in religious circles by criticizing the dominant Nazarene School, a group of German religious painters in Rome who served as a model for the later pre-Raphaelites. In 1852 he resigned from the university and left for Italy, where he wrote the immensely popular Cicerone (1854), ‘a guide to the enjoyment of art in Italy’, which remained the standard guidebook to Renaissance Italian architecture, sculpture and art for three generations and went through seven editions during his lifetime. On the basis of this he was given a post at the Zürich Polytechnic. In 1858 he was appointed Professor of History at Basle, where he was required to lecture both at the university and at the high school; from 1874 he was also Professor of the History of Ar t. The first post he held until 1885, and the second until 1893. He was a conscientious and assiduous lecturer in both history and history of art, who taught as much as ten hours weekly, and also gave many lectures for the general public.

Burckhardt never married (although as a young man he was in love and wrote poetry to a girl whose parents disapproved); his youthful German friends drifted away, and in his thirties he confessed to being lonely beyond all expectations. He had a few close friends with whom he corresponded, and lived a regular and uneventful life in two rooms above a baker’s shop, devoting himself to his lectures, his books and his travels.

Politically Burckhardt was a natural conservative, who disliked and despised the new industrialization and the development of the national state: he foresaw in the course of his own lifetime the coming of an age of ‘terribles simplificateurs’ and demagogues, who would control the masses and bring ruin to Europe. This pessimistic conservatism is characteristic of a reflective historian, who cultivated irony and distance from the enthusi- asms of contemporary nationalist historians. In so far as he foresaw the development of industrial society towards the totalitarian popular regimes of National Socialism and Marxism, he was of course a prophet out of his time, standing against the tide of history. But he was not a political thinker; and these prejudices, however clear-sighted, are merely the regrets of a marginal observer over the decline of the patrician order to which his own family so clearly belonged. Hence his attack on the vice of reading news- papers and concerning oneself with the agitations of the present in the introduction to the present book.3 It is not Burckhardt’s political views or his pessimism in regard to the future which matter, but his conception of historical method; as he wrote already in 1846:

But, my dear friend, Freedom and the State have lost nothing in me. States are not built with men like me; though as long as I live I mean to be kind and sympathetic to my neighbour; I mean to be a good private individual, an affectionate friend, a good spirit; I have some talent in that direction and mean to develop it I can do nothing more with society as a whole; my attitude towards it is willy-nilly ironical; the details are my affair. . . we may all perish, but at least I want to discover the interest for which I am to perish, namely the ancient culture of Europe.4 So he developed the mask of a dilettante, immersed in his work and his few friends, and devoted to the study of European culture, by which he meant the artistic, literary and spiritual achievements of the past, placed in their context and explained as the result of the forces of history. History was the contemplation of the past: ‘leisure, the mother of contemplation and of the inspiration that springs from it’ (writing from London); ‘Listen to the secret of things. The contemplative mood.’ ‘How is the collector of inscriptions to find time for contemplative work? Why, they don’t even know their Thucydides! Don’t bother about others.’5

Early Works

In the 1840s, while still a student, Burckhardt rebelled against the prevailing conception of history, ‘the one-sidedness of the present that only wants to have a biassed history (Tendenz-Geschichte), just as it has a biassed poetry and a biassed art’.6 ‘For me the background is the chief consideration, and that is provided by cultural history, to which I intend to dedicate myself,’ Burckhardt wrote in 1842.7 From the start his conception of history was concerned, not with actions and events or the great men who appeared to have caused them, but with the cultural context in which such events occurred, a context which might explain the changes far more satisfactorily than by ascribing them to the actions of individuals or the workings of chance. How had Constantine converted the Roman Empire to Christianity, and what did that mean to contemporaries? This was the subject of his first book, The Age of Constantine (1852); it was translated into English a century later (1949),8 and had an enormous effect on my generation of historians, who were in the process of discovering, for the first time in the Anglo-Saxon world since Gibbon, the inexhaustible fascination of late antiquity; for he taught us how to see the age as a cultural phenomenon, rather than in terms of its politics and power structures, or its governmental organization, as more recent historians had interpreted it.

In this book the arrangement is already around three thematic centres - politics, religion and culture. Politics in this period is a necessary evil, a defence against barbarian invasion and internal anarchy. Culture is in decline: literature is reduced to dependence on power (in panegyric) or religion; art is an adjunct of religion: ‘the relevant myths were represented as symbolic husks of general ideas, and the separation between kernel and shell could in the long run only be injurious to art’.9 Philosophy is a solitary pursuit, even if as Themistius said, ‘the value of a philosopher’s discourse is not diminished if it is delivered under a solitary plane tree with none but cicadas to hear’.10 The Christian Church was already a powerful corpor- ation. In this picture Constantine is simply a man of his age, almost irrel- evant to the revolution in consciousness which he brought about; he belongs firmly in a world of mixed pagan and Christian beliefs, and his conversion simply ratified a formal division of equality between two cultures which already existed. The core of the argument lay in Burckhardt’s portrayal of the dominance of religious modes of thought. Late antique paganism was an immensely complex set of rituals and beliefs trying to make sense of the spiritual world:

Christianity was bound to conquer in the end because it provided answers which were incomparably simpler, and which were articu- lated in an impressive and convincing whole, to all the questions for which that period of ferment was so deeply concerned to find solutions.11

Burckhardt’s most famous book, on which his reputation still rests, was The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1860). Lord Acton, the founder of modern historical studies in Cambridge, described it as ‘the most pen- etrating and subtle treatise on the history of civilization that exists in literature’.1 2 It is indeed this book which still shapes and challenges all subsequent attempts to explain the central phenomenon in European history. Burckhardt set out to present an analysis of the new forces at work in the period, and how they interrelate. The first part treats of politics and warfare under the provocative heading, ‘The State as a Work of Art’. That is to say, political life was no longer determined by traditional forms of government or by underlying forces revealed by the modem historian, but by the conscious knowledge of protagonists that there existed a science or art of government, which could be discovered either by experiment or by reflection. The catalogue of murder, treachery and tyranny which ensues shows the consequences of believing in the power of reason rather than tradition: it is a view of the history of events which places the new political science of Machiavelli at its centre; yet whatever its consequences in terms of anarchy and suffering, Burckhardt showed how politics had never before or since been conducted at such a high intellectual level by leaders with such practical and theoretical talents.

The second part describes ‘The Development of the Individual’. This was a constant preoccupation of nineteenth-century post-Hegelian thought: how had the modem idea of the individual arisen from the tribal and religious stages of history? Burckhardt does not explain: he simply describes the forces which separated individuals from their communities, the creation of the ideal of ‘the universal man’ and the modem conception of fame, together with its antithesis, the modem idea of wit and satire:

Man was conscious of himself only as a member of a race, people, party, family or corporation - only through some general category. In Italy this veil first melted into air; an objective treatment and consideration of the state and of all the things of this world became possible. The subjective side at the same time asserted itself with corresponding emphasis; man became a spiritual individual, and recognized himself as such.13

So Burckhardt establishes that ‘it was not the revival of antiquity alone, but its union with the genius of the Italian people, which achieved the conquest of the western world’.1 4 His third section concerns ‘The Revival of Antiquity’ and the education of this new man through contact with ancient literature and culture. The discovery of the New World is treated in a section which relates it to the inner exploration of the psyche, to the development of poetry and biography, and to descriptions of the external world, in ‘The Discovery of the World and of Man’.

Under ‘Society and Festivals’, Burckhardt treats of how men and women actually lived in this new world, the principles of courtesy, good manners and outward refinement, styles of language and conversation, lovemaking, physical exercise and music, the equality of men and women within a masculine ideal of the courtier, and the development of a style of official popular festival, which was modelled on conceptions of ancient triumphs and bacchanals. Finally ‘Morality and Religion’ seeks to relate this new age to the medieval religious forces which it never wholly superseded, so that the last chapter concerns the mixture of ancient and modem superstition which led towards the inevitable disintegration of belief.

It is this work which marks the definitive establishment of a new form of history, which has come to be known in German as Kulturgeschichte, ‘cultural history’.15 Each theme is seen from an entirely new viewpoint, which is on the one hand descriptive and concerned with the details, and on the other corresponds to an underlying view of the basic elements which through their interrelation make up the idea of a culture. In this book Burckhardt was able to discard the determinism inherent in the philosophical problem of the meaning of history for the development of the human spirit, as Hegel had formulated it, while using contemporary philosophical concepts (such as the State, religion and the individual) to structure his description of reality. At the same time he avoided the trap of historical positivism, which consists in believing that the meaning of history is con tained in a chain of cause and effect, and in the certification of the truth or falsehood of alleged events or facts. For Burckhardt the explanation of events lies not in their causes but in the interrelations between them, of which the idea of cause is only a partial and pseudo-scientific two-dimensional reflection. Societies are not linear series of events, but highly complex and interconnected systems, where a change in any element may provoke multiple effects elsewhere. Moreover what people believe and how they behave are far more important than whether their beliefs are true or usefu l: it is not the event which matters, but the perception of that event as a ‘fact’, which is neither true nor false, but simply believed.

It is a valid criticism of Burckhardt’s view of culture that he concerned himself essentially with high culture, with the expression of values contained in the activities and beliefs of an educated elite. His concept of cultural history is therefore fundamentally different from that prevalent in modem universities, where ‘cultural studies’ means the investigation of popular culture and especially minority cultures. Even so the appropriation of the nineteenth-century term by this new modern discipline points to the fact that the tradition begun by Burckhardt opened the way to the study of gestures, customs and behaviour patterns, festivals and other forms of popular expression. Even if Burckhardt might not have relished it, he is in a sense also the father of this discipline, derived from a multicultural and egalitarian conception of society. But it is important to realize that the techniques, concepts and archival materials necessary to make this leap into the future were not available in Burckhardt’s day; and that the great strength of his own reliance on the elite culture is that it was this culture which was self-conscious and fully realized, recorded in the literature and art of the period.

At one time the Constantine and the Renaissance had been intended to be the beginning and end of a great study of the development of European culture from antiquity to the start of the modem age.16 But The Civilization of the Renaissance was the last book published by Burckhardt during his lifetime. Burckhardt came to believe that teaching was far more important:

‘in my experience learned authorship is one of the most unhealthy, and mere teaching (however troublesome it may be and however detailed the studies and preparations need to be) one of the healthiest activities in the world’.17 Behind this ironic withdrawal from the duty to publish, and his refusal to accept that teaching and writing are part of a continuous process of communicating ideas, lay a deeper distaste for the activities of his academic contemporaries, with their unreadable multiple volumes, their obsession with detail and facts, and the pompous arrogance of ‘the viri eruditissimi in their professorial chairs’ whom he refused to join in 1872, when he turned down the offer of Ranke’s chair in Berlin. Heinrich von Sybel proclaimed the programme for the first number of the new historical journal Historische Zeitschrift in 1859: it was to be devoted to the true method of historical research, which was to be combined with a special place for modern history rather than older history and German history rather than the history of other peoples.18 Increasingly Burckhardt could accept neither the political purpose nor the conceptual method of this new history. He no longer believed in the way positivist historicism was going, and could not bring himself to betray his vision of history as contemplation.

The lecture hall in Basle was the one place where it was still possible for a professor to meditate on history rather than making political propaganda or writing boring books designed to kill the interest in his subject. As he said in conversation with his successor Heinrich Wölfflin:

A teacher cannot hope to give much. But in the first place he can keep alive belief in the value of spiritual things. And secondly he can awaken the conviction that there is real happiness to be found in such things.19

The Greeks and Greek Civilization Lectures
Jacob Burckhardt
Edited and translated by
Oswyn Murray and Sheila Stern

Morality

 THE relation of the various peoples of the earth to the supreme interests of life, to God, virtue, and immortality, may be investigated up to a certain point, but can never be compared to one another with absolute strictness and certainty. The more plainly in these matters our evidence seems to speak, the more carefully must we refrain from unqualified assumptions and rash generalisations.

This remark is especially true with regard to our judgment on questions of morality. It may be possible to indicate many contrasts and shades of difference among different nations, but to strike the balance of the whole is not given to human insight. The ultimate truth with respect to the character, the conscience, and the guilt of a people remains for ever a secret; if only for the reason that its defects have another side, where they reappear as peculiarities or even as virtues. We must leave those who find a pleasure in passing sweeping censures on whole nations, to do so as they like. The peoples of Europe can maltreat, but happily not judge one another. A great nation, interwoven by its civilisation, its achievements, and its fortunes with the whole life of the modern world, can afford to ignore both its advocates and its accusers. It lives on with or without the approval of theorists.

Accordingly, what here follows is no judgment, but rather a string of marginal notes, suggested by a study of the Italian Renaissance extending over some years. The value to be attached to them is all the more qualified as they mostly touch on the life of the upper classes, with respect to which we are far better informed in Italy than in any other country in Europe at that period. But though both fame and infamy sound louder here than elsewhere, we are not helped thereby in forming an adequate moral estimate of the people.What eye can pierce the depths in which the character and fate of nations are determined?—in which that which is inborn and that which has been experienced combine to form a new whole and a fresh nature?—in which even those intellectual capacities, which at first sight we should take to be most original, are in fact evolved late and slowly? Who can tell if the Italian before the thirteenth century possessed that flexible activity and certainty in his whole being—that play of power in shaping whatever subject he dealt with in word or in form, which was peculiar to him later? And if no answer can be found to these questions, how can we possibly judge of the infinite and infinitely intricate channels through which character and intellect are incessantly pouring their influence one upon the other. A tribunal there is for each one of us, whose voice is our conscience; but let us have done with these generalities about nations. For the people that seems to be most sick the cure may be at hand; and one that appears to be healthy may bear within it the ripening germs of death, which the hour of danger will bring forth from their hiding-place.

At the beginning of the sixteenth century, when the civilisation of the Renaissance had reached its highest pitch, and at the same time the political ruin of the nation seemed inevitable, there were not wanting serious thinkers who saw a connexion between this ruin and the prevalent immorality. It was not one of those methodistical moralists who in every age think themselves called to declaim against the wickedness of the time, but it was Macchiavelli, who, in one of his most well-considered works,[981] said openly: ‘We Italians are irreligious and corrupt above others.’ Another man had perhaps said, ‘We are individually highly developed; we have outgrown the limits of morality and religion which were natural to us in our undeveloped state, and we despise outward law, because our rulers are illegitimate, and their judges and officers wicked  men.’ Macchiavelli adds, ‘because the Church and her representatives set us the worst example.’

Shall we add also, ‘because the influence exercised by antiquity was in this respect unfavourable’? The statement can only be received with many qualifications. It may possibly be true of the humanists (p. 272 sqq.), especially as regards the profligacy of their lives. Of the rest it may perhaps be said with some approach to accuracy, that, after they became familiar with antiquity, they substituted for holiness—the Christian ideal of life—the cultus of historical greatness (see Part II. chap. iii.). We can understand, therefore, how easily they would be tempted to consider those faults and vices to be matters of indifference, in spite of which their heroes were great. They were probably scarcely conscious of this themselves, for if we are summoned to quote any statement of doctrine on this subject, we are again forced to appeal to humanists like Paolo Giovio, who excuses the perjury of Giangaleazzo Visconti, through which he was enabled to found an empire, by the example of Julius Cæsar.[982] The great Florentine historians and statesmen never stoop to these slavish quotations, and what seems antique in their deeds and their judgments is so because the nature of their political life necessarily fostered in them a mode of thought which has some analogy with that of antiquity.

Nevertheless, it cannot be denied that Italy at the beginning of the sixteenth century found itself in the midst of a grave moral crisis, out of which the best men saw hardly any escape.

Let us begin by saying a few words about that moral force which was then the strongest bulwark against evil. The highly gifted men of that day thought to find it in the sentiment of honour. This is that enigmatic mixture of conscience and egoism which often survives in the modern man after he has lost, whether by his own fault or not, faith, love, and hope. This sense of honour is compatible with much selfishness and great vices, and may be the victim of astonishing illusions; yet, nevertheless, all the noble elements that are left  in the wreck of a character may gather around it, and from this fountain may draw new strength. It has become, in a far wider sense than is commonly believed, a decisive test of conduct in the minds of the cultivated Europeans of our own day, and many of those who yet hold faithfully by religion and morality are unconsciously guided by this feeling in the gravest decisions of their lives.[983]It lies without the limits of our task to show how the men of antiquity also experienced this feeling in a peculiar form, and how, afterwards, in the Middle Ages, a special sense of honour became the mark of a particular class. Nor can we here dispute with those who hold that conscience, rather than honour, is the motive power. It would indeed be better and nobler if it were so; but since it must be granted that even our worthier resolutions result from ‘a conscience more or less dimmed by selfishness,’ it is better to call the mixture by its right name.[984] It is certainly not always easy, in treating of the Italian of this period, to distinguish this sense of honour from the passion for fame, into which, indeed, it easily passes. Yet the two sentiments are essentially different.

There is no lack of witnesses on this subject. One who speaks plainly may here be quoted as a representative of the rest. We read in the recently-published ‘Aphorisms’ of Guicciardini:[985] ‘He who esteems honour highly, succeeds in all that he undertakes, since he fears neither trouble, danger, nor expense; I have found it so in my own case, and may say it and write it; vain and dead are the deeds of men which have not this as their motive.’ It is necessary to add that, from what is known of the life of the writer, he can here be only speaking of honour, and not of fame. Rabelais has put the matter more clearly than perhaps any Italian. We quote him, indeed, unwillingly in these pages. What the great, baroque Frenchman gives us, is a picture of what the Renaissance  would be without form and without beauty.[986] But his description of an ideal state of things in the Thelemite monastery is decisive as historical evidence. In speaking of his gentlemen and ladies of the Order of Free Will,[987] he tells us as follows:—

‘En leur reigle n’estoit que ceste clause: Fay ce que vouldras. Parce que gens liberes, bien nayz,[988] bien instruictz, conversans en compaignies honnestes, ont par nature ung instinct et aguillon qui toujours les poulse à faitz vertueux, et retire de vice; lequel ilz nommoyent honneur.’

This is that same faith in the goodness of human nature which inspired the men of the second half of the eighteenth century, and helped to prepare the way for the French Revolution. Among the Italians, too, each man appeals to this noble instinct within him, and though with regard to the people as a whole—chiefly in consequence of the national disasters—judgments of a more pessimistic sort became prevalent, the importance of this sense of honour must still be rated highly. If the boundless development of individuality, stronger than the will of the individual, be the work of a historical providence, not less so is the opposing force which then manifested itself in Italy. How often, and against what passionate attacks of selfishness it won the day, we cannot tell, and therefore no human judgment can estimate with certainty the absolute moral value of the nation.

A force which we must constantly take into account in judging of the morality of the more highly-developed Italian  of this period, is that of the imagination. It gives to his virtues and vices a peculiar colour, and under its influence his unbridled egoism shows itself in its most terrible shape.

The force of his imagination explains, for example, the fact that he was the first gambler on a large scale in modern times. Pictures of future wealth and enjoyment rose in such life-like colours before his eyes, that he was ready to hazard everything to reach them. The Mohammedan nations would doubtless have anticipated him in this respect, had not the Koran, from the beginning, set up the prohibition against gambling as a chief safeguard of public morals, and directed the imagination of its followers to the search after buried treasures. In Italy, the passion for play reached an intensity which often threatened or altogether broke up the existence of the gambler. Florence had already, at the end of the fourteenth century, its Casanova—a certain Buonaccorso Pitti,[989] who, in the course of his incessant journeys as merchant, political agent, diplomatist and professional gambler, won and lost sums so enormous that none but princes like the Dukes of Brabant, Bavaria, and Savoy, were able to compete with him. That great lottery-bank, which was called the Court of Rome, accustomed people to a need of excitement, which found its satisfaction in games of hazard during the intervals between one intrigue and another. We read, for example, how Franceschetto Cybò, in two games with the Cardinal Raffaello Riario, lost no less than 14,000 ducats, and afterwards complained to the Pope that his opponent had cheated him.[990] Italy has since that time been the home of the lottery.

It was to the imagination of the Italians that the peculiar character of their vengeance was due. The sense of justice was, indeed, one and the same throughout Europe, and any violation of it, so long as no punishment was inflicted, must have been felt in the same manner. But other nations, though they found it no easier to forgive, nevertheless forgot more easily, while the Italian imagination kept the picture of the  wrong alive with frightful vividness.[991] The fact that, according to the popular morality, the avenging of blood is a duty—a duty often performed in a way to make us shudder—gives to this passion a peculiar and still firmer basis. The government and the tribunals recognise its existence and justification, and only attempt to keep it within certain limits. Even among the peasantry, we read of Thyestean banquets and mutual assassination on the widest scale. Let us look at an instance.[992]In the district of Aquapendente three boys were watching cattle, and one of them said: ‘Let us find out the way how people are hung.’ While one was sitting on the shoulders of the other, and the third, after fastening the rope round the neck of the first, was tying it to an oak, a wolf came, and the two who were free ran away and left the other hanging. Afterwards they found him dead, and buried him. On the Sunday his father came to bring him bread, and one of the two confessed what had happened, and showed him the grave. The old man then killed him with a knife, cut him up, brought away the liver, and entertained the boy’s father with it at home. After dinner, he told him whose liver it was. Hereupon began a series of reciprocal murders between the two families, and within a month thirty-six persons were killed, women as well as men.

And such ‘vendette,’ handed down from father to son, and extending to friends and distant relations, were not limited to the lower classes, but reached to the highest. The chronicles and novels of the period are full of such instances, especially of vengeance taken for the violation of women. The classic land for these feuds was Romagna, where the ‘vendetta’ was interwoven with intrigues and party divisions of every conceivable sort. The popular legends present an awful picture of the savagery into which this brave and energetic people had relapsed. We are told, for instance, of a nobleman at Ravenna, who had got all his enemies together in a tower, and might have burned them; instead of which he let them out, embraced  them, and entertained them sumptuously; whereupon shame drove them mad, and they conspired against him.[993] Pious and saintly monks exhorted unceasingly to reconciliation, but they can scarcely have done more than restrain to a certain extent the feuds already established; their influence hardly prevented the growth of new ones. The novelists sometimes describe to us this effect of religion—how sentiments of generosity and forgiveness were suddenly awakened, and then again paralysed by the force of what had once been done and could never be undone. The Pope himself was not always lucky as a peacemaker. ‘Pope Paul II. desired that the quarrel between Antonio Caffarello and the family of Alberino should cease, and ordered Giovanni Alberino and Antonio Caffarello to come before him, and bade them kiss one another, and promised them a fine of 2,000 ducats in case they renewed this strife, and two days after Antonio was stabbed by the same Giacomo Alberino, son of Giovanni, who had wounded him once before; and the Pope was full of anger, and confiscated the goods of Alberino, and destroyed his houses, and banished father and son from Rome.’[994] The oaths and ceremonies by which reconciled enemies attempted to guard themselves against a relapse, are sometimes utterly horrible. When the parties of the ‘Nove’ and the ‘Popolari’ met and kissed one another by twos in the cathedral at Siena on Christmas Eve, 1494,[995] an oath was read by which all salvation in time and eternity was denied to the future violator of the treaty—‘an oath more astonishing and dreadful than had ever yet been heard.’ The last consolations of religion in the hour of death were to turn to the damnation of the man who should break it. It is clear, however, that such a ceremony rather represents the despairing mood of the mediators than offers any real guarantee of peace, inasmuch as the truest reconciliation is just that one which has least need of it.

This personal need of vengeance felt by the cultivated and highly placed Italian, resting on the solid basis of an analogous  popular custom, naturally displays itself under a thousand different aspects, and receives the unqualified approval of public opinion, as reflected in the works of the novelists.[996] All are at one on the point, that, in the case of those injuries and insults for which Italian justice offered no redress, and all the more in the case of those against which no human law can ever adequately provide, each man is free to take the law into his own hands. Only there must be art in the vengeance, and the satisfaction must be compounded of the material injury and moral humiliation of the offender. A mere brutal, clumsy triumph of force was held by public opinion to be no satisfaction. The whole man with his sense of fame and of scorn, not only his fist, must be victorious.

The Italian of that time shrank, it is true, from no dissimulation in order to attain his ends, but was wholly free from hypocrisy in matters of principle. In these he attempted to deceive neither himself nor others. Accordingly, revenge was declared with perfect frankness to be a necessity of human nature. Cool-headed people declared that it was then most worthy of praise, when it was disengaged from passion, and worked simply from motives of expedience, ‘in order that other men may learn to leave us unharmed.’[997] Yet such instances must have formed only a small minority in comparison with those in which passion sought an outlet. This sort of revenge differs clearly from the avenging of blood, which has been already spoken of; while the latter keeps more or less within the limits of retaliation—the ‘jus talionis’—the former necessarily goes much farther, not only requiring the sanction of the sense of justice, but craving admiration, and even striving to get the laugh on its own side.

Here lies the reason why men were willing to wait so long for their revenge. A ‘bella vendetta’ demanded as a rule a combination of circumstances for which it was necessary to wait patiently. The gradual ripening of such opportunities is described by the novelists with heartfelt delight.

There is no need to discuss the morality of actions in which plaintiff and judge are one and the same person. If this Italian thirst for vengeance is to be palliated at all, it must be by proving the existence of a corresponding national virtue, namely gratitude. The same force of imagination which retains and magnifies wrong once suffered, might be expected also to keep alive the memory of kindness received.[998] It is not possible, however, to prove this with regard to the nation as a whole, though traces of it may be seen in the Italian character of to-day. The gratitude shown by the inferior classes for kind treatment, and the good memory of the upper for politeness in social life, are instances of this.

This connexion between the imagination and the moral qualities of the Italian repeats itself continually. If, nevertheless, we find more cold calculation in cases where the Northerner rather follows his impulses, the reason is that individual development in Italy was not only more marked and earlier in point of time, but also far more frequent. Where this is the case in other countries, the results are also analogous. We find, for example, that the early emancipation of the young from domestic and paternal authority is common to North America with Italy. Later on, in the more generous natures, a tie of freer affection grows up between parents and children.

It is in fact a matter of extreme difficulty to judge fairly of other nations in the sphere of character and feeling. In these respects a people may be developed highly, and yet in a manner so strange that a foreigner is utterly unable to understand it. Perhaps all the nations of the West are in this point equally favoured.

(...)

In the imagination then, which governed this people more than any other, lies one general reason why the course of every passion was violent, and why the means used for the gratification of passion were often criminal. There is a violence which cannot control itself because it is born of weakness; but in Italy what we find is the corruption of powerful natures. Sometimes this corruption assumes a colossal shape, and crime seems to acquire almost a personal existence of its own.

The restraints of which men were conscious were but few. Each individual, even among the lowest of the people, felt himself inwardly emancipated from the control of the State and its police, whose title to respect was illegitimate, and itself founded on violence; and no man believed any longer in the justice of the law. When a murder was committed, the sympathies of the people, before the circumstances of the case were known, ranged themselves instinctively on the side of the murderer.[1005] A proud, manly bearing before and at the execution excited such admiration that the narrator often forgets to tell us for what offence the criminal was put to death.[1006] But when we add to this inward contempt of law and to the countless grudges and enmities which called for satisfaction, the impunity which crime enjoyed during times of political disturbance, we can only wonder that the state and society were not utterly dissolved. Crises of this kind occurred at Naples during the transition from the Aragonese to the French and Spanish rule, and at Milan, on the repeated expulsions and returns of the Sforzas; at such times those men who have never in their hearts recognised the bonds of law and society, come forward and give free play to their instincts of murder and rapine. Let us take, by way of example, a picture drawn from a humbler sphere.

When the Duchy of Milan was suffering from the disorders which followed the death of Giangaleazzo Sforza, about the year 1480 (pp. 40, 126), all safety came to an end in the provincial cities. This was the case in Parma,[1007] where the Milanese Governor, terrified by threats of murder, and after vainly offering rewards for the discovery of the offenders,  consented to throw open the gaols and let loose the most abandoned criminals. Burglary, the demolition of houses, shameless offences against decency, public assassination and murders, especially of Jews, were events of everyday occurrence. At first the authors of these deeds prowled about singly, and masked; soon large gangs of armed men went to work every night without disguise. Threatening letters, satires, and scandalous jests circulated freely; and a sonnet in ridicule of the Government seems to have roused its indignation far more than the frightful condition of the city. In many churches the sacred vessels with the host were stolen, and this fact is characteristic of the temper which prompted these outrages. It is impossible to say what would happen now in any country of the world, if the government and police ceased to act, and yet hindered by their presence the establishment of a provisional authority; but what then occurred in Italy wears a character of its own, through the great share which personal hatred and revenge had in it. The impression, indeed, which Italy at this period makes on us is, that even in quiet times great crimes were commoner than in other countries. We may, it is true, be misled by the fact that we have far fuller details on such matters here than elsewhere, and that the same force of imagination, which gives a special character to crimes actually committed, causes much to be invented which never really happened. The amount of violence was perhaps as great elsewhere. It is hard to say for certain, whether in the year 1500 men were any safer, whether human life was after all better protected, in powerful, wealthy Germany, with its robber knights, extortionate beggars, and daring highwaymen. But one thing is certain, that premeditated crimes, committed professionally and for hire by third parties, occurred in Italy with great and appalling frequency.

So far as regards brigandage, Italy, especially in the more fortunate provinces, such as Tuscany, was certainly not more, and probably less, troubled than the countries of the North. But the figures which do meet us are characteristic of the country. It would be hard, for instance, to find elsewhere the case of a priest, gradually driven by passion from one excess to another, till at last he came to head a band of robbers. That  age offers us this example among others.[1008] On August 12, 1495, the priest Don Niccolò de’ Pelegati of Figarolo was shut up in an iron cage outside the tower of San Giuliano at Ferrara. He had twice celebrated his first mass; the first time he had the same day committed murder, but afterwards received absolution at Rome; he then killed four people and married two wives, with whom he travelled about. He afterwards took part in many assassinations, violated women, carried others away by force, plundered far and wide, and infested the territory of Ferrara with a band of followers in uniform, extorting food and shelter by every sort of violence. When we think of what all this implies, the mass of guilt on the head of this one man is something tremendous. The clergy and monks had many privileges and little supervision, and among them were doubtless plenty of murderers and other malefactors—but hardly a second Pelegati. It is another matter, though by no means creditable, when ruined characters sheltered themselves in the cowl in order to escape the arm of the law, like the corsair whom Massuccio knew in a convent at Naples.[1009] What the real truth was with regard to Pope John XXIII. in this respect, is not known with certainty.[1010]The age of the famous brigand chief did not begin till later, in the seventeenth century, when the political strife of Guelph and Ghibelline, of Frenchman and Spaniard, no longer agitated the country. The robber then took the place of the partisan.

In certain districts of Italy, where civilization had made little progress, the country people were disposed to murder any stranger who fell into their hands. This was especially the case in the more remote parts of the Kingdom of Naples, where  the barbarism dated probably from the days of the Roman ‘latifundia,’ and when the stranger and the enemy (‘hospes’ and ‘hostis’) were in all good faith held to be one and the same. These people were far from being irreligious. A herdsman once appeared in great trouble at the confessional, avowing that, while making cheese during Lent, a few drops of milk had found their way into his mouth. The confessor, skilled in the customs of the country, discovered in the course of his examination that the penitent and his friends were in the practice of robbing and murdering travellers, but that, through the force of habit, this usage gave rise to no twinges of conscience within them.[1011] We have already mentioned (p. 352, note 3) to what a degree of barbarism the peasants elsewhere could sink in times of political confusion.

A worse symptom than brigandage of the morality of that time was the frequency of paid assassination. In that respect Naples was admitted to stand at the head of all the cities of Italy. ‘Nothing,’ says Pontano,[1012] ‘is cheaper here than human life.’ But other districts could also show a terrible list of these crimes. It is hard, of course, to classify them according to the motives by which they were prompted, since political expediency, personal hatred, party hostility, fear, and revenge, all play into one another. It is no small honour to the Florentines, the most highly-developed people of Italy, that offences of this kind occurred more rarely among them than anywhere else,[1013] perhaps because there was a justice at hand for legitimate grievances which was recognised by all, or because the higher culture of the individual gave him different views as to the right of men to interfere with the decrees of fate. In Florence, if anywhere, men were able to feel the incalculable con sequences of a deed of blood, and to understand how insecure the author of a so-called profitable crime is of any true and lasting gain. After the fall of Florentine liberty, assassination, especially by hired agents, seems to have rapidly increased, and continued till the government of Cosimo I. had attained such strength that the police[1014] was at last able to repress it.

Elsewhere in Italy paid crimes were probably more or less frequent in proportion to the number of powerful and solvent buyers. Impossible as it is to make any statistical estimate of their amount, yet if only a fraction of the deaths which public report attributed to violence were really murders, the crime must have been terribly frequent. The worst example of all was set by princes and governments, who without the faintest scruple reckoned murder as one of the instruments of their power. And this, without being in the same category with Cæsar Borgia. The Sforzas, the Aragonese monarchs, the Republic of Venice,[1015] and later on, the agents of Charles V. resorted to it whenever it suited their purpose. The imagination of the people at last became so accustomed to facts of this kind, that the death of any powerful man was seldom or never attributed to natural causes.[1016] There were certainly absurd notions current with regard to the effect of various poisons. There may be some truth in the story of that terrible white powder used by the Borgias, which did its work at the end of a definite period (p. 116), and it is possible that it was really a ‘velenum atterminatum’ which the Prince of Salerno handed to the Cardinal of Aragon, with the words: ‘In a few days you will die, because your father, King Ferrante, wished to trample upon us all.’[1017] But the poisoned letter which Caterina Riario sent to Pope Alexander VI.[1018] would hardly have caused his death even if he had read it; and when Alfonso the Great was warned by his physicians not to read in the ‘Livy’ which Cosimo de’ Medici had presented to him, he told them with justice not to talk like fools.[1019] Nor can that poison, with which the secretary of Piccinino wished to anoint the sedan-chair of Pius II.,[1020] have affected any other organ than the imagination. The proportion which mineral and vegetable poisons bore to one another cannot be ascertained precisely. The poison with which the painter Rosso Fiorentino destroyed himself (1541) was evidently a powerful acid,[1021] which it would have been impossible to administer to another person without his knowledge. The secret use of weapons, especially of the dagger, in the service of powerful individuals, was habitual in Milan, Naples, and other cities. Indeed, among the crowds of armed retainers who were necessary for the personal safety of the great, and who lived in idleness, it was natural that outbreaks of this mania for blood should from time to time occur. Many  a deed of horror would never have been committed, had not the master known that he needed but to give a sign to one or other of his followers.

Among the means used for the secret destruction of others—so far, that is, as the intention goes—we find magic,[1022] practised, however, sparingly. Where ‘maleficii,’ ‘malie,’ and so forth, are mentioned, they appear rather as a means of heaping up additional terror on the head of some hated enemy. At the courts of France and England in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, magic, practised with a view to the death of an opponent, plays a far more important part in Italy.

In this country, finally, where individuality of every sort attained its highest development, we find instances of that ideal and absolute wickedness which delights in crimes for their own sake, and not as means to an end, or at any rate as means to ends for which our psychology has no measure.

Among these appalling figures we may first notice certain of the ‘Condottieri,’[1023] such as Braccio di Montone, Tiberto Brandolino, and that Werner von Urslingen whose silver hauberk bore the inscription: ‘The enemy of God, of pity and of mercy.’ This class of men offers us some of the earliest instances of criminals deliberately repudiating every moral restraint. Yet we shall be more reserved in our judgment of them when we remember that the worst part of their guilt—in the estimate of those who record it—lay in their defiance of spiritual threats and penalties, and that to this fact is due that air of horror with which they are represented as surrounded. In the case of Braccio, the hatred of the Church went so far that he was infuriated at the sight of monks at their psalms,  and had thrown them down from the top of a tower;[1024] but at the same time ‘he was loyal to his soldiers and a great general.’ As a rule, the crimes of the ‘Condottieri’ were committed for the sake of some definite advantage, and must be attributed to a position in which men could not fail to be demoralised. Even their apparently gratuitous cruelty had commonly a purpose, if it were only to strike terror. The barbarities of the House of Aragon, as we have seen, were mainly due to fear and to the desire for vengeance. The thirst for blood on its own account, the devilish delight in destruction, is most clearly exemplified in the case of the Spaniard Cæsar Borgia, whose cruelties were certainly out of all proportion to the end which he had in view (p. 114 sqq.). In Sigismondo Malatesta, tyrant of Rimini (pp. 32, 228), the same disinterested love of evil may also be detected. It is not only the Court of Rome,[1025] but the verdict of history, which convicts him of murder, rape, adultery, incest, sacrilege, perjury and treason, committed not once but often. The most shocking crime of all—the unnatural attempt on his own son Roberto, who frustrated it with his drawn dagger,[1026]—may have been the result, not merely of moral corruption, but perhaps of some magical or astrological superstition. The same conjecture has been made to account for the rape of the Bishop of Fano[1027] by Pierluigi Farnese of Parma, son of Paul III.

If we now attempt to sum up the principal features in the Italian character of that time, as we know it from a study of the life of the upper classes, we shall obtain something like the following result. The fundamental vice of this character was at the same time a condition of its greatness, namely, excessive individualism. The individual first inwardly casts off the  authority of a state which, as a fact, is in most cases tyrannical and illegitimate, and what he thinks and does is, rightly or wrongly, now called treason. The sight of victorious egoism in others drives him to defend his own right by his own arm. And, while thinking to restore his inward equilibrium, he falls, through the vengeance which he executes, into the hands of the powers of darkness. His love, too, turns mostly for satisfaction to another individuality equally developed, namely, to his neighbour’s wife. In face of all objective facts, of laws and restraints of whatever kind, he retains the feeling of his own sovereignty, and in each single instance forms his decision independently, according as honour or interest, passion or calculation, revenge or renunciation, gain the upper hand in his own mind.

If therefore egoism in its wider as well as narrower sense is the root and fountain of all evil, the more highly developed Italian was for this reason more inclined to wickedness than the member of other nations of that time.

But this individual development did not come upon him through any fault of his own, but rather through an historical necessity. It did not come upon him alone, but also, and chiefly by means of Italian culture, upon the other nations of Europe, and has constituted since then the higher atmosphere which they breathe. In itself it is neither good nor bad, but necessary; within it has grown up a modern standard of good and evil—a sense of moral responsibility—which is essentially different from that which was familiar to the Middle Ages.

But the Italian of the Renaissance had to bear the first mighty surging of a new age. Through his gifts and his passions, he has become the most characteristic representative of all the heights and all the depths of his time. By the side of profound corruption appeared human personalities of the noblest harmony, and an artistic splendour which shed upon the life of man a lustre which neither antiquity nor mediævalism either could or would bestow upon it.

The Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy, 

by Jacob Burckhardt

Leon Battista Alberti

 But among these many-sided men, some who may truly be called all-sided, tower above the rest. Before analysing the general phases of life and culture of this period, we may here, on the threshold of the fifteenth century, consider for a moment the figure of one of these giants—Leon Battista Alberti (b. 1404? d. 1472).[306] His biography,[307] which is only a fragment, speaks of him but little as an artist, and makes no mention at all of his great significance in the history of architecture. We shall now see what he was, apart from these special claims to distinction.

In all by which praise is won, Leon Battista was from his childhood the first. Of his various gymnastic feats and exercises we read with astonishment how, with his feet together, he could spring over a man’s head; how, in the cathedral, he threw a coin in the air till it was heard to ring against the distant roof; how the wildest horses trembled under him. In three things he desired to appear faultless to others, in walking, in riding, and in speaking. He learned music without a master, and yet his compositions were admired by professional judges. Under the pressure of poverty, he studied both civil and canonical law for many years, till exhaustion brought on a  severe illness. In his twenty-fourth year, finding his memory for words weakened, but his sense of facts unimpaired, he set to work at physics and mathematics. And all the while he acquired every sort of accomplishment and dexterity, cross-examining artists, scholars, and artisans of all descriptions, down to the cobblers, about the secrets and peculiarities of their craft. Painting and modelling he practised by the way, and especially excelled in admirable likenesses from memory. Great admiration was excited by his mysterious ‘camera obscura,’[308] in which he showed at one time the stars and the moon rising over rocky hills, at another wide landscapes with mountains and gulfs receding into dim perspective, and with fleets advancing on the waters in shade or sunshine. And that which others created he welcomed joyfully, and held every human achievement which followed the laws of beauty for something almost divine.[309] To all this must be added his literary works, first of all those on art, which are landmarks and authorities of the first order for the Renaissance of Form, especially in architecture; then his Latin prose writings—novels and other works—of which some have been taken for productions of antiquity; his elegies, eclogues, and humorous dinner-speeches. He also wrote an Italian treatise on domestic life[310] in four books; various moral, philosophical, and historical works; and many speeches and poems, including a funeral oration on his dog. Notwithstanding his admiration for the Latin language, he wrote in Italian, and encouraged others to do the same; himself a disciple of Greek science, he maintained the doctrine, that without Christianity the world would wander in a labyrinth of error. His serious and witty sayings were thought worth collecting, and specimens of them, many columns long, are quoted in his biography. And all that he had and knew he  imparted, as rich natures always do, without the least reserve, giving away his chief discoveries for nothing. But the deepest spring of his nature has yet to be spoken of—the sympathetic intensity with which he entered into the whole life around him. At the sight of noble trees and waving corn-fields he shed tears; handsome and dignified old men he honoured as ‘a delight of nature,’ and could never look at them enough. Perfectly-formed animals won his goodwill as being specially favoured by nature; and more than once, when he was ill, the sight of a beautiful landscape cured him.[311] No wonder that those who saw him in this close and mysterious communion with the world ascribed to him the gift of prophecy. He was said to have foretold a bloody catastrophe in the family of Este, the fate of Florence, and the death of the Popes years before they happened, and to be able to read into the countenances and the hearts of men. It need not be added that an iron will pervaded and sustained his whole personality; like all the great men of the Renaissance, he said, ‘Men can do all things if they will.’

And Lionardo da Vinci was to Alberti as the finisher to the beginner, as the master to the dilettante. Would only that Vasari’s work were here supplemented by a description like that of Alberti! The colossal outlines of Lionardo’s nature can never be more than dimly and distantly conceived.

[306] For what follows compare Burckhardt, Geschichte der Renaissance in Italien, Stuttg. 1868, esp. p. 41 sqq., and A. Springer, Abhandlungen zur neueren Kunstgeschichte, Bonn, 1867, pp. 69-102. A new biography of Alberti is in course of preparation by Hub. Janitschek.

[307] In Murat. xxv. col. 295 sqq., with the Italian translation in the Opere Volgari di L. B. Alberti, vol. i. pp. lxxxix-cix, where the conjecture is made and shown to be probable that this ‘Vita’ is by Alberti himself. See, further, Vasari, iv. 52 sqq. Mariano Socini, if we can believe what we read of him in Æn. Sylvius (Opera, p. 622, Epist. 112) was a universal dilettante, and at the same time a master in several subjects.

[308] Similar attempts, especially an attempt at a flying-machine, had been made about 880 by the Andalusian Abul Abbas Kasim ibn Firnas. Comp. Gyangos, The History of the Muhammedan Dynasties in Spain (London, 1840), i. 148 sqq. and 425-7; extracts in Hammer, Literaturgesch. der Araber, i. Introd. p. li.

[309] Quidquid ingenio esset hominum cum quadam effectum elegantia, id prope divinum ducebat.

[310] This is the book (comp. p. 185, note 2) of which one part, often printed alone, long passed for a work of Pandolfini.

The Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy, by 

Jacob Burckhardt

Canetti on Burckhardt

 Jacob Burckhardt: How little he discouraged you, despite his acceptance of Schopenhauer!

You owe a great deal to Burckhardt:

His rejection of any system derived from history

His sense that nothing had gotten better but, on the contrary, worse

His respect for expressiveness of form, as opposed to pure conceptuality

His warm feeling for life truly lived, nourished by the tenderness of his renunciation

His unprettified knowledge of the Greeks

His resistance to Nietzsche, an early warning for me.

The shadow that lay upon Burckhardt’s thought was not cast by feeling. His enthusiasm was reserved for particular things. If some have withered, others retain their significance. One need not accept him. One cannot dismiss him.

There is no historian of the previous century for whom I feel such unreserved admiration.

In the years of preparation, when I read the most diverse things in order to lengthen the road to Crowds and Power, I appeared to be lost in an ocean of reading. People who learned of this situation thought me obsessed; even my best friends offered tactful advice. They said it was pointless to read nothing but primary sources; the great ancient books had been sifted a thousand times and been reduced to a few lasting insights. All the rest was ballast. Getting rid of superfluous material, they said, was paramount in any major undertaking.

But I kept rowing rudderless in my ocean and did not let myself be deterred. I had no justification for this attitude—until I came across the following sentence:

“It is possible that Thucydides, for example, contains a fact of prime importance that will not be noticed until a hundred years from now.” This sentence appears in the introduction to Reflections on World History. My most intimate debt to Burckhardt, my justification for those years, is that sentence.

The Secret Heart of the Clock 

Elias Canetti

Burckhardt on our astrological impatience ...

To know the future, however, is no more desirable in the life of mankind than in the life of the individual. And our astrological impatience for such knowledge is sheer folly. Whether we imagine a man, for instance, knowing in advance the day of his death and the situation it would find him in, or a people knowing in advance the century of its downfall, both pictures would bear within themselves the inevitable consequence-a confusion of all desire and endeavour. For desire and endeavour can only unfold freely when they live and act ''blindly," i.e. for their own sakes and in obedience to inward impulses. After all, the future is shaped only when that happens, and if it did not happen, the future life and end of that man or that people would be different.
A future known in advance is an absurdity.

Foreknowledge of the future, however, is not only undesirable, it is probably beyond our power as well. The main obstacle in the way is the confusion of insight by our wishes, hopes and fears; further, our ignorance of everything which we call latent forces, physical or mental, and the incalculable factor of mental contagions, which can suddenly transform the world. Nor must we forget the acoustic illusion in which we live. For four centuries past, thought and argument; multiplied to ubiquity by the press, have drowned every voice but their own, and seem to hold even material forces in dependence on themselves. And yet it may be that those very forces are on the eve of a triumphant expansion of another kind, or that a spiritual current is at the door ready to carry the world in the opposite direction. If that current wins the day, it will take thought and its trumpets into its service until another comes to take its place. And finally, as regards the future, we must not forget the limitations of our knowledge of racial biology from the physiological side.

Quote from the book Reflections on history

Jakob Burckhardt: An essential condition of scholarship

An essential condition of scholarship is a definite branch of study : theology, jurisprudence, or whatever it may be, must be taken up and carried through to its academic conclusion, and that not only for private, professional reasons, but in order to acquire the habit of steady work, to learn respect for all branches of a particular subject, to fortify the seriousness necessary to learning.

Side by side with it, however, we must continue those pre-liminary studies which give access to all that comes later, in particular the various world literatures, i.e. the two classical languages and, if possible, two modern ones. We can never know too many languages. And however much or little we may have known of them, we should never quite let them lapse. All honour to good translations, but none can replace the original expression, and the original language, in word and phrase, is historical evidence of the first rank.

Further, we should avoid anything which exists simply as a pastime, for time should be welcomed and turned to account, and secondly we should maintain an attitude of reserve towards the present-day devastation of the mind by newspapers and novels.

We are only concerned here with such minds and hearts as cannot fall victim to common boredom, which can carry through i train of thought, and have imagination enough to be able to do without the concrete imaginings of others or, if they do turn to them, are not enslaved, but can keep their own integrity.

In any case, we should be capable from time to time of turning completely away from intentions to knowledge simply because it is knowledge. In particular, we should be able to contemplate the process of history even when it is not concerned with our own well or ill being, directly or indirectly. But even when it is, we should be able to behold it with detachment.

Further, intellectual work must not aim at pure enjoyment.

All genuine records are at first tedious, because and in so far as they are alien. They set forth the views and interests of their time for their time, and come no step to meet us. But the shams of today are addressed to us, and are therefore made amusing and intelligible, as faked antiques generally are. This is especially true of the historical novel, which so many people read as if it were history, slightly rearranged but true in essence.

For the ordinary half-educated man, all poetry (except political verse), and, in the literature of the past, even the greatest creations of humour (Aristophanes, Rabelais, Don Quixote, etc.) are incomprehensible and tedious because none of all this literature was written specifically for him, as present-day novels are.

Yet, even to the scholar and thinker, the past, in its own utterance, is at first always alien, and its acquisition arduous.

A complete study of the sources of any important subject according to the laws of scholarship is an enterprise which demands the whole of a man.

from the book Reflections on history ...

The transformation of the people into a multitude destitute of will

 Frederick’s measures (especially after the year 1231) are aimed at the complete destruction of the feudal state, at the transformation of the people into a multitude destitute of will and of the means of resistance, but profitable in the utmost degree to the exchequer. He centralised, in a manner hitherto unknown in the West, the whole judicial and political administration by establishing the right of appeal from the feudal courts, which he did not, however, abolish, to the imperial judges. No office was henceforth to be filled by popular election, under penalty of the devastation of the offending district and of the enslavement of its inhabitants. Excise duties were introduced; the taxes, based on a comprehensive assessment, and distributed in accordance with Mohammedan usages, were collected by those cruel and vexatious methods without which, it is true, it is impossible to obtain any money from Orientals. Here, in short, we find, not a people, but simply a disciplined multitude of subjects; who were forbidden, for example, to marry out of the country without special permission, and under no circumstances were allowed to study abroad. The University of Naples was the first we know of to restrict the freedom of study, while the East, in these respects at all events, left its youth unfettered. It was after the example of Mohammedan rulers that Frederick traded on his own account in all parts of the Mediterranean, reserving to himself the monopoly of many  commodities, and restricting in various ways the commerce of his subjects. The Fatimite Caliphs, with all their esoteric unbelief, were, at least in their earlier history, tolerant of the differences in the religious faith of their people; Frederick, on the other hand, crowned his system of government by a religious inquisition, which will seem the more reprehensible when we remember that in the persons of the heretics he was persecuting the representatives of a free municipal life. Lastly, the internal police, and the kernel of the army for foreign service, was composed of Saracens who had been brought over from Sicily to Nocera and Luceria—men who were deaf to the cry of misery and careless of the ban of the Church. At a later period the subjects, by whom the use of weapons had long been forgotten, were passive witnesses of the fall of Manfred and of the seizure of the government by Charles of Anjou; the latter continued to use the system which he found already at work.

At the side of the centralising Emperor appeared an usurper of the most peculiar kind: his vicar and son-in-law, Ezzelino da Romano. He stands as the representative of no system of government or administration, for all his activity was wasted in struggles for supremacy in the eastern part of Upper Italy; but as a political type he was a figure of no less importance for the future than his imperial protector Frederick. The conquests and usurpations which had hitherto taken place in the Middle Ages rested on real or pretended inheritance and other such claims, or else were effected against unbelievers and excommunicated persons. Here for the first time the attempt was openly made to found a throne by wholesale murder and endless barbarities, by the adoption, in short, of any means with a view to nothing but the end pursued. None of his successors, not even Cæsar Borgia, rivalled the colossal guilt of Ezzelino; but the example once set was not forgotten, and his fall led to no return of justice among the nations, and served as no warning to future transgressors.

It was in vain at such a time that St. Thomas Aquinas, a born subject of Frederick, set up the theory of a constitutional monarchy, in which the prince was to be supported by an upper house named by himself, and a representative body  elected by the people; in vain did he concede to the people the right of revolution.[5] Such theories found no echo outside the lecture-room, and Frederick and Ezzelino were and remain for Italy the great political phenomena of the thirteenth century.

From: The Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy, by Jacob Burckhardt

Oswyn Murray on Burckhardt

Burckhardt was born in 1818 into a family which was a minor branch of one of the great burgher clans of Basle: the name of Burckhardt had been prominent in the city since the fifteenth century. His father was a Protestant minister who had been much influenced by Schleiermacher’s theology.

Basle was a patrician city, conservative and increasingly prosperous, at the same time as being detached from the turbulence of European political events; Burckhardt belonged to its intelligentsia. He completed a degree in theology at Basle, but ceased to be religious, having become convinced by his youthful studies that the life of Christ was a myth. In 1839 he went to Berlin to study history under Ranke, Boeckh and Droysen; but his closest friend and greatest influence was Franz Kugler, the bohemian professor in   the new subject of art history. In another friend, Gottfried Kinkel, he fouone of the last of the great Romantics; he moved into the circle of Kinkel’s mistress, the divorced Johanna Matthieux, and of Bettina von Amim, who had once loved Goethe and who lived in Berlin with her sister, the widow of the great legal historian F. C. von Savigny. Burckhardt was Kinkel’s best man at his wedding with Johanna in 1844; but he distanced himself from him during Kinkel’s subsequent career as a revolutionary. Kinkel was con- demned to death in 1848, and escaped with his wife’s help to exile in London, where Johanna finally committed suicide.

Burckhardt was safely back in Basle in 1844, where he served for eighteen months as editor of the main conservative newspaper, the Basler Zeitung.

He was already lecturing at the university on the history of painting, where he caused offence in religious circles by criticizing the dominant Nazarene School, a group of German religious painters in Rome who served as a model for the later pre-Raphaelites. In 1852 he resigned from the university and left for Italy, where he wrote the immensely popular Cicerone (1854), ‘a guide to the enjoyment of art in Italy’, which remained the standard guidebook to Renaissance Italian architecture, sculpture and art for three generations and went through seven editions during his lifetime. On the basis of this he was given a post at the Zürich Polytechnic. In 1858 he was appointed Professor of History at Basle, where he was required to lecture both at the university and at the high school; from 1874 he was also Professor of the History of Art. The first post he held until 1885, and the second until xii Editor's Introduction 1893. He was a conscientious and assiduous lecturer in both history and history of art, who taught as much as ten hours weekly, and also gave many lectures for the general public.

Burckhardt never married (although as a young man he was in love and wrote poetry to a girl whose parents disapproved); his youthful German friends drifted away, and in his thirties he confessed to being lonely beyond all expectations. He had a few close friends with whom he corresponded, and lived a regular and uneventful life in two rooms above a baker’s shop, devoting himself to his lectures, his books and his travels.

Politically Burckhardt was a natural conservative, who disliked and despised the new industrialization and the development of the national state: he foresaw in the course of his own lifetime the coming of an age of ‘terribles simplificateurs’ and demagogues, who would control the masses and bring ruin to Europe. This pessimistic conservatism is characteristic of a reflective historian, who cultivated irony and distance from the enthusiasm of contemporary nationalist historians. In so far as he foresaw the development of industrial society towards the totalitarian popular regimes of National Socialism and Marxism, he was of course a prophet out of his time, standing against the tide of history. But he was not a political thinker;  and these prejudices, however clear-sighted, are merely the regrets of a marginal observer over the decline of the patrician order to which his own family so clearly belonged. Hence his attack on the vice of reading news-papers and concerning oneself with the agitations of the present in the introduction to the present book. It is not Burckhardt’s political views or his pessimism in regard to the future which matter, but his conception of historical method; as he wrote already in 1846:

But, my dear friend, Freedom and the State have lost nothing in me. States are not built with men like me; though as long as I live I mean to be kind and sympathetic to my neighbour; I mean to be a good private individual, an affectionate friend, a good spirit; I have some talent in that direction and mean to develop it I can do nothing more with society as a whole; my attitude towards it is willy-nilly ironical; the details are my affair... we may all perish, but at least I want to discover the interest for which I am to perish, namely the ancient culture of Europe.

So he developed the mask of a dilettante, immersed in his work and his few friends, and devoted to the study of European culture, by which he meant the artistic, literary and spiritual achievements of the past, placed in their context and explained as the result of the forces of history. History was the contemplation of the past: ‘leisure, the mother of contemplation and of the inspiration that springs from it’ (writing from London); ‘Listen to the secret of things. The contemplative mood.’ ‘How is the collector of inscriptions to find time for contemplative work? Why, they don’t even know their Thucydides! Don’t bother about others.’

from: The Greeks and Greek Civilization 

Jacob Burckhardt quotes

 A teacher cannot hope to give much. But in the first place he can keep alive belief in the value of spiritual things. And secondly he can awaken the conviction that there is real happiness to be found in such things.
*

The philosophy of history is a centaur, a contradiction in terms, for history coordinates, and hence is unphilosophical, while philosophy subordinates, and hence is unhistorical.
*

The word ‘amateur’ owes its evil reputation to the arts. An artist must be a master or nothing, and must dedicate his life to his art, for the arts, of their very nature, demand perfection.

In scholarship, on the other hand, a man can only be a master in one particular field, namely as a specialist, and in some field he should be a specialist. But if he is not to forfeit his capacity for taking a general view, or even his respect for general views, he should be an amateur at as many points as possible, privately at any rate, for the increase of his own knowledge and the enrichment of his possible standpoints. Otherwise he will remain ignorant in any field lying outside his own speciality, and perhaps, as a man, a barbarian.
*

... those who attain an Archimedian point outside events, and are able to ‘over- come in the spirit’. Nor is the satisfaction of those who do so, perhaps, very great. They can hardly restrain a rueful feeling as they look back on all the rest, whom they have had to leave in bondage.

Burckhardt and Nietzsche

 Friedrich Nietzsche was appointed Professor of Classical Philology at the University of Basle in 1869 at the astonishingly early age of 24; Burckhardt was fifty, and had been teaching at the university since 1844, the year Nietzsche was born; he had been Professor of History since 1858.35 From the start Nietzsche admired his older colleague enormously; in 1870 he wrote to a friend:

Yesterday evening I had the pleasure which I would have liked you above all people to have shared, of hearing Jacob Burckhardt lec- ture. He gave a lecture without notes on Historical Greatness which lay entirely within the orbit of our thoughts and feelings. This very unusual middle-aged man does not, indeed, tend to falsify the truth, but to concealments, though on our confidential walks and talks he calls Schopenhauer ‘Our Philosopher’. I am attending his weekly lectures at the University on the study of history, and believe I am the only one of his sixty hearers who understands his profound train of thought with all its strange circumlocutions and abrupt breaks wherever the subject fringes on the problematical.

For the first time in my life I have enjoyed a lecture: and what is more, it is the sort of lecture I shall be able to give when I am older.36 In turn Burckhardt attended lectures of Nietzsche in 1872:

He is still in debt to us for the last, from which we awaited some solutions to the questions and lamentations that he threw out in such a grand and bold style ... He was quite delightful in places, and then again one heard a note of profound sadness, and I still don’t see how the auditores humanissimi are to derive comfort or explanations from it. One thing was clear: a man of great gifts who possesses everything at first hand and passes it on.

 They had in common their love of Schopenhauer: ‘The Philosopher’s credit has risen again these last weeks. Living here is one of his faithful, with whom I converse from time to time, as far as I can express myself in his language’ wrote Burckhardt about Nietzsche to a friend in 1870.

On the personal level, Nietzsche always maintained his admiration for Burckhardt, ‘our great teacher’: even after he left Basle in 1879, and as late as 1887, he continued to send him copies of his books from Untimely Essays (1873-6) to Human, All-too-Human (1879), The Gay Science (1882), Thus Spake Zarathustra (1883), Beyond Good and Evil (1886) and The Genealogy of Morals (1887). But Burckhardt’s letters of thanks reveal his increasing distance from Nietzsche’s philosophy.39 Nietzsche was oblivious of this change in the feelings of ‘my honoured friend Jacob Burckhardt of Basle’ to whom ‘above all Basle owes its pre-eminence in the humanities’ as he describes him in Twilight of the Idols in 1889.40 Indeed Burckhardt was one of the recipients of his strange messages from Turin, written in late 1888 as he descended into insanity:

To my most honoured Jacob Burckhardt.

That was only a little joke, on account of which I overlook the tedium of having created a world. Now you are - thou art - our greatest teacher; for I, together with Ariadne, have only to be the golden balance of all things, we have in every part those who are above us ...

Dionysus

His last letter to Burckhardt began:

Dear Professor, In the end I would rather be a professor at Basle than God;
but I did not dare to press my private egoism so far as to abstain from the creation of the world.

It was this letter, arriving in early January 1889, which caused Burckhardt to consult Nietzsche’s friend Franz Overbeck, who had the final responsibil- ity of bringing Nietzsche back to Basle and committing him to medical care.

In old age Burckhardt liked to distance himself from the ‘publicity stunt’ that Nietzsche had become; in 1896 at the age of 78 he wrote:

Moreover, since the philosophical vein is entirely wanting in me, I recognized from the time of his appointment here that my relations with him could not be of any help to him in this sense, and so they remained infrequent, though serious and friendly discussions. I never had any dealings with him in respect of Gewaltmenschen, the power maniacs, and do not even know whether he clung to this idea at the time when I still saw him fairly often; from the time when his illnesses began I only saw him very rarely.

 But there is no doubt that in the early seventies the two men were very close. Both of them refer to the delight they experienced in finding someone who shared the same veneration for ‘the Philosopher’ as they both called Schopenhauer; each was profoundly affected by the same distaste for the growth of Prussian power and the cultural consequences of the triumph of Germany over France in 1870. And intellectually each influenced the other in a variety of ways.

At first impression it is the differences between the two which are most striking, to the extent that it becomes clear that each reacted against the other, and essentially found the other useful in the process of clarifying his own ideas. Nietzsche’s belief in Burckhardt’s agreement with him was of course unverifiable since the latter’s views were expressed only in lectures, whereas his own were published. Thus he could claim that Burckhardt had accepted the great contrast between the Apollinian and Dionysian aspects of Greek culture:

Whoever has investigated the Greeks, such as that profoundest student of their culture now living, Jacob Burckhardt of Basle, realizes at once the value of this line of approach: Burckhardt inserted a special section on the said phenomenon into his Culture of the Greeks.42 he wrote in Twilight of the Idols. But in fact, whatever may have led Nietz- sche to believe this, there is little reference to Nietzsche’s theories in the surviving manuscripts of Burckhardt’s lectures on Greek culture, either in relation to Greek religion and Greek morals, or in relation to tragedy.

And indeed the whole argument of The Birth of Tragedy, with its attempt to relate ancient tragedy to the modern music of Wagner, can scarcely ever have appealed to Burckhardt, whose musical interests lay rather with Mozart and Verdi, and whose silence about Wagner hides a profound distaste for him.

Nietzsche had claimed that he was the only hearer to understand Burck- hardt’s lectures on the philosophy of history. In the 1870s Nietzsche was indeed struggling to free himself from the historical vision of his age. But his famous essay ‘On the use and abuse of history for life’, publishedindependently in 1874 and two years later in Untimely Essays, is essentially a statement of rejection of all that Burckhardt had stood for in those lectures, even if at one point he refers to Burckhardt’s description of the Italian Renaissance with approval.44 The modem age is viewed as suffering from a surfeit of history, produced for entertainment, which leads to self- irony and cynicism; like the Roman from the imperial age, the modem human being continually has his historical artists prepare for him the festival of a world’s fair. He has become a spectator who strolls about enjoying himself, and he has been reduced to a condition in which even great wars and great revolutions can scarcely change anything, even for a moment...

Or is it necessary to have a race of eunuchs to stand guard over the great historical world-harem? Certainly pure objectivity is quite becoming in eunuchs. It almost seems as if the task is to watch over history so that nothing will ever come of it but stories - but certainly no events!

Although Burckhardt might have approved of Nietzsche’s dismissal of objectivity, the main criticisms surely relate to Burckhardt’s pose of the connoisseur and dilettante, writing and lecturing for the general public.

Now picture to yourself the present-day historical virtuoso: is he the most just man of his age? It is true, he has cultivated in himself a sensibility so tender and sensitive that absolutely nothing human is alien to him; his lyre can echo in kindred tones the sounds of the most diverse ages and persons; he has become an echoing passivity whose resonance, in turn, has a resounding effect on other passivities of the same sort, until ultimately the air of an age is filled with the buzzing counterpoint of such tender and kindred echoes. Yet it seems to me that only the harmonics, as it were, of that original historical note remain audible: the harshness and power of the original can no longer be divined in the thin and shrill sound of the lyre strings. Moreover the original tone usually awakened deeds, difficulties, and terrors, whereas this pure tone just lulls us to sleep and turns us into gentle epicures. It is as though the Eroica symphony had been arranged for two flutes and were intended for the benefit of dreaming opium smokers.

Burckhardt well understood that this was a criticism of himself, and replied to the gift of the book with a characteristic defence of ‘amateurism’:

In the first place my poor head has never been capable of reflecting, even at a distance, as you are able to do, upon final causes, the aims and the desirability of history. As teacher and professor I can, however, maintain that I have never taught history for the sake of what goes under the pompous title of World History, but essentially as a propaedeutic study: my task has been to put people in pos- session of the scaffolding which is indispensable if their further studies of whatever kind were not to be aimless. I have done everything I possibly could to lead them on to personal possession of the past - in whatever shape or form - and at least not to sicken them of it; I wanted them to be capable of picking the fruits for themselves; I never dreamt of training scholars and disciples in the narrower sense, but only wanted to make every member of my audience feel and know that everyone may and must appropriate those aspects of the past which appeal to him personally, and that there might be happiness in so doing. I know perfectly well that such an aim may be criticized as fostering amateurism, but that does not trouble me overmuch.

 Indeed for Burckhardt amateurism was part of his historical ideal:

The word ‘amateur’ owes its evil reputation to the arts. An artist must be a master or nothing, and must dedicate his life to his art, for the arts, of their very nature, demand perfection.

In scholarship, on the other hand, a man can only be a master in one particular field, namely as a specialist, and in some field he should be a specialist. But if he is not to forfeit his capacity for taking a general view, or even his respect for general views, he should be an amateur at as many points as possible, privately at any rate, for the increase of his own knowledge and the enrichment of his possible standpoints. Otherwise he will remain ignorant in any field lying outside his own speciality, and perhaps, as a man, a barbarian.48 Nietzsche in fact had refused to accept the central conception of Burck-hardt’s lectures on history, though he borrowed his tripartite division: his own theory of history sees it as divided into three types, monumental (greatmen), antiquarian (facts) and critical (moral judgments). These categories are very crude and offer no great insight, except that his excessive emphasis on the first, which is concerned with history as the record of the actions of great men, shows that he already viewed history primarily as the arena for a display of the power of the Übermensch or the free spirit. Although Burckhardt had indeed tackled the problem of the Great Man in history, he saw history as concerned, not with individuals or facts or moral judg- ments, but with the three fundamental forces whose interaction shaped the development of civilizations. Nietzsche’s own theory was concerned with the uses of history for his philosophy of revolutionary change in society;

Burckhardt might set him thinking, but, from Nietzsche’s point of view, he belonged in the historicist culture which must be destroyed.

What united them most was their common rejection of certain funda- mental principles of historicism. They both dismissed the attitudes of the so-called professional scholars: while Nietzsche was provoking his col- leagues and calling for a new philology related to the needs of a new vision of the world, Burckhardt was finding himself more and more at odds with the historical perception of the ‘viri eruditissimi in their professorial chairs’.49 Burckhardt must have approved of Nietzsche’s dismissal of objec- tivity and historical neutrality as historical ideals. And behind this lay a common rejection of the importance of facts and events in history. As Nietzsche wrote, ‘The fact is always stupid and has at all times looked more like a calf than a god.’50 At precisely the same time Burckhardt was writing to a friend during the preparation of his lectures on Greek culture, and in relation to current political events:

To me, as a teacher of history, a very curious phenomenon has become clear: the sudden devaluation of all mere ‘events’ in the past. From now on in my lectures, I shall only emphasize cultural history, and retain nothing but the quite indispensable external scaffolding.

 At much the same time he wrote to a young historian:

I further advise you simply to omit the refuse of mere facts - not from your labour - but certainly from the presentation. One really only needs to use such facts as are characteristic of an idea, or a vivid mark of a time. Our nervous strength and our eyesight are too precious to waste on the study of external facts of the past,unless we are archivists, county historians or something of the sort.

This rejection of the tyranny of factual history was elevated by Burckhardt into one of the most powerful methodological challenges that positivist historiography has faced. In the lectures on Greek culture Burckhardt developed a formal rejection of the cult of the event:

One great advantage of studying cultural history is the certainty of the more important facts compared with those of history in the ordinary sense of narrated events - these are frequently uncertain, controversial, coloured, or, given the Greek talent for lying, entirely the invention of imagination or of self-interest. Cultural history by contrast possesses a primary degree of certainty, as it consists for the most part of material conveyed in an unintentional, disin- terested or even involuntary way by sources and monuments; they betray their secrets unconsciously and even, paradoxically, through fictitious elaborations, quite apart from the material details they may set out to record and glorify, and are thus doubly instructive for the cultural historian.

 Cultural history deals with phenomena which are ‘recurrent, constant, typical. It does not matter whether the stories which it uses are true, as long as they are believed to be true. And even a forgery is an important piece of evidence for the period that perpetrated it, since it reveals more clearly than a genuine article the conceptions and beliefs about the past of the age that created it. This principle of unconscious revelation through represen- tation derives ultimately from Schopenhauer’s conception of the world as representation; and it is one of the most powerful tools in the modern historian’s study of mentalities. As Burckhardt saw very clearly, it offers a solution to the sterile disputes of positivism as to whether a fact is true or false, and how such a proposition can be established: cultural history is primarily interested in beliefs and attitudes, rather than events - and false- hoods are therefore often more valuable than truths:

Even where a reported act did not really occur, or not in the way it is said to have occurred, the attitude that assumes it to have occurred, and in that manner, retains its value by virtue of the typicality of the statement.

It is this common attitude to the unimportance of the truth of events compared to the significance of beliefs or statements about events that seems to me to unite Burckhardt and Nietzsche as the founders of relativist and ‘post-modern’ historiography.

Apart from the creative enthusiasm which resulted from their meetings, undoubtedly the most significant specific idea about the Greek world that Burckhardt and Nietzsche shared was the belief in the importance of the ‘agonal’ aspect of Greek and (in Nietzsche’s case) modern culture. The realization that individual contest and the desire to be supreme lay at the centre of early Greek attitudes to the world is their joint discovery. Nietzsche seems to have realized the importance of the agon or contest, even before he arrived in Basle; but Burckhardt had already formulated it independently, and was busy working out in detail the consequences of this discovery for the understanding of every aspect of Greek culture.

 This is indeed the most important of all Burckhardt’s insights into the Greek mentality, and has proved continually fruitful in Greek history to the present day, where Greek ethical values are often seen as a conflict between competitive and cooperative virtues.56 It can also be said that the unorthodoxy of each contributed to liberating the thought of the other about the Greeks in this great creative period for both of them. Thus Nietzsche’s very critical approach to Socrates mirrors Burckhardt’s equally critical but ironic version of the standard myth. And both men share in very different ways a hatred of the Greek city-state and of Athenian democracy as destructive forces.

Oswyn Murray
Burckhardt - The Greeks and Greek Civilization