Chapter VI

THE ORIGINS OF UNIVERSAL HISTORY

Arnaldo Momigliano (University of Chicago)

I would be making the understatement of the century if I were to say that universal history has never been a clear notion. Taken literally, the idea of universal history verges on absurdity. Who can tell everything that has hap­ pened? And who would like to listen if he were told? But both in the Greek and in the Hebrew tradition of history-writing the urge to tell the whole story from beginning to end has been apparent, and universal history has become one of the most problematic components of our twofold Jewish and Greek heri­ tage. Among the texts which have reached us directly it is a Greek text­ Hesiod's Works and Days-that gives us the oldest scheme of the succession of ages; but the Jews of the Hellenistic age outbid the Greeks by taking the story beyond the present into the future and gliding from history into apocalypse. The mixture of the historic and the Messianic has seldom been absent in the accounts of universal history which have been produced by ecclesiastical and secular historians from the Revelation of St. John to Arnold Toynbee's Study of History; and there is no sign that the universal history industry is flagging. Contrary to the prevailing opinion that most of the time universal his­ tory played only a small part in Greek culture there was a continuous and considerable production of patterns intended to give, if not a meaning, at least some order to the story of mankind. But the majority of these patterns had their origins in what we can loosely call the mythical or philosophical imagination of the Greeks rather than in the empirical collection and critical interpretation of past events called historia. Only the succession of world empires can be said to have represented a guiding thought for real historians. I shall therefore devote the second part of this chapter to the development of the notion of the succession of world empires within Greek historiography and I shall try to show that the Jews-and more precisely the authors of the Book of Daniel-derived this notion from the Greeks and turned it into an apocalyp­ tic one. But before I do this I have to examine three other Greek schemes of universal history which are important in themselves, though they affected the historians only in a marginal way. These are the scheme of the succession of different races characterized by different metals; the biological scheme accord­ ing to which not only individuals but nations and even mankind as a whole go

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through the stages of childhood, youth, maturity and old age ; and finally the scheme of the progress of mankind from barbarism to civilization through a series of technological discoveries.. Each of these three schemes had high potential for proper historical research. In later ages each was adopted and developed by historians on a large scale. But the Greek historians, being mainly interested in politics and wars, took far less notice of these schemes than we should have liked. The first thing to learn from Greek historiography is that schemes of the evolution of mankind can be invented in a given culture before historical research makes its appearance and can be multiplied after his­ torical research has established itself without necessarily taking into account what historians have to say. We historians are a rather marginal by-product of history. The traditional father of Greek historiography, Hecataeus, lived at the end of the sixth century B.C.; the two men who shaped Greek historiography in the way we know it, Herodotus and Thucydides, operated in the second half of the fifth century B.C. But Hesiod presented a scheme of universal history which can hardly be later than the end of the eighth century B.C. It is also virtually certain that Hesiod had at his disposal a pre-existing model for his cogitations on the development of mankind through a succession of various races, the golden race, the silver race, etc. Hesiod's scheme is distinguished by two further complications. For motives which at least in the case of the golden race are entirely mysterious and in the case of the successive races (silver, bronze, heroic, iron) by no means self-evident, the gods, to say the least, allow the elimination of the existing race and its replacement by another which (with one exception) they like less than the one just suppressed. The one excep­ tion-the race of heroes inserted between the bronze and the iron age-is anomalous in so far as it does not receive its name from a metal and interrupts for a while the decline characterizing the process as a whole. Long ago it was seen that the insertion of the race of heroes in the scheme of the four races named according to metals was secondary and necessitated by the importance attributed to heroes in the Greek tradition. Whether it was in fact Hesiod who performed this adaptation of the scheme of the four ages to specific Greek requirements we cannot say. The races of gold and of bronze, and the heroic race, each seem to be limited to one generation-which would mean that the gods from the start did not endow them with the faculty of reproduction. Only the race of silver is explicitly given children, but it is also the only race about which it is explicitly stated that it was destroyed by the gods themselves. Hesiod has no remarks on this, and nor have I. All the later writers in Greek or Latin about the four races, outside Judaism or Christianity, depended directly or indirectly on Hesiod. Plato used the myth freely, especially in the Republic (3, 415 a-c), to support the hier­ archical structure of his State. Hellenistic poets like Aratus ( third century B.C.) and Ovid refurbished the Hesiodic myth to express a nostalgia for the golden race which Hesiod, far more sensitive to the pains of the iron race than to the attraction of previous times, had never really felt. The races could be reduced in number-or increased. It will be remembered that Juvenal in