Antonis Liakos Changing the structure of historical time: Comments on a title page engraved by Rubens in 1632 In 1632 the great Dutch painter Peter Paul Rubens engraved the title-page of the book Romanae et Graecae antiquitatis monumenta, a numismatic collection by Hubert Goltzius, published in Antwerp in 1645. The gravure depicts the decline of the old and the rise of the new structure of historical time. This transformation of historical time was part of a more general change in the cognitive and cultural landscape of 17th century. Central to the new image of the past was the concept of Antiquity. The title of the book was written in a square at the centre, surrounded by an allegorical scene representing the re-emergence of antiquity. Antiquity was depicted as a woman in the centre, decorated with a numismatic chain, with an open book in her front, and a phoenix (a symbol of revival) on her head. The figures around her tell a story. Time and Death, in the top-right corner, hurl four figures down towards the abyss. The first is an allegory of Rome, the second an allegory of Macedonia, the third of Persia and the fourth of Media.1 1 Ludwig Burchard, Corpus Rubenianum, Part XXI, Vol. 1+2 (J.R.Judson and C. Van de Velde: Book Illustrations and Title-Pages), Brussels, Arcade Press, 1977, vol. 2, αλ. 275278. At the centre bottom of the page there is a dark cave, an allegory of oblivion. While the dark cave is the destination of the four falling figures, Mercury, on the left, can be seen pulling out of the same cave three broken Greek and Roman statues. From here, the activity on the page moves from the bottom to the top of the page. The statues are the result of excavation, and this is obvious with the depiction of archaeological tools. Above Mercury stands Hercules, handing a pot containing coins to a slave, and in the top left-hand corner of the page is Athena who, with a torch, illuminates the whole venture to recover the knowledge of antiquity. This title-page seems to narrate a strange story. We understand that the offering of a treasury of coins to the goddess of learning is a metaphor for the contribution of the book to our knowledge of antiquity. But why are Time and Death pushing into oblivion four figures which, after all, belong to antiquity? Why are four figures of antiquity being substituted in order to recover an invented and abstract figure, antiquity and its material relics? This is now a forgotten story, but the four symbols of the Median, Persian, Macedonian and Roman empires comes from an interpretation of a dream by the prophet Daniel. According to this story, the Persian king Nebuchadnezzar had a dream about a statue whose head was made of gold, its chest and arms of silver, its belly and thighs of bronze, its legs of iron, its feet partly of iron and partly of baked clay. Suddenly a rock was cut out without hands from the mountain, struck the statue on its feet of iron and clay and smashed them. Then, all the materials that constituted the statue were pulverized and the rock that struck the statue became a huge mountain and filled the whole earth. 2 2 John Collins and Flint Peter (eds), The Book of Daniel. Composition and Reception, vol. A+B, Boston-Leiden, Brill, 2002 World History at a glance. The image of the Colossus, engraved by Tobias Conrad Lotter in 1744 This vision, which in another way was narrated by Daniel with the story of the four beasts emerging from the sea, became not only the matrix of Apocalypse but also the backbone of a periodization of world history in the Christian era. The story of the succession of the four major empires of antiquity was told by the Greek and Roman historians Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Emilius Sura and Velleius Paterculus.3 But the story was canonized through the interpretation of Daniel by the Christian fathers. The story was the object of controversy and polemics between the pagan philosopher Porfyrius and Hieronymous in the fourth century.4 It was also open to speculation on what constituted the last empire. For Christian writers of the fourth and fifth century, the Roman Empire and the church were the last phase of the story. For Eusebius, the 3 Joseph Ward Swain, “The Theory of the Four Monarchies. Opposition History Under the Romans”, Classical Philology 35 (1940), 1-21 4 Edward Young, The Prophecy of Daniel. A Commentary, Michigan, Grand Rapids, 1949, AΰαγΪΰΰ ζομ Γ πλΰδΪ βμ, Π λέ πθ εα Ϊ Χλδ δαθυθ απκ πα ηΪ πθ κυ Πκλφυλέκυ, ( δ . δα λ. Φδζο οφδεά Σξοζάμ Παθ πδ βηέου λζΪΰΰβμ), Λ δοέα, Baer and Hermann, 1891 church and empire, since its Christianization, would constitute an eternal present.5 But there was also another interpretation which was prevailed in subsequent centuries: the Roman Empire was and would be the last empire, and its end would coincide with the end of the world. 6 The story of the succession of the four empires connected history and eschatology. It was also powerful not only in linking the experienced history with the itinerary of the world, but imposing also a sense of the imminent end of the world. The capture of Constantinople, the wars of the Reformation and the English civil war were such events in which history, theology and action were mixed. The strongest point of this story was the implied theory of Translatio imperii, a political theory legitimising the rise and fall of these empires as a transference of power from one people to the other, from the Babylonians to the Persians, from the Persians to the Greeks and from the Greeks to the Romans. In medieval times, this theory was used to present the German emperor with the title of Holy Roman Emperor [Otto von Freising (12th century) and Alexander von Roes (13th century)].7 In this structure of history, the present was incorporated into a succession of pasts of long duration. Johannes Sleidanus or Sleidan, who lived from 1506 to 1556, was one of the principal historians of Reformation, earning him the title of the Thucydides of the Reformation. He wrote a history in four volumes.8 Each book comprised the history of one of the four empires, and the last book, much bigger, was dedicated to the Roman Empire, encompassing the period from the first to the sixteenth centuries. Sleidanus concluded his series by writing that Daniel’s vision was verified by the course of world history! He wasn’t an obscure writer, but one of the first to go to the archives, and was familiar with the writings of the Greek and Roman historians. In his book there is a rational explanation of historical deeds, but these are framed in a prophetic history. This sense of the past wasn’t totally arbitrary in his era. The name of the emperors was still Roman, an echo of the Roman Imperial title Caesar/es ( in Germany and Austria: “Kaiser” , in Russia: “Tsar”, in Ottoman Empire:“Kayser-i- 5 υ Ϋίδομ, Εεεζβ δα δεά Ι κλέα, Α,2,15-27 6 Alexander Vasiliev, “Medieval ideas of the end of the world: west and east”, Byzantion 16,2 (1943-44), 462-502, Petre Guran, “Eschatology and Political Theology in the Last Centuries of Byzantium”, Revue des Etudes Sud-Est Européennes 45 (2007), 73-85 and “Genesis and Function of the Last Emperor-Myth in Byzantium”, Bizantinistica. Rivista di Studi Bizantini e Slavi (serie seconda, anno 8) (2006), 273-303. 7 Donald Kelley, Versions of History from Antiquity to the Enlightenment, New Haven, Yale UP, 1991 , 198-211 8 John Sleidan, A Brief Chronicle of the Four Principal Empires, London,1563 Rûm”) . The official language in most courts and state bureaucracies was still Latin, Roman law and the Justinian code were still taught in the universities. According Reinhart Koselleck, we should understand this sense of non-differentiation from the past as a plain space which endured until the massive transformations of European society in seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.9 This means that expectations were linked to experience, and this is obvious in the writings of historians and political thinkers from the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries, such as Niccolo Machiavelli, James Harrington, (Oceana) and others who used the experience of Roman antiquity to illuminate their contemporary political situation and to advice the prince.10 This story of the four empires was also read as a synopsis of world history. In 1774, Tobias Conrad Lotter (1717-1777) engraved an image of the legendary Colossus, upon whose figure he wrote a chronicle of the main events from the times of king Nimrod of Mesopotamia to his contemporary Josef II, emperor of the Absburgian Empire. This was a common use of the story. Martin Luther used to read the details of the story, even those written in the fingers of the imaginary statue. He read in the one foot the five nations emerged from the western part of the Roman Empire (Spain, France, Italy, England and Germany) and on the other, those emerging from the Eastern Empire (Greece, Egypt, Syria, Asia and Africa). Not all of them were at the same status or size. But this was of less importance. The story of the four empires was also taught in German universities. For Philipp Melanchthon, it offered a bird’s eye view on the whole of human history.11 It was history at a glance, and a real grand narrative for understanding each one place in the flow of time and the world events. Indeed, the story of the four empires served to structure historical time within the structure of cosmological time. Details of the Colossus depicting the image of the contemporary world As a consequence, the Rubens’ engraving picturing the pushing of the four figures back into the cave of oblivion was a sign of a bigger change in the understanding of 9 Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past, On the Semantic of Historical Time, Cambridge MA, MIT Press 1985, 4. 10 John Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment, Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition, Princeton, PUP, 2003 339-341 11 Mario Miegge, Il sogno del re di Babilonia. Profezia e storia da Thomas Muntzer a Isaac Newton, Milano, Feltrinelli, 1995, 41-52 history and in the structure of the time. To use François Hartog’s description, it was a big change in the regime of historicity.12 What was the context of this change? How did a regime of historicity based on the succession of the four world empires turn into another regime of historicity based on the succession of three eras - antiquity, medieval times and the modern era? Jean Bodin was a sixteenth-century historian who belonged to the French Nobles of the Robe. He was also jurist and high state official. In 1566, he published a book entitled Methodus ad facilem historiarum cognitionem (Method for the easy comprehension of history). He wrote an entire chapter against the theory of the four empires. His argumentation is another sign of the change in historical consciousness. He saw world history as richer than the biblical narrative, which didn’t comprise the Hispanic and the Ottoman empires. His main argument was that the biblical narrative was pessimist, as the succession of metals from the gold to clay suggested. Our golden era was not in the past but in front of us. His advice was to ignore the dark writer of the apocalypse.13 Yet, the decisive event for the abandonment of the old structure of history was the awareness that China was much older than the old empires of the Bible. According to the Jesuits who had penetrated the forbidden centre of Chinese culture, China escaped from Noah’s flood and had a history different from that of the biblical peoples. In 1615, the manuscript of Matteo Ricci, the first Jesuit who penetrated and lived for many years in Beijing, was published.14 In 1665, Isaac La Peyrère, a Jewish Marano, published a book in Amsterdam on the existence of the “pre-Adamites”, people from the era before Adam, based on anthropological observations in Greenland. This was the second death of Adam.15 The discovery also of gigantic fossils led to the hypothesis that they were remnants of a previous world.16 All these theories shook the faith in the stories narrated in the Old Testament. 12 Francois Hartog, Régimes d’ Historicité. Présentisme et expériences du Temps, Paris, Seuil, 2003 13 Jean Bodin, Method for the easy comprehension of history, (transl. Beatrice Reynolds), New York, Norton, 1969, 291, A. Garosci , Jean Bodin, Politica e Diritto nel Rinascimento Francese, Milano, Corticelli, 1934, 174 14 Edwin Van Kley, “Europe’s ‘Discovery’ of China and the Writing of World History”, American Historical Review, 76,2 (1971), 358-385 15 David Livingstone, Adam’s Ancestors, Race, Religion and the Politics of Human Origins, Baltimore, John Hopkins UP, 2008, 16 Paolo Rossi , The Dark Abyss of Time. The History of the Earth and the History of Nations from Hooke to Vico, Chicago, CUP, 1984,123-187 The theory of many worlds: Figure in the book of Thomas Barnet, Telluris Theoria Sacra, London, 1681 The world experience required a new structure of time. Nevertheless, the new structure of time was also Eurocentric. The idea of a historical structure based of the three eras emerged in Reformation attitudes towards the history of the church. The first Christian era was succeeded by a long period of decline under the papacy, and authentic belief re-emerged with the Reformation. The end of the wars of religion, with the treaty of Westphalia (1648), created also a sense of a new beginning in Europe. Terms related to antiquity, medium-aevum (moyen age, Mittelalter) and modernity were employed until the seventeenth century without any consistency. But at the end of this century, these terms were used for canonizing a new division of historical time. Christoph Cellarius (Keller) wrote and published in Jena three textbooks, each one dedicated to an historical epoch: Historia nova in 1669, Historia antique in 1685, and Historia medii aevi in 1696. Cellarius also defined the beginning and the end of the middle ages with Constantine, the first Christian Roman emperor in the fourth century, and the Reformation of the church in the sixteenth century.17 The invention of the middle ages was more important for the study of antiquity than for the middle 17 Wallace Ferguson, The Renaissance in Historical Thought, Five Centuries of Interpretation, Cambridge MA, Riverside Press, 1948 , Anthony Grafton, “A Vision of the past and Future”, TLS (12-18 February 1988), 151-152 and “Dating History. The Rennaissance and the Reformation of Chronology”, Daedalus (Spring 2003), 74-85 ages themselves. In the humanist era, the key for the opening of the thesaurus of knowledge was antiquity and not Medieval times.18 But for antiquity to become a key to knowledge, historical knowledge had to escape from the conception of the succession of empires. This structure had no place for the classical past. According to Dionysius of Halicarnassus, it was senseless to compare Greek and Roman history given the incomparability of their dimension and duration. « βθ Ρπηαέπθ βΰ ηκθέαθ απΪ αμ υπ λί ίζβηΫθβθ σο αδ αμ πλκ αυ άμ ηθβηκθ υκηΫθαμ, κυ ησθκθ εα Ϊ κ ηΫΰ γκμ βμ αλξάμ (…) αζζΪ εαδ εα Ϊ κ ηάεκμ κυ π λδ δζβφσ κμ αυ άθ ξλσθκυ […]« αμ ΰαλ ΕζζβθδεΪμ υθΪη δμ κυε Ϊιδκθ αυ αέμ αθ δπαλ αιΪηβθ, κτ ηΫΰ γκμ αλξάμ κτ ξλσθκθ πδφαθ έαμ κ κτ κθ σ κθ ε έθαδ ( θθ. δμ αυ οελα ολέ μ) ζαίκτ αμ»» (Ρπηαρεά Αλξαδοζοΰέα, 1, ΙΙ-ΙΙΙ ) Greek antiquity didn’t even appear in Eusebius, the founder of Church history. In his “Chronical Canon” (Χλοθδεὸμ Καθώθ), there is little room for the history of the Greek cities. Historians and thinkers of history were for centuries imprisoned in a structure of history grounded on the concept of the four world empires. It is impressive how rapidly the historical structure of time changed in a relatively short time span. In 1559, the concept of the ‘century’ emerged, which, ever since, has been used to ascribe particular features for hundred-year blocks of time. In 1627 Domenicus Petavius established the distinct enumeration of the years before and after the birth of Christ. Ten years later, in 1637, René Descartes’ work Le Discours de la method: Pour bien conduire sa raison, et chercher la vérité dans les sciences appeared. This is the historical context of the making and publication of Ruben’s gravure. During this period not only did the structure of time and the regime of historicity change but also the presuppositions of knowledge.19 The new structure of time provided new narrative devices for understanding past realities. Terms like antiquity, the middle ages, the Renaissance and modernity are not only periods in which we place the historical facts. They are “general ideas”, according Siegfried Kracauer. 20 Frank Ankersmit has named such concepts “narrative substances” without which historical narratives can’t be constructed. Indeed, the change in the structure of time created new historical representations of the past. 21 The transition from the old to the new structure of historical time had to do with different forms of historical consciousness. In the old structure, history was indeed the unfolding of a deeper text defined by God, in which the last human empire would be replaced by the kingdom of God. On the other hand, in 1543 Copernicus used the 18 Peter Schaeffer, “The Emergence of the Concept “Medieval” in Central European Humanism”, Sixteenth Century Journal, 7,2 (1976), 21-30 19 Donald Wilcox, The Measures of Times Past, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1987, 8-9 20 Siegfried Kracauer, History. The Last Things Before the Last, Princeton, Marcus Wiener,1995 21 Frank Ankersmit, Narrative logic: A semantic analysis of the historian’s language, The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1983 and Historical representation, Stanford UP, 2001 experience of the traveller to depict the experience of time as a change of images.22 The same image was used by Bodin, in the same epoch, for describing historical experience over the passage of time. The new Ars Historica was connected with the Copernician revolution in the understanding of time. Paper in the conference 7th Trends in Classics International Conference on Greek Historiography Knowing Future Time in and through Greek Historiography Thessaloniki, 7- 9 June 2013 http://www.lit.auth.gr/node/2231 22 Anthony Grafton, What Was History? The Art of History in Early Modern Europe, Cambridge, CUP, 2007, 176