Claudius the Historian

And what thoughts or memories, would you guess, were passing through my mind on this extraordinary occasion? Was I thinking of the Sibyl's prophecy, of the omen of the wolf-cub, of Pollio's advice, or of Briseis' dream? Of my grandfather and liberty? Of my father and liberty? Of my three Imperial predecessors, Augustus, Tiberius, Caligula, their lives and deaths? Of the great danger I was still in from the conspirators, and from the Senate, and from the Guards battalions at the Camp? Of Messalina and our unborn child? Of my grandmother Livia and my promise to deify her if ever I became Emperor? Of Postumus and Germanicus? Of Agrippina and Nero? Of Camilla? No, you would never guess what was passing through my mind. But I shall be frank and tell you what it was, though the confession is a shameful one. I was thinking, So, I'm Emperor, am I? What nonsense! But at least I'll be able to make people read my books now. Public recitals to large audiences. And good books too, thirty-five years' hard work in them. It won't be unfair. Pollio used to get attentive audiences by giving expensive dinners. He was a very sound historian, and the last of Romans. My History of Carthage is full of amusing anecdotes. I'm sure they'll enjoy it.

That was what I was thinking. I was thinking too, what opportunities I should have, as Emperor, for consulting the secret archives and finding out just what happened on this occasion or on that. How many twisted stories still remained to be straightened out. What a miraculous fate for a historian! And as you will have seen, I took full advantage of my opportunities. Even the mature historian's privilege of setting forth conversations of which he knows only the gist is one that I have availed myself of hardly at all.
- Robert Graves, I, Claudius

Historians in fiction are usually a pretty predictable bunch. Sometimes they've unearthed some dark secret and are committed to risking their lives and fortunes for the sake of getting it out (most historians I know, including myself, wouldn't know a dark secret if it jumped out of the file and bit them on the ass, and even fewer would sacrifice anything more than copying fees for it). More often, fictional historians are dour pedants who bury themselves in dusty books at the expense of the real world; in the more nuanced/psychological version, they deliberately choose the dead past as a refuge from the unsatisfactory present. While convenient, these images aren't especially reflective of historians in real life. Portrayals of academics typically exaggerate the professional side of their lives, perhaps because most often they are the work either of grad students who have no other side of their lives or of undergraduates who know professors only as "that guy who teaches HIST 1115." (If anything, philosophers have it worse, while natural scientists tend to get more well-rounded characters. Take that, "liberal arts"!)  

For me, and probably not just for me, being hopelessly unworldly is actually something of a romantic dream. One of these days I won't have to go to department stores or drop off dry cleaning or have awkward first dates, I'll just lock myself up with my Loeb Classical Library and that's the last this cruel world will see of me! This is linked, in my head, with a fantasy of detachment. It's true that being "objective" is no longer considered a viable possibility for historians, even if the more recondite among us still consider it a worthwhile ideal. But no matter how politically-engaged (and hence avowedly unobjective) a historian gets, detachment as an ideal never quite disappears. This is a rather different kind of detachment from the one we are normally encouraged to pursue. It's not about remaining unswayed by partisanship or treating historical subjects with fairness and dignity.

No, our kind of detachment is more of an abiding sense of professional superiority over effectively anyone who has opinions about things. This comes at least in part from the fact that it is now very difficult, if not impossible, to publish a book about (say) abolitionists that strides confidently to a conclusion that the abolitionists were stand-up dudes and were right about stuff. Even an audience composed entirely of leftists would jeer at this kind of presentation. No, we've moved on from the '60s, and all our books have to show how the agents were trapped by cultural structure n and achieved icky unintended consequences x, y, z. It's hard not to feel superior to everyone if you watch the news knowing firmly that fifteen years on someone's gonna publish an article about how the heroic freedom fighters on the screen were really the apostles of some fresh hell. You're not detached because of some conscious choice; you're detached because irony is your most important professional habit.

I, Claudius, in its tragicomic final third, is a beautiful illustration of the stupidity of this way of viewing the world. Graves surely had more than a casual acquaintance with historians and their occupational illnesses--or, at any rate, knew enough about the classical historians to discern the similarities. Graves's Claudius imagines himself as a classic unworldly recluse, engaging with the court around him only to the extent that he needs materials for his history-writing. In practice, of course, this is far from being the case: the narrative makes it plain that he is in fact far from obscure, and although his physical defects marginalize him, he is still on the minds of many of the people who are carrying on their intrigues. In the final third of the novel, with the last years of Tiberius and the reign of Caligula, this narrative pushes towards its absurd denouement. Rome is falling apart, and while Claudius constantly makes outraged noises, it is obvious that he is relishing the opportunity to ironize over the unenviable careers of people foolish enough to have played a part in the world of politics and rank. This conceit breaks down when Caligula makes Claudius a court jester. As he struggles to save his own skin, Claudius turns into the most obsequious of courtiers. He is, it turns out, no more dignified and aloof than anyone else at court. Meanwhile, Caligula's reign only heightens his tendency to ironize. What is supposed to be a popular tragedy is described as a sequence of comic interludes in which Caligula doesn't even come off that badly. Crazy? Sure, but what a clever guy!

So it is with us. Ironic detachment helps us, modern historians, deal with the unpleasantness of living in a ridiculous world, but when it's needed most it becomes more and more of a figleaf. I won't belabor the point: it's not hard to see how academics these days are structurally servile, whether your starting point is Marx or Nietzsche or someone else. To a certain extent, the narrowing of horizons that comes from being able to see yourself from history's point of view is adaptive. If you're mostly helpless to do anything about student loan delinquency rates or bloodthirsty state legislatures, you may as well sigh and be the jester for a bit. What the gesture doesn't carry with it--as in Claudius's case--is the luxury of distance. I don't know if it's only my generation of graduate students that seems ready on command to adopt the melancholy-ironic pose and then to relinquish it, but it's a good time to develop that kind of skill, as long as you're not entertaining too many illusions. But then someone has to end up writing those histories.

Fatal Flaws

Unattractive in his political life, Maximilian was equally unattractive in his personal characteristics. Fate had unkindly bestowed upon him a singularly unimpressive presence; he was lanky, lean and small with mouse-colored hair and a pasty complexion, his speech and features much affected by adenoids. His manners were polished and his conversation blunt and well-informed, but the shrill pitch of his voice startled those who were not prepared for it. In honor of his wife, a princess of Lorraine, he affected the French fashion, whose elegant elaborations can hardly have concealed the shortcomings of nature.

Abler and more politically effective than John George, Maximilian had not that dogged honesty which was the saving grace of the Elector of Saxony. Cautious to a fault, he would never commit himself and thereby raised delusive hopes in all who courted him. Like John George he was sincere in striving for the common good of Germany, but unlike John George he had a clear sense of policy and an accurate judgment. His excuse was the less when, like John George, he allowed his individual advantages to take precedence. In this respect both the Elector of Saxony and the Duke of Bavaria failed their country, but Maximilian always with the more shameless egoism. Never was man more anxious that others should sacrifice their gains for the general good; never did man stand more jealously, more fatally by his own.
- C. V. Wedgwood, The Thirty Years War (1938)

C. V. Wedgwood does not believe in the so-called "Great Man" theory of history. If anything, her vision is the opposite: what shapes history is the weakness of people in power, their inability to prevent their flaws from coming to the surface and annihilating anything that might have been achieved by the better angels of their nature. That is what gives her work its fine--and baffling--literary quality. How can a book that's mostly about moving troops from someplace and putting them somewhere else, in which descriptions of looting and rapine maintain a static consistency from chapter to chapter and whose biographical fragments amount to a kind of elaborate twisting of the knife, be so wonderfully captivating, magical, and irresistible to read? I say this as someone who has not found the energy to read for pleasure in months (which is why I haven't been blogging) and who bought the book fully expecting to let it mature on the shelf like a fine wine. Somehow this did not happen.

Anyway, what I'm trying to say is, any notion Wedgwood might have of historical causality is not really reducible to the categories in which we're accustomed to thinking. Disbelief in "great-manism" has been universal among bien pensants for about a hundred fifty years now, which is truly astonishing, considering how many times every other foundation of our thought has been overturned since then. We all nod our bored heads along with Tolstoy when he inveighs against Napoleonocentrism. What do we think causes historical events to happen? Well, that does change: sometimes we call it "social forces," sometimes "culture," sometimes something already fully circular like "patterns" or "trajectories." As Carlyle's influence has waned further and further, the people who think about this kind of thing have gradually come to believe that any theory that places individual human beings front and center in the historical process (not just in a positive or transformational kind of way) is actually subsumable under great-manism.

That's a funny paradox. I'm not sure if this is a malady specific to historians, but we're somehow always being encouraged to "leave room for agency," an admonition that is current only as long as that agency involves otherwise powerless brown people. People who are not oppressed cannot have agency. Actually, no, maybe that's too post-'60s revisionist. What I mean to say is: in the contemporary view, people have agency, and that agency is important, as long as nobody is actually accomplishing anything. It would be absurd if someone got up at the AHA and demanded that Duke Maximilian of Bavaria be assigned his due measure of agency. I think it would be short-sighted to blame this kind of thing solely on the '60s hangover that continues to dominate in The Profession. No doubt that's part of it, but mostly it's symptomatic of a near-universal unwillingness among historians to discuss causality in any kind of serious way because no one actually has clear and defensible views on the matter. (I've talked about this kind of thing lots of times before.)

It's a bit like Jackson Pollock. There must be people out there who think Jackson Pollock is a good artist for excellent reasons. I suspect, however, that there are more people like me: people who secretly have no idea why anyone thinks Jackson Pollock is a good artist but, for social and cultural-capital kinds of reasons, don't want to discuss their qualms with anyone. (What does it say about me that I only felt the weight lift once I read this piece?)

What is particularly odd is that the bien-pensant position is, in its bastardized current form, obviously absurd. Everyone agrees that people who wield power can, usually, do lots of different stuff with it; everyone agrees that individual biographies can be decisive when those individuals become entangled in social movements (for instance); everyone operates in their daily lives under the assumption that personality is an important part of how people react to events and do things. But put those pieces together and all of a sudden you need to mount defensive rearguard actions and use words like "social forces" (what are they?), "structure" (where is it?), and "contingency" (as if the historical role of individuals were not the ultimate source of contingency).

In Wedgwood's hands, all these hifalutin methodological questions fall away. I don't know how contemporary early modern Germanists think about her work; three quarters of a century is usually enough time for the pendulum of revisionism to swing around two or three times. Judged on its own terms, however, the history she tells is utterly convincing. The weaknesses of statesmen reinforce and direct the flow of a process that has its own dynamic. Without, say, the selfishness of Maximilian or the arrogance of Wallenstein the war would have been allowed to exhaust itself, but the tragic flaws of otherwise reasonably normal and competent people ensured that it could not come to an end. In contrast with Wedgwood, any more "structural" or economic explanation in the Marxist style looks utterly ad hoc, and anything more contemporary far too causally flabby. (One of the effects of the decline of interest in causality among historians has been a dramatic rise in histories that largely ignore causality in favor of relatively static internal accounts of various phenomena. Whether or not this is a good thing is a subject for a different post.)

I have to confess a large part of my sympathy for Wedgwood's approach comes from the fact that I love her style, although strictly speaking this is of course totally irrelevant. Is it that her account of the war actually is more convincing, or is she just more successful at making it look that way? I'm not sure. When I start thinking about how, exactly, style and content can be so cleanly separated my head starts to hurt, which isn't quite the same thing as being willing to assert that the two are one and the same. On some level, isn't a successfully-told story one that also proposes an internally consistent and propulsive narrative, even if we're talking about fiction? But this stacks the deck against approaches that lend themselves less easily to narrative...

At any rate, one of the reasons I feel so enthusiastic about the current resurgence of good, well-researched academic narrative history is that it promises to recreate some of Wedgwood's charm. As narrative, it must inevitably deal with both character and causes, and pry into the links between the two. As history, it ought to feel a sense of responsibility not only to the sources but also to the state of the field, meaning it cannot simply impose a character-centered framework on material that it assumes to be its own. If we're to start revising the bien-pensant view, we ought not to do it without thinking deeply about how it can be replaced.