Surveying 2,500 years of historians

EPICS, CHRONICLES, ROMANCES AND INQUIRIES FROM HERODOTUS AND THUCYDIDES TO THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

By John Burrow

Knopf, $35, 517 pages

REVIEWED BY Stephen Goode

John Burrow’s “A History of Histories” surveys a big chunk of history — 2,500 years — beginning with the Ancient Greek, Herodotus, “the father of history,” onward to such innovative 20th-century figures as Fernand Braudel, Frances Yates and Thomas Kuhn.

It’s a daunting task, but it’s one that Mr. Burrow, who is professor of European Thought at Oxford University, handles with clarity and admirable dexterity.

Mr. Burrow focuses on the major historians of Europe and the United States. There’s nothing in “A History of Histories” about Asian, Arab, African or South American historians.

But he knows the many works and the biographies of the men and women he writes about thoroughly, and readers will admire his graceful prose and appreciate his erudition.

The author sees one overriding goal that unites historians throughout the centuries: “To all of them the past mattered: it was worth investigating and recording and keeping alive for future generations,” he writes.

Where they differ is in approach to history and above all in the lessons derived from it: A Thomas Carlyle (a Scot) or Jules Michelet (Frenchman), for example, can view the French Revolution as a great era bringing magnificent benefits to mankind, while a Hippolyte Taine (another Frenchman) sees it as a sickness from when France and Europe never truly recovered.

No clear heroes emerge from among the many historians Mr. Burrow writes about, though there are figures he admires: Herodotus, the Renaissance Florentine Francisco Guicciardini and William Hickling Prescott, a 19th-century American, among others.

Mr. Burrow sees no overall pattern in the development of history during the 2,500 years his book takes up.

But he does discuss themes shared by clusters of historians, and he writes eloquently about the two or three times when the writing of history experienced significant change.

Among the Ancient Romans, for example, one shared theme was the degeneracy of the age they lived in compared to past times.

Sallust, writing in the first century B.C. during the chaotic last years of the Republic, concluded that Rome’s greatness derived from the days when (in Mr. Burrow’s words) when “men burned to distinguish themselves and acquire glory in the service of the state.”

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