Jorge Luis Borges’ famous tale ‘Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote’ tells of an imaginary contemporary writer who sets out to write Don Quixote – not by crudely transcribing the classic text written by Miguel de Cervantes in the early years of the seventeenth century, but by composing himself, after many crossings out, after all the frustrations of literary creation, pages that coincide word for word with Cervantes’ version. Borges’ conceit turns on the fact that the sections Menard manages to complete demand to be interpreted differently from Cervantes’ originals. Menard’s writing of a chapter where Don Quixote tussles between the relative merits of war and literature before concluding he prefers the former is a richer and more ambiguous text, Borges’ narrator claims, than the original – given that Menard was writing in the age of Bertrand Russell, an age with different attitudes to militarism. The story then picks out Menard’s (re-)crafting of the following phrase for particular analysis: ‘truth, whose mother is history, rival of time, depository of deeds, witness of the past, exemplar and adviser to the present, and the future’s counsellor’. In the original version, these words are ‘a mere rhetorical praise of history’. But as written by Menard, the view of truth and history is ‘astounding’ and ‘brazenly pragmatic’. Menard’s work is also celebrated for its use of language. While Cervantes ‘handles with ease the current Spanish of this time’, Menard’s ‘archaic’ style is a jarring affectation. He has succeeded, Borges’ narrator concludes, in enriching the ‘rudimentary art of reading’ with a new technique, ‘deliberate anachronism’.1
Borges’ sensitivity to the cultural and chronological gap between Cervantes and Pierre Menard chimes with the view of developments in historical consciousness posited by many influential modern philosophers of history. A strong break in conceptions of time is often thought to occur in the second half of the eighteenth century. The notion of history as ‘exemplar and adviser to the present, and the future’s counsellor’ presupposes, it is claimed, a view of an unchanging human landscape – a view that came under fire from the historicizing trends in eighteenth-century German thought and from the political disruption of the French Revolution. Modern philosophers of history tend to see the human experience of time as context-specific rather than universal. Different understandings of time hold sway in different periods, and these understandings determine the other intellectual modes available to the culture in question.
An influential exponent of this position is the French historian François Hartog, whose Regimes of Historicity (2003) offers a model of changing perspectives on the past, charting the ways in which the past and future are viewed from the present. For Hartog, a conception of the past as providing examples for future action was prevalent in historiography from antiquity until the start of the revolutionary period in France. The French Revolution marks the beginning of an acceleration of history (the regime of modernity), and this temporal acceleration sets in motion the forces creating Hartog’s third regime, the ‘presentist’ regime of memory and heritage that has held sway since the end of the Cold War.
Hartog’s model is informed by the writings of the German philosopher of history Reinhart Koselleck (1923–2006). Koselleck suggests that European historical thought in the medieval and early modern periods was given its orientation by Christian eschatology. Particular historical events, such as the conflict between the Holy Roman Empire and the Turks, were seen as iterations of the conflict between Christ and Antichrist, and were interpreted in relation to the Final Judgement as prophesied in the Book of Revelation. In this mode of temporal understanding (similar to Hartog’s regime of exemplarity), past, present and future exist on a ‘common historical plane’, an experiential continuum in which the future can be predicted owing to the expectations derived from knowledge of the past. This historical orientation was gradually undermined as a result of the Reformation, the wars of religion during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and the Enlightenment. What occurs as a result of these interlocking historical and intellectual upheavals is a ‘temporalization (Verzeitlichung) of history’. As a teleological conception of the future based on the certainties of Christian theology is replaced by that of a domain determined by human concerns and projects, planning and rational calculation replace eschatology and prophecy as the dominant modes through which futurity is conceived. A philosophy of historical process detaches humanity from its past, opening up the progressive future that is distinctive to modernity, characterized for Koselleck by the ‘increasing speed with which it approaches us’ and its ‘unknown qualities’: a gap developed over the second half of the eighteenth and the first half of the nineteenth centuries between the ‘space of experience’ (perceptions generated by the past) and the ‘horizon of expectation’ (anticipation of the future).2
While the language used by Koselleck is rooted in German philosophy, especially the hermeneutic thought of Hans-Georg Gadamer, Anglo-American scholars have tended to formulate changes in historical consciousness in terms of the development of a ‘sense of anachronism’. They have also focused much more on the humanist philology of Renaissance Italy than on the German Reformation as the motor of historical change. A new awareness of historical difference is seen as spreading north from Italy: one classic study of historical thought in Tudor England proposes that ‘the importation of Italian humanism introduced first, and most important, the concept of anachronism’; with the introduction of this concept (glossed as the perception that ‘the past was different from the present’), historians are said to have sought after ‘those things which made for uniqueness rather than for similarity’.3
The history of art has played a prominent part in these debates over shifting understandings of time. One of that discipline’s most renowned figures, the German Jewish scholar Erwin Panofsky, did not himself use the language of ‘anachronism’ as a shorthand for the discovery that the past was different from the present, preferring instead to speak of an awareness of historical ‘distance’ (that is, a consciousness that humans contemplating past events were removed in time from the objects of their observation).4 He illustrated this awareness in a study of a sketchbook that belonged to Giorgio Vasari, whose Lives of the Artists is often hailed as a foundational text in the discipline of art history. Vasari’s decision to enclose a drawing attributed to the thirteenth-century artist Cimabue within an architectural frame from what he saw as a parallel period of development marks for Panofsky a self-consciousness of historical distance.5 In his monograph Renaissance and Renascences in Western Art, Panofsky groups this self-consciousness with the discovery of spatial perspective as two distinctive features of the Italian Renaissance (by contrast with earlier periods when a sense of renewal was felt). While a British historian speaks of Panofsky’s analysis of Vasari’s sketch as offering the best account of the creation of a ‘sense of anachronism’,6 Panofsky himself uses ‘anachronism’ only of specific stylistic breaches: in his essay on Vasari’s sketchbooks, he applies the term to some unavoidable lapses in the artist’s historicism, while in Renaissance and Renascences he uses a shift from unconscious anachronism (figures from antiquity depicted in knightly guise) to deliberate anachronism (Raphael giving Apollo a modern lyre) to illustrate the new self-consciousness of the Renaissance.7
Despite the stress on the Italian Renaissance as an inaugural moment, narratives focused around the idea of anachronism have allowed for a gradual development over the course of the centuries in which Koselleck plots the temporalization of history. Panofsky himself thought that artistic anachronism persisted in Northern Europe until the eighteenth century. Similarly, the idea of a timeless human nature is seen as lingering in some areas. The survey of the concept of anachronism in Ritter’s Dictionary of Concepts in History concludes that ‘although the growth of anachronist consciousness is clearly displayed in painting, sculpture, and philology from the fifteenth century onwards, the new sensibility was ironically slow to emerge in the writing of history itself … Only in the late 18th and early 19th centuries did the awareness of anachronism finally triumph in historiography.’8
How does classical antiquity fit into these narratives? Categories such as historical process and progress have played much the same role in accounts of ancient Greece and Rome as they do in Koselleck’s analysis of pre-modern Europe. J. B. Bury, one of the most notable intellectual historians of the early twentieth century, suggested in lectures on the ancient Greek historians delivered at Harvard in 1908 that the cyclical theories prominent in antiquity were dropped in the Christian era, when ‘the historical process was for the first time definitely conceived as including past and future in a totality which must have a meaning’; they were then resumed in the Renaissance before being ‘abandoned once more’ in the eighteenth century ‘for the idea of indefinite progress’.9 Bury’s terms were echoed half a century later by Moses Finley in a shorter and more damning introduction to the Greek historians: ‘there was no idea of progress … and therefore there was no reason to look to the past for a process of continuing growth’.10 A more complex picture was presented at about the same time by the historian of political thought J. G. A. Pocock (then based, like Finley, in Cambridge) at the start of a now classic book on the ancestral constitution in English legal thought. Pocock suggested that the Greeks and Romans ‘did not quite reach the point of postulating that there existed, in the past of their own civilization, tracts of time in which the thoughts and actions of men had been so remote in character from those of the present as to be intelligible only if the entire world in which they had occurred were resurrected, described in detail and used to interpret them’; a strong recognition of difference, Pocock continued, was precluded by the lack of a ‘sense of organized dependence on the past’ and of ‘the means of studying and interpreting this dependence’, especially in circumstances when tradition came under attack.11 While Pocock is focusing on historical approaches to English common law rather than the Enlightenment sense of progress, he is just as prone as Bury and Finley to the use of later concepts as an exclusionary mechanism.
The concept of anachronism has been exploited for this same rhetoric of exclusion. One introduction to historical thought begins by speaking of ‘the awareness of anachronism’ as ‘lacking in ancient and medieval historians’.12 Peter Burke’s chapter on ‘The Sense of Anachronism’ in his 1969 classic The Renaissance Sense of the Past does at least allow some sense of historical perspective to the Romans – though it denies any such perspective to both the Greeks and the Middle Ages: following Bury and the philosopher R. G. Collingwood, he thinks that the Greeks’ historical imagination was thwarted by a restriction of the bounds of knowledge to the realm of the permanent, thereby excluding changing historical circumstances.13 As with the once popular but now discarded opposition between the cyclical thought of the Greeks and the linear conceptions of time in the Judaeo-Christian tradition,14 a partial reading of a single Greek philosopher, Plato, is made to stand for the perceptions of the Greeks tout court.
A different development is plotted by the American historian Zachary Sayre Schiffman in his 2011 book The Birth of the Past. While Schiffman regards the narrative ambition of ancient historians as unsurpassed, he argues that the ancients lacked a conception of ‘the past’ and so did not have ‘an idea of anachronism’. They conceived what we name history as ‘things that had passed’, in a way which did not ‘entail a sense of difference between past and present’, and consequently did not ‘constitute the past as an intellectual construct’; instead, they ‘conceived of multiple “pasts” characterized by different time frames, each disassociated from the next’, and ‘could not subsume these pasts under a single entity – “the” past – because they could not integrate these time frames’. Schiffman does allow that the ancients ‘perceived “local” distinctions between past and present’, but dismisses these distinctions as ‘sporadic and naïve’.15 Schiffman shares with the philosophers of history mentioned above a perception that what is distinctive about modern temporality must be placed in contradistinction to antiquity’s under-negotiated temporal consciousness. By charting the development of concepts such as ‘anachronism’ and ‘the past’ in the Renaissance, and their maturity in the eighteenth century, he relegates classical authors to achieving only localized anachronism.
The goal of this chapter is to explore and criticize the way anachronism has been used to structure narratives of historical consciousness. By analysing some notable examples of classical reception at the historical turning points that typically provide support to these accounts, it will probe both the accounts themselves and the methodological assumptions underlying them. As a first step, we may return to Borges’ story of Pierre Menard and his anachronistic re-writing of Don Quixote.
Borges’ story, as we have observed, is supported by the assumption that the age of Cervantes is separated from the present by a wide cultural gap. As a fable about reading, it suggests that to engage with a classic work such as Don Quixote is to be involved in an anachronistic encounter; it could even be interpreted as a story about the anachronism of all acts of reading and interpretation – no matter how far removed they are from the worlds of the original. But a closer reading suggests that the rich ambiguity with which Borges’ creation, Pierre Menard, is endowed is partly the result of a deliberately obtuse reading of Cervantes.
Don Quixote is the great forebear of Borges’ metafictional play. The sentence that Borges’ narrator ruthlessly historicizes – the description of history as ‘witness of the past, exemplar and adviser to the present, and the future’s counsellor’ – is a deliberate cliché. In context, it is a critique of the faithlessness of the invented Arab historian Cid Hamet Ben Engeli, on whose account of Quixote Cervantes’ narrator conveniently stumbles after his first source breaks off at a climactic moment in a duel (Cid Hamet, despite his supposed propensity for lies, then becomes the main source of the story).16 The whole story of Quixote, moreover, is an affectionate parody of the exemplary ideal as expressed in chivalric romance. Quixote himself invokes the exemplary model when he hears of the accounts of his exploits that have appeared (including Cid Hamet’s): he cites famous men of times past who were calumniated by malicious contemporaries, including Alexander, who ‘is said to have had a little smack of the drunkard’.17 The accusation of malice is a response of sorts to the challenge to traditional models of exemplarity posed by conflicting accounts about supposedly virtuous heroes, but is scarcely a serious defence of exemplarity itself.
Quixote’s own attachment to exemplarity is revealed to be an anachronism. The only other passage to which Borges alludes directly, the disquisition on the relative merits of war and literature, is a parody of what was a commonplace topic at the time Cervantes was writing. The normal solution was to view arms and letters as complementary rather than opposed; Quixote’s choice of arms over letters is a throwback to (his own perception of) the values of the age of chivalry. Quixote himself, moreover, recognizes that his own idealization of warfare is an anachronism: he laments the changes in warfare produced by ‘powder and lead’ which now make the valiant hero vulnerable to a chance shot from a coward.18
The treatment of anachronism in ‘Pierre Menard’ turns out to be more complicated than the narrator’s glosses initially lead us to expect. Borges’ story asks to be read not just as a fable about the anachronism of reading but also as a warning against reducing the history of historical consciousness to a series of binary contrasts between past and present. As we shall see, it is a warning that retains its value amidst the proliferating explorations of ideas of the past in modern scholarship.
‘In the history of the sense of history, it is difficult not to start with him.’ Thus Peter Burke half a century ago on the poet and scholar Francesco Petrarca (Petrarch, 1304–74) – though he acknowledged at the same time that descriptions of Petrarch as ‘the first modern man’ had fallen out of fashion.19 The division between the (pre-modern) Middle Ages and the (early modern) Renaissance has been even more forcefully questioned in the decades since Burke wrote,20 but Petrarch continues to play a leading role in debates about developments in ideas of the past.
The distinctive historical sensitivity attributed to Petrarch tends to be located in his attitude to classical antiquity. Petrarch, it is often noted, applied imagery of darkness not to pagan antiquity, as many earlier Christian writers had done, but to the period since the decline of Roman civilization. Overcome with malaise at this sense of cultural decline, he tried to recover as much of classical antiquity as he could, whether by searching for unknown manuscripts, by emending the corrupt text of Livy, or by commissioning (with Boccaccio) a Latin translation of Homer. In addition, he tried to bridge the chasm separating himself from the peaks of Roman literary achievement by writing letters to classical authors, including not just staples of school curricula such as Cicero but also writers whose works were almost entirely lost (the polymath Varro, the orator and historian Asinius Pollio). In these letters, he at the same time gauges his distance from the pagan past by the precision with which he marks the time and place of their composition: the subscription of his letter to Livy (Letters to Friends 24.8), for instance, starts ‘from the world above, in the part of Italy and the city in which you were born and buried’, and then zooms in to a specific Christian site (‘in the vestibule of the Virgin Justina and before the actual monument of your tomb’) and date (‘on February 22nd in the year 1351 since the birth of the One whom you would have to have lived a little longer to know or hear of’).21 But while Petrarch’s letters bask in a sense of loss, they are also exercises in spiritual communion: he expresses the wish that Livy could have lived in his own day or he himself in Livy’s, so that they could have conversed about the great heroes of Republican Rome. Petrarch expresses here a sense of temporal displacement that has led a modern Renaissance scholar to call him ‘a living anachronism’.22
Petrarch has at the same time been credited with a pivotal role in the discovery of a sense of anachronism.23 His awareness of anachronism is most commonly illustrated by a letter (Letters of Old Age 16.5) he wrote in 1361 to Holy Roman Emperor Charles IV, who had consulted him about some privileges supposedly granted to Austria (at that time a Duchy within the empire) by his eleventh-century predecessor Henry IV.24 Those privileges were themselves based on earlier grants supposedly made by Julius Caesar and Nero, but both Henry’s grant and the Roman precedents had in fact been forged at the instigation of Rudolf IV, the Hapsburg Duke of Austria. After receiving the text of these grants from Charles IV, Petrarch replied with a scornful dismissal of their authenticity. He pointed to usages that were at odds with conventions during the time of Caesar (notably the dating formula, which included a regnal year rather than the names of the consuls) and with the character of Nero (who was notoriously scornful of religion, yet here styled himself amicus deorum, ‘friend of the gods’). He also pointed to some linguistic features that he claimed were later than the age of Caesar – features that we could classify as anachronisms: thus Caesar used the plural ‘we’ for himself, a form that in Caesar’s time, Petrarch claims, was starting to be used by flatterers, but that was not employed by Caesar himself; and Caesar also includes the title ‘Augustus’, which was first adopted by his successor – an error that could be spotted by everyone except ‘this jackass now braying so rudely’. More broadly, Petrarch objected to what he described as the ‘rough and recent’ style of the Latin. The forgers, one modern scholar concludes, ‘were living in the Middle Ages’ and ‘wholly without the historical perspective to notice that Julius Caesar was not likely to employ “Augustus” as an honorific’ – whereas ‘Petrarch naturally had that perspective’.25
The sense of anachronism that is thought to underlie Petrarch’s exposure of the inauthenticity of the ancient grants is rooted in philology. He supports his comments on Caesar’s avoidance of the first-person plural by citing letters written by Caesar himself – thereby flaunting his own greatest scholarly discovery, the Verona manuscript of Cicero’s correspondence with Atticus in which Caesar’s letters were quoted. Less spectacularly, he cites a range of other authorities in his letter, among them Suetonius, Florus and Orosius.
The modern scholar can nonetheless point without much trouble to elements of Petrarch’s argument that seem to betray some philological naivety. Does the use of the first-person singular in three private letters justify the assumption that Caesar could not have adopted the plural form in a public decree?26 And why should the impious Nero not have adopted hypocritically the title ‘friend of the gods’? Petrarch also seems rash when he uses the poet Lucan’s account of the civil war between Pompey and Caesar as evidence of historical developments in flattery at Rome, or again when he takes a speech denouncing kingship attributed to Scipio in Livy’s account of the Second Punic War as evidence for attitudes more than a century and a half later.
The shaky philological argumentation in Petrarch’s unmasking of the forgery is matched by some anachronistic slips he makes in his correspondence with the ancients. Unaware that two separate authors, father and son, were covered by the name ‘Seneca’, he thinks that a remark about a certain Quintilian in (the elder) Seneca’s Controversiae alludes to the famous educational writer, who was born at about the time this Seneca died (Letters to Friends 24.7). And in a long letter to Homer (24.12) Petrarch refers to a story that the poet was treated as a madman at Athens, even though there is an anachronistic reference to coinage (the poet was fined ‘fifty drachmas’) in his likely source, Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Philosophers 2.43, which he knew in a Latin translation; he then adds an anachronism of his own by calling Athens ‘the most scholarly city’, a retrojection of the intellectual position acquired by Athens in the fifth century BC.27
A further problem with attributing to Petrarch a new conception of anachronism is that he betrays no consciousness of any such novelty himself. On the contrary, he attributes to the forger himself a theoretical consciousness of historical difference, however inept his practice. Petrarch comments, for instance, that the forger’s style as a whole is ‘far from what it wishes to appear – namely from antiquity and the style of Caesar’, but that ‘a notion of antiquity, striven for childishly’ does stand out ‘in individual words’.28 Petrarch’s judgement can be supported by Nero’s description of himself as ‘a friend of the gods’, a phrase which evidently places him in an age of polytheism as insistently as Petrarch’s use of Christian dating formulae separates him from his beloved classical correspondents. What Petrarch parades, then, is not a new sense of anachronism, but an improved use of philology in the tackling of forgery.29
Accounts of the role of anachronism in the development of historical criticism often suggest that the potential unlocked by Petrarch was fully realized by Lorenzo Valla (1407–57).30 Valla wrote a variety of philosophical and philological treatises, including important studies of the Latin language and of the text of the New Testament. He was also commissioned to produce the first Latin translation of Thucydides. The work for which he has been more celebrated in histories of historical thought, however, is his declamation On the Forged and Mendacious Donation of Constantine.31 The Donation was a document supposedly composed by Constantine, the first Roman emperor to convert to Christianity, which gave the Pope control over the western lands of the empire. Valla’s treatise (written in 1440 when he was secretary to Alfonso, King of Naples and Sicily, a political opponent of the papacy) used in expanded form the same sort of arguments, and the same rhetoric of abuse, that Petrarch had deployed against the exemptions supposedly granted to Austria.32
Valla’s polemic paid attention to what he claimed were egregious factual and stylistic errors. At one point he notes that the text of the Donation referred to ‘Constantinople’, and yet at the time it was meant to have been composed ‘the city was still Byzantium, not Constantinople’ (45). Elsewhere, drawing on the attention to the historicity of Latin that he employed in his philological writings, he claims that the ‘barbarous way of talking’ in the Donation attests that ‘this nonsense was not concocted in the age of Constantine’ (57). And he took particular delight in contrasting its style with the classicizing idiom of Constantine’s adviser, Lactantius: ‘Come back to life, Lactantius, just for a moment, and shut up the gross and monstrous braying of this ass.… Did imperial scribes in your time talk like that?’ (43).
The weight traditionally given to Valla’s treatise in the story of anachronism has come under attack in recent scholarship. For one thing, it has been noted that Valla did not apply his philological skills to the Donation itself: some of his polemic is directed at errors in the copy of the text he was using. Valla has also been criticized for not taking account of the variations in fourth-century Latin: he relied on the Ciceronian Latin of Lactantius as his standard rather than the diplomatic Latin attested by inscriptions.33 Far from exposing the Donation as a forgery, moreover, Valla is seen by recent scholars as initiating a change in the conception of documents. Others both before and during Valla’s lifetime were sceptical that the text of the Donation derived from the time of Constantine, but they had seen it as apocryphal rather than forged. But though Valla initially (4) speaks of the Donation in the same terms in which Cicero (On Duties 3.39) alludes to Plato’s self-consciously ‘fabricated and fictitious’ tale of Gyges’ ring of invisibility,34 he goes on (38) to berate its author as a ‘falsifier’ (falsarius) who is guilty of a ‘most shameless lie’ (imprudentissimum … mendacium). He also pays attention to the materiality of the text, asking why it was written on papyrus rather than inscribed on stone or bronze (39) and how its author could claim in the text itself that he had left it on the body of St Peter (66). That is, Valla turns into a deliberate forgery a text whose aim may have been to supply through an obvious historical fiction an aetiology for the expansion of the church’s concerns beyond the spiritual.35
Questions have been raised, too, about the extent to which Valla’s philology was specifically concerned with categories of time. One scholar has stressed that Valla (like Petrarch before him) lacks a single concept such as anachronism to denote temporal errors.36 And Margreta de Grazia goes even further by arguing that ‘the treatise’s philological analyses’ are not concerned with ‘temporal discrepancies’ at all: ‘It is not the forger’s anachronisms that incense Valla, but his barbarisms. He denies Constantine’s authorship of the document not because it refers to phenomena that postdate Constantine but because he never would have written such bad Latin.’ Valla’s text should be seen, she suggests, more as a rhetorical display-piece than as evidence of increasing chronological sophistication.37
The rhetorical style of Valla’s attack on the Donation of Constantine seems to tell against a strong concern for historical difference. Towards the start of the thesis, he presents himself addressing an imagined gathering of kings and princes, asking them whether they, had they been in Constantine’s place, would have considered ceding so much power; his transhistorical argument for powerful rulers’ tendency to expansionism is capped by the example of Alexander of Macedon (7). Valla subsequently presents three imaginary attempts to dissuade Constantine from his proposed course of action: first his sons deliver a speech, then a spokesman for the Roman senate and people, and finally Pope Sylvester; with some rhetorical aplomb, he makes the Romans invoke the spirit of Brutus avenging the rape of Lucretia (17) while Pope Sylvester uses exclusively biblical and Christian examples of the spiritual dangers of worldly power (21–6).
While Valla’s treatise owes much to his formal training in rhetoric, the temporal dimension in his arguments should not be underestimated. His rhetorical exercises are based on an idealization both of Republican Rome and of the purity of the early Church similar to that which is found in Petrarch’s writings. This idealization is based on a rather uncritical acceptance of a myth of simplicity corrupted, but it nonetheless implies a sensitivity to the difference of the past.38 As for Valla’s linguistic arguments, it is true that he makes no attempt to discover when the document was written. But his opposition between pure and barbaric Latin is likewise grounded in a sense of before and after: the language of ‘barbarism’ had been used before the fourth century for impure Latin, but Valla makes it clear that the barbarisms he notes are a sign that ‘whoever composed the text of this grant lived long after the time of Constantine’ (45).
The notion that Valla did not have at his disposal terminology for dealing with temporal error is also misguided. We noted in the last chapter that the term prolepsis was regularly employed in exegetical commentaries throughout late antiquity and the Middle Ages. That term is also used in a commentary on Sallust’s Catilinarian War that was published in Valla’s name in 1491.39 While the attribution of the commentary to Valla is uncertain, there is no reason to doubt that he could have used the term prolepsis had he wanted, at least in relation to anachronisms such as the use of ‘Constantinople’ for ‘Byzantium’. That he did not use it in his treatise on the Donation is probably because it was used of textual anticipations of toponyms that were in use at the time of the author. It was not a suitable weapon with which to disprove the authenticity of a text that purported to have been written earlier than it actually was.
Like Petrarch, Valla was more concerned to expose the crassness of the forger than the novelty of his own historical perspective. And again the explanation for this silence may lie in the fact that the Donation itself, like Rudolf’s forged grants, shares something of that sense of historical difference. Like those grants, the Donation evokes the pagan religion of ancient Rome: it starts with a miraculous account of how Constantine, suffering from leprosy, was initially advised by ‘the priests of the Capitol’ to sacrifice infants and bathe in their blood (6), before he (or nostra serenitas, ‘our serenity’ – a formula adopted from genuine imperial texts) was moved by the sight of their mothers’ tears and visited in a dream by the apostles Peter and Paul. Besides this, the Donation uses a more convincing dating formula than the regnal year that prompted Petrarch’s scorn: ‘given at Rome on the third day before the Kalends of April, when the distinguished consuls were our lord Flavius Constantine Augustus for the fourth time and Gallicanus’.40 As it happens, that dating is impossible: Constantine was never consul in the same year as Gallicanus, who was consul just once, in AD 330, the year after the fourth consulship of Constantine’s son, the future Constantine II.41 Valla himself was not aware of that objection to the formula: evidently basing his polemic on a corrupt text, he mocked the implausible coincidence that it was the fourth consulship for both consuls.
Our discussion of Petrarch and Valla suggests that the much-vaunted ‘sense of anachronism’ has been made to do too much work in accounts of the development of Italian humanism. Suggestions that it was their sense of anachronism that enabled Petrarch or Valla to dispute the authenticity of documents gloss over the part played by their philological acumen (even if we have seen reason to question some of their arguments). It may be the case that their fine-grained knowledge of Latin enabled a distinctive sort of appreciation of historical difference – that is, that it led to a qualitative and quantitative shift in the conception of change. But it was nonetheless that acumen, not a discovery of historical difference itself, that enabled them to dismiss the documents.42
The ease with which Petrarch uncovered the incompetent forgery of the Austrian grants has been taken to illustrate ‘the abyss between north and south’ in his time.43 That philological rift was carried over into the next century, at the time of Valla’s dismissal of the Donation of Constantine. But a century later Valla’s anti-clerical treatise was to be widely disseminated in print by supporters of the Protestant Reformation. It is to this northern intellectual revolution, and its distant repercussions, that we turn for our final case study.
Among the many visitors to Paris in 1804 drawn by the artworks from Germany and Italy looted by Napoleon was the German philosopher and philologist Friedrich von Schlegel. At one time a committed Hellenophile, Schlegel had become increasingly interested in the poetry of ancient India and in the European Middle Ages. Among the works of art he saw in the Louvre was the Alexanderschlacht, a panel painting by the German artist Albrecht Altdorfer depicting the victory of Alexander of Macedon over the Persians at the battle of Issus in 333 BC (Fig. 3). One of a series of biblical and historical paintings commissioned by Duke William IV of Bavaria, Altdorfer’s work (completed in 1529) sets a highly detailed rendition of the battle in its lower half against a dramatic backdrop of mountains and sea stretching into the distance. Schlegel’s response to the work (first published in 1805 in his journal Europa) brought to both the painting and its artist the recognition that they continue to enjoy to this day.44 In recent decades, however, the painting and Schlegel’s response have also come to be frequently invoked in debates about shifting understandings of time – debates in which an important role has been played by anachronism.
The inspiration for these uses of Altdorfer and Schlegel is the opening essay in Reinhardt Koselleck’s collection Futures Past (originally his inaugural lecture at the University of Heidelberg). Koselleck’s essay focuses on what he sees as the ‘temporalization of history’ in the centuries between Altdorfer’s painting and Schlegel’s visit to Paris. He begins by noting that there is ‘a conscious anachronism’ in the painting: it shows the battle in progress, but includes details about the result of the battle such as casualty figures on a tablet in the sky as well as on banners held by soldiers. Koselleck then notes ‘another anachronism’ that he claims is ‘much more obvious to us today’ – the style of armour worn by the two armies: ‘we believe we see before us the last knight Maximilian [Holy Roman Emperor from 1508 to 1519 and an important promoter of Hapsburg power] or the crowds of Landsknechts [mercenaries] at the battle of Pavia [a decisive Hapsburg victory over the French in 1525]’; in addition, ‘most of the Persians’ are wearing turbans, and so modelled on the Turks, who were laying siege to Vienna at the time Altdorfer was painting. Koselleck concludes that ‘the historical event which Altdorfer recorded was for him as if contemporary. Alexander and Maximilian … move together in an exemplary way; the historical space of experience drew life from the depth of generational unity.’45
Fig. 3 Albrecht Altdorfer, The Battle of Alexander at Issus (Alexanderschlacht) (1529). Altes Pinakothek, Munich.
Koselleck’s argument for the timelessness of Altdorfer’s painting is reinforced by Christian eschatology. Alexander’s conquest of the Persian empire was widely seen in the sixteenth century as the transition from the second to the third of the four empires prophesied in the Book of Daniel; though their interpretation had varied considerably over time, the four animals in the prophecy were generally at this time taken as signifying the Assyrians (or Babylonians), Persians, Greeks and Romans. At the time of Altdorfer’s painting, this prophecy was acquiring an acute contemporary relevance. Thanks to the principle of translatio imperii enunciated by thinkers such as Otto of Freising, the Roman Empire itself was thought to endure in the Holy Roman Empire founded by Charlemagne. While this idea of continuity was used to validate the authority of the Germanic emperors, it fed apocalyptic fears during the Reformation when it was linked with biblical prophecies such as those of Daniel or the Book of Revelation, which seemed to point to a climactic battle of good against evil (identified by Lutherans with the papacy itself).46 These eschatological ideas feed into Koselleck’s interpretation of Altdorfer’s painting: though it celebrates the status of the Hapsburgs within the Empire, the battle waged between Alexander and Darius beneath the cosmic pairing of sun and moon could have been viewed by contemporaries as a figure of the final battle between Christ and Antichrist.
The timeless fusion of past and present that Koselleck detects in the Alexanderschlacht contrasts with Schlegel’s ‘astonishment’ at the sight of the painting:
In long cascades sparkling with thoughts, Schlegel celebrated the work, in which he recognized ‘the highest adventure of old knighthood’. He thus gained a historical-critical distance with respect to Altdorfer’s masterpiece. Schlegel knew how to distinguish the painting not only from his own time but also from the ancient time which it pretends to represent. For him, history had thereby gained a specifically temporal dimension which is clearly lacking in Altdorfer.47
Koselleck here sees the difference between Altdorfer and Schlegel in the development of a sense of period detail.
Koselleck’s historical trajectory can easily be questioned. He distinguishes between two types of anachronism: a conscious anachronism relating to narrative arrangement (the anticipation of casualty figures on the banners) and an unconscious anachronism in the depiction of costume (the style of armour and the turbans). That the second sort of anachronism would have been less obvious to Altdorfer’s contemporaries, however, is hard to believe. The anachronisms stand out in part because the painting is not uniformly anachronistic. One contrast with current-day modes of fighting is the absence of any weapons fired by gunpowder, such as the cannons that can be found in fifteenth-century illustrations of the Alexander Romance or again in a painting of the siege of Alesia, a climactic moment in Julius Caesar’s campaigns against the Gauls, in the series of historical paintings commissioned by Wilhelm IV (and also seen by Schlegel in Paris).48 Altdorfer’s painting, by contrast, shows signs of detailed engagement with ancient accounts of Alexander’s campaigns.49 It is true that details from the battles of Issus (the topography and the presence of royal Persian women) and Gaugamela (notably Darius’ wounded charioteer) have been merged, but these mergings can themselves be read as a pointed display of the painting’s historical consciousness, especially when viewed alongside its attention to antiquarian detail. Especially notable is the scythed chariot in which Darius rides – a type of vehicle described in ancient historical writings and military manuals.50 In attempting to reproduce this exotic vehicle, Altdorfer was following in a tradition that includes the illustrated manuscripts of the Roman military writer Vegetius and the drawings of Leonardo da Vinci. The selectivity of Altdorfer’s anachronism is seen, too, in his portrayal of the Persians. Darius wears an elaborate diadem possibly modelled on ancient accounts of Persian headwear.51 Some of the Persians, especially those close to the fleeing figure of Darius, are, it is true, wearing head-dresses that resemble turbans, but even these could claim support from accounts of ancient Persian clothing. But in the cavalry clash forcefully depicted in the bottom tier of the painting, the Persians are wearing exactly the same style of full-metal armour with elaborate crests as Alexander’s troops. Altdorfer, then, makes the distant battle comprehensible to his audience while also evoking the specificity of the encounter. He deliberately portrays the battle as both familiar and unfamiliar.
The suggestion that Altdorfer’s chivalrous depiction of the battle represents a deliberate choice is supported by comparison with contemporary practice. Some of the other historical paintings produced for Wilhelm IV’s cycle do portray the past in a stereotypically ancient manner: Burgkmair’s painting of Cannae, for instance, presents the confusion of battle from a low vantage point with armour all’ antica, while, in the parallel series devoted to pagan and Christian heroines, depictions of the suicide of Lucretia and of the Empress Helena receiving the cross (by Breu and Beham respectively) have backgrounds of classical architecture.52 A sense of period style can be seen, moreover, in some of Altdorfer’s other works, for instance a Crucifixion painted c. 1520.53
The context of Altdorfer’s commission further calls into question Koselleck’s distinction between two types of anachronism. Clearly depicted on one of the banners on Alexander’s side is a Hapsburg eagle – the heraldic emblem of Altdorfer’s patron Wilhelm IV and of Wilhelm’s uncle, the Emperor Maximilian, before him. That emblem is a clear sign of the painting’s propagandistic intent. The point of the propaganda is not, as Koselleck suggests, to merge Alexander with Maximilian, who had been dead for almost ten years when it was commissioned. Rather, it asserts the continuity of the empire against the threat of the Reformation while holding out the hope that Wilhelm IV might become a new Alexander.
That the use of anachronism in Altdorfer’s painting was propagandistic is also suggested by the writings of Wilhelm’s court historian Johannes Turmaier, generally known as Aventinus.54 Aventinus is known above all for his Bavarian Chronicle, which traces the distant ancestry of the Bavarians but also covers much non-Bavarian history, including a relatively full account of Alexander’s campaigns, which are explicitly interpreted in terms of Daniel’s prophecies. Among his other writings were works on military strategy and on the Turkish war, and in these he cites Alexander’s victory at Issus as an example of how a small force could defeat a larger one, while also pointing to the Turkish incursions into Europe along with Scipio’s invasion of Africa as illustrations of the effectiveness of sending troops into enemy territory.55 The significance of Aventinus for understanding the Alexanderschlacht is that it is likely that he both orchestrated Wilhelm’s gallery of historical paintings and provided Altdorfer with specific details of Alexander’s campaigns. Altdorfer’s painting stands in a similar relation to earlier illustrations of Alexander, which often showed fantastic episodes taken from the Alexander Romance, as Aventinus’ account of Alexander in the Chronicle does to popular earlier re-tellings of the Alexander Romance which it explicitly sought to surpass.56 Both painting and chronicle are composed in a style felt to be appropriate for their propagandistic goal, and the anachronisms in the painting can themselves be seen as enacting Aventinus’ view that the past offers lessons for the present.
The exemplary quality of Altdorfer’s painting should not be equated with a sense of timelessness. It is not just that the painting contains clear hints of historical distance. It is also that the very attempt to establish continuity with the past can itself be a response to a sense of historical rupture – in this case the threat posed by the Turks in Europe which carried with it the prospect of the fulfilment of biblical prophecies. Nor need the idea of the succession of four empires be interpreted as timeless: each empire can be seen as superseding its predecessor in the Christian narrative. It provides a model of periodization that is effaced by Koselleck’s exclusive focus on the shift to a modern understanding of historical process.
Koselleck’s presentation of Schlegel’s response to Altdorfer is as misleading as his reading of Altdorfer’s anachronisms. Koselleck, as we have noted, quotes Schlegel’s comment that he recognized in the painting ‘the highest adventure of old knighthood’ and infers from this that Schlegel was conscious of historical difference both between his own day and Altdorfer’s and between Altdorfer’s and antiquity. Properly understood, Schlegel’s discussion points to a more complicated sense of temporality. Key to grasping Schlegel’s point are two phrases in the same sentence that Koselleck omits: Schlegel was suggesting that Altdorfer, in portraying the battle as a chivalric adventure, was presenting it ‘not in mere imitation of the antique manner’, but ‘as in medieval poetry’.57
Schlegel’s chivalrous reading of Altdorfer’s painting exemplifies the transformation of attitudes to medieval art and literature during the German Romantic period. Rejecting the universal tenets of French Neoclassicism for reasons of both religion (the anti-Christian tenor of the French Revolution) and patriotism (Napoleon’s invasion of the Holy Roman Empire), Schlegel turned to Gothic art and architecture and to chivalric literature. He developed his thoughts on the literature of the Middle Ages in lectures he delivered some years later in which he discussed how chivalric poetry emerged at the time of the Crusades and peaked by the end of the thirteenth century. He saw this period as the youth of the European nations, marked by a spirit of creativity comparable with the spirit which produced the Homeric poems; and one area where this creativity was displayed was in the chivalric re-fashioning of the past, no matter whether poets were dealing with non-classical subjects (the Germanic migrations, the deeds of Arthur) or re-working classical themes such as the Trojan War or the exploits of Alexander, whose deeds ‘bear the greatest resemblance to heroic traditions’.58
By comparing Altdorfer with the poets of the Middle Ages, Schlegel was endowing him with the sort of temporal consciousness denied him by Koselleck. While conscious of Altdorfer’s anachronism (he called the costumes ‘throughout Germanic and chivalric’59), he was suggesting that it was Altdorfer’s choice to depict the battle in a chivalric manner – a more compelling picture than the historically naive figure posited by Koselleck. Altdorfer, after all, was not responding to the Battle of Issus in a vacuum, but following in the wake of numerous chivalric re-imaginings of Alexander: his adviser Aventinus suggested in his Bavarian Chronicle that Alexander was better known ‘to our people, including the unlearned, than our own kings and emperors, whose names they hardly know’.60
The choice that Altdorfer made was for Schlegel one that was available to artists in his own time. Far from using the idea of chivalry to set the painting in an unbridgeable past, as Koselleck suggests, Schlegel was proposing Altdorfer as a possible inspiration for a chivalric revival. He concluded his discussion of the painting by addressing ‘the thinking painter who strives after new and grandiose subjects, who wishes to abandon at once the sacred sphere of Catholic symbology and seeks to create a truly romantic painting’, and suggesting that ‘this little Iliad in colours could teach what the spirit of chivalry was and meant’.61 The comparison with the Iliad suggests the sort of comparative approach to the development of chivalry that Schlegel would later offer in his lectures and that had already been articulated by eighteenth-century writers such as Richard Hurd. But the lesson that Schlegel wants to draw from Altdorfer shows that he views the spirit of chivalry as a transhistorical ideal: he concluded the article in which he discussed the Alexanderschlacht by urging painters to ‘adopt the well-considered creed of the old Dürer, who said: “No, I don’t want to paint in the antique manner, or the Italian manner, what I want is to paint in the German manner.”’62 Historical distance is here collapsed further by the brazenly anachronistic words that Schlegel puts in Dürer’s mouth: Dürer himself is made to take on the role of national German icon that was thrust on him at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.63
The sense of history shown in Schlegel’s reading of Altdorfer is much richer than Koselleck allows. Koselleck posits that Alexander and Altdorfer both stood on a common historical plane, but that this plane had been ruptured by the time of Schlegel. But we have seen that there is good reason to allow not only that Altdorfer had a more nuanced conception of historical change, but also that Schlegel was suppressing as much as accentuating the difference between himself and Altdorfer. It is true that Schlegel sees Altdorfer as ‘early’ in terms of style: he speaks of the painting having ‘the stiffness of the old style’ and of its workmanship being typical of ‘the high style of the old German school’.64 But these stylistic features were central to Schlegel’s exercise in patriotic recuperation. The anachronistically ‘German’ character of the painting made it an appropriate model for current-day artists (Schlegel notably avoids any comment on the slight Turquerie of the turbans).
We have examined so far in this chapter three case studies where the concept of anachronism has been used as a vehicle for historical periodization: two relating to forgery (Petrarch’s exposure of grants supposedly made by Julius Caesar and Nero; Valla’s disquisition on the Donation of Constantine) and one centred on an image (Schlegel’s reading of Altdorfer’s Alexanderschlacht). The aim of these case studies has not been to deny that there have been changes in the ways in which historical difference has been configured: in the centuries that divide Altdorfer from Schlegel, the collapse of the model of the four empires and the increasing hold of the idea of progress are just two of the notable changes on which Koselleck’s account of the ‘temporalization of history’ rightly focuses. The problems we have observed should rather be seen as the product of a polarizing use of anachronism. A more nuanced view of change over time can be gained from the metaphor of multiple co-existing temporal layers (Zeitschichten) that Koselleck himself elaborates in his trademark conceptual histories (Begriffsgeschichte). Koselleck developed this metaphor partly as a way round the opposition between ‘linear’ and ‘cyclical’ time: he sees the historical process as structured by patterns of singularity and recurrence, themselves subject to varying processes of change.65
The case studies we have presented raise a number of general points about how narratives of historical change are constructed. One feature of many histories of temporal consciousness is their refusal to address adequately the question of what it is at stake in writing a history of time. Whose ideas of the past are we talking about? This question can be asked at a national level: French and German historians such as Hartog and Koselleck have focused on a sense of rupture in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in part because of the experiences of the French and German peoples at those times (the French Revolution, Napoleon’s dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire, incipient German nationalism); historians with a British focus, by contrast, have tended to stress continuities, while post-colonial critics have been particularly concerned to criticize the way in which the static time of the colonized has been opposed to the linear progress embodied in the colonial powers.
The question of identity is relevant at the personal level too. As we have seen, scholars have often structured their stories around a progression of heroic figures who both represent their own moment in history but also stand ahead of it, prefiguring the future course of temporal consciousness (the forgers Petrarch unmasks belong in the Middle Ages while Petrarch himself does not). The problem with this exclusive focus on great names is that at any given historical moment there are multiple different conceptions of the past both across different societies and within one society. Even a single individual may have many different ideas of the past at any one time, and these ideas will change over the course of her or his life.
The need to look beyond a restricted intellectual elite has been seen in our discussion of forgery. Both the faked grants awarded by Caesar and Nero and the text of the Donation of Constantine show some sense of historical perspective, even if they are in other ways vulnerable to the charge of anachronism. In the case of Rudolf IV of Austria, moreover, the very effort to base a claim to authority on grants made by Roman emperors implies a sense of distance not so different from Petrarch’s own use of the Roman past for self-validation.66 The importance of taking a more expansive approach to the history of a sense of anachronism can be illustrated even by cases where forgeries are not spotted: a manuscript history of the monastery of St Augustine of Canterbury which was produced in 1413 displayed a historicizing sensibility towards handwriting by including facsimiles of some forged old documents alongside transcriptions in the style of documents of the copyist’s own day.67
Another problem in many scholarly approaches to historical representations is their failure to allow for the significance of genre. Accounts of developing historical consciousness have repeatedly made use of paintings and histories. While it is certainly reasonable to try to extrapolate an idea of the past from a painting or an historical account, the idea of the past extrapolated in this way necessarily relates to a representation of the past in a form that can be communicated to others. It does not correspond straightforwardly with the manifold impressions of the past that the creators of those artistic or literary works carry with them over the course of their lives.
The problems that arise from the neglect of genre are particularly clear in the account of the birth of the past offered by Zachary Sayre Schiffman. Schiffman, as we noted earlier, detects only ‘local’ anachronisms in classical historians such as Thucydides. He proceeds to chart the development of new forms of temporal consciousness first in the Christian era, when there was ‘a vision of history as a self-contained entity with a beginning and an end’, but ‘the immediate connections it fostered between past, present and future … precluded any sustained idea of anachronism by which to distinguish past from present’; and then in the Renaissance, when there was a sense of a ‘living past’, ‘a synchronous space that preserves temporal differences while annihilating time’, involving an increased but still limited consciousness of anachronism. The climax comes with the ‘birth of the past’ in the French philosopher Montesquieu’s Considerations on the Causes of the Greatness of the Romans and their Decline (1734). Montesquieu introduces a cross-historical perspective by comparing early Rome with a village in the Crimea in his own day, and again by aligning the clash of ancient Gauls and Romans with the wars of the Mexicans and the Spanish. What distinguishes Montesquieu, in Schiffman’s reading, is a ‘relational view’ that allows him properly to contextualize entities within a unified conception of ‘the past’.68
Schiffman’s bold analysis of the birth of the past fails to address the generic differences between the evidence he deploys for antiquity and for later periods. For antiquity, Schiffman relies on historical narratives. Beyond antiquity, he draws on the analytical genres used by select authors from Montaigne to Montesquieu. As a result of this restricted evidence, Schiffman is able to claim that the ancients looked at the past as a series of separate narratives. But the same claim could equally be made of modern conceptions of the past on the basis of the narratives that modern historians actually produce. It is true that both Greek and Roman writers tend to adopt phrases such as ‘the things that have happened’ (ta gegenēmena in Greek, res gestae in Latin), but both cultures offer ample evidence for a view of the past as a linear sequence, and the recurrence of similar patterns (of decline or development or both) in a wide variety of ancient evidence makes it appropriate to speak of a global rather than just a localized sense of anachronism. The evidence discussed in this book will show that many of the tropes which Schiffman sees as post-antique stages on the way towards the birth of the past can be found in antiquity.
The failure in many accounts of historical thought to take account of modes of representation is closely tied to their teleology. That is to say, the discovery of a ‘proper’ sense of historical difference in a particular era necessarily springs from a reluctance to engage sympathetically with earlier forms of historical representation. The problem of teleology is especially seen in the policing of the division between the modern and the medieval: in the words of two scholars of medieval France, ‘by rendering history as a teleological unfolding that leads inexorably to a moment of intellectual awakening (whether in Dante, Petrarch, or Valla) at which time and history are finally grasped for what they truly are, modern historians repeat the gestures of a Whig history they otherwise repudiate’.69 According to this teleological pattern of thought, medieval illustrations of ancient warriors in knightly garb are dismissed as unconscious anachronisms rather than appreciated as deliberate attempts to familiarize the unknown. But this patronizing view of medieval art is liable to the objection that earlier images seem anachronistic only once artists have started to reproduce period styles of clothing.
The related problems of genre and teleology are both illuminated in the French historian Paul Veyne’s reflections on the writing of history. For Veyne, any historical account implies an understanding of difference: ‘An event stands out against a background of uniformity; it is a difference, a thing we could not know a priori.’70 This observation can be illustrated by the beginning of Herodotus’ Histories. When Herodotus expresses the view that wrong-doing between Greeks and barbarians started (to the best of his knowledge) with the Lydian king Croesus’ subjection of the Ionian Greeks (1.5–6), he stresses a cardinal moment of difference in marked opposition to the alleged Persian claim that wrong-doing started with the Phoenicians’ seizure of the Argive princess Io (1.1). But equally when Herodotus writes a bit later that ‘all the other sophists from Greece arrived at Sardis … among them Solon an Athenian’ (1.29.1), he is still offering information that is not available to the audience at the level at which they ordinarily engage with the world. In Veyne’s words, ‘the historian does not exhaustively describe a civilization or a period … he will tell his reader only what is necessary so that the latter can picture that civilization starting from what is always taken to be true’.71 History is difference – even when, to return to our Herodotean example, Solon’s arrival is picked out because it makes a difference to Croesus’ (and to our) general conceptions of the world.
Veyne’s discussion of historical concepts sheds further light on the problems involved in writing histories of anachronism. He suggests that historians tell their selective stories about the past with the help of concepts (such as ‘revolution’, ‘nationalism’ or ‘capitalism’) which facilitate understanding even though their breadth necessarily makes them hard to define. The problem with these concepts, according to Veyne, is not just that they are ill-defined, but also that they do not keep up with the new ways of understanding the world that have emerged since they were formulated. Outmoded though they may be, these concepts are nonetheless used by historians to impose boundaries on the unlimited domain of the historical. The history of historiography, he concludes, is ‘partly the history of anachronisms caused by ready-made ideas’, and the history book ‘is to be seen as a battle-ground between an ever-changing truth and concepts that are always anachronistic’, with historians ‘in the position of designers of historical monuments’.72 Veyne’s provocative view that all attempts to write the past are transient monuments to its ever-changing difference receives support from the histories of anachronism we have discussed in this chapter. In these histories, the anachronistic concept is precisely the notion of historical difference – and the definitions of both ‘historical’ and ‘difference’ are at stake in these anachronisms.
It may be helpful to close these methodological reflections by going beyond the limits of the written and visual evidence with which we have so far been concerned. There is a strong case for claiming that a sense of difference is inherent not just in genres such as historiography and historical painting but also in the processes of human consciousness. The varying conceptions that individuals have of the past will be expressed with different degrees of explicitness and self-reflection, but to be conscious of living in the present is to be aware that the past is different.
Taking account of cognitive processes suggests, too, that observing many forms of textual or visual anachronism is not among the most complex operations carried out by the human brain. When a scholar suggests that Petrarch’s ‘conception of anachronism’ was what ‘underlay his understanding of the fact that no knowledge of Christianity could be attributed to Livy’,73 the abstraction of the language glosses over the relative simplicity of the mental operation. The birth of Christ marked the transition from the fifth to the sixth of the ages formulated by Augustine in his City of God, and by Petrarch’s time it was firmly embedded in the sort of dating formula he used in the subscriptions to his letters to classical authors. To return to an example from our discussion in Chapter 1 of ancient uses of the word ‘anachronism’, the conceptual grasp shown by a petitioner in Egypt objecting that a document has been dated in the name of the wrong official matches Petrarch’s understanding that Livy died before the birth of Christ.
Our concern in this book will not be the anachronism inherent in all historical writing and in all human consciousness but the workings of anachronism in explicit formulations of historical difference across a wide variety of Greek and Roman genres. Applying later conceptions of anachronism to antiquity is, as we have noted, necessarily anachronistic. But, for all that, it is a story worth telling both because it is relatively unfamiliar and because it makes a difference to how we conceive the barriers that separate antiquity and modernity. The need to reconfigure those barriers is suggested by the fact that the structures of the anachronistic histories that have been discussed in this chapter themselves replicate common patterns in accounts of the past in antiquity.
The structural resemblances between ancient and modern patterning of the past will be a theme throughout this book. It will be helpful nonetheless to pick out at this point some of the most notable resemblances. The binary division that we have noted in some modern accounts between simple and complex conceptions of time adopts an opposition found in ancient evolutionary narratives, which often made simplicity the hallmark of ‘old’ or ‘heroic’ times. A particularly close link lies in the move that Schiffman sketches from a ‘sporadic’ to a global sense of anachronism; this move echoes numerous Greek developmental narratives which use the adverb sporadēn or cognate words for the ‘sporadic’ settlement of humans prior to the foundation of towns.74 Equally significant is patterning in terms of decline rather than development. The two figures who, as we have seen, commonly play a foundational role in the development of historical perspective, Petrarch and Valla, both operate with a notion of decline from the virtues of the Roman republic that is directly inherited from the poets and historians of Augustan Rome; the reason why Petrarch wanted to commune with Livy was not because he saw the Augustan age as a peak of human achievement, but because so much of Livy’s account of the nobler republican past had been lost. This conception of decline that Petrarch inherited from Livy can itself, moreover, be seen as a re-working of a notion of a decline from a heroic past that is strongly expressed in the earliest surviving Greek poetry.
It is time now to begin to explore in more detail the different conceptions of anachronism that can be found in antiquity. Following the plot outlined in the previous chapter, we turn first to the origins of anachronism in the literary discourses of late antiquity, to an educational setting where teachers and students sought to understand remote texts that themselves looked back to an even more remote and heroic past.