An Inaugural Address Delivered before the First Annual General Meeting of the Society,

11th May, 1911

Author(s): F. Haverfield
Source: The Journal of Roman Studies, Vol. 1 (1911), pp. xi-xx
Published by: Society for the Promotion of Roman Studies
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/295845
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AN INAUGURAL ADDRESS DELIVERED BEFORE THE FIRST ANNUAL
GENERAL MEETING OF THE SOCIETY, iith May, i9ii.

By PROP. F. HAVERFIELD, LL.D. D.Litt. V.P.S.A. President of the Society.

If a cynic were asked why the Society for the Promotion of

Roman Studies had been founded, he might reply that it was done
to satisfy the grumbles of a few specialists. That is certainly a
part of the truth. But this meeting would not have been convened
nor would the council of the society have bidden the President
to deliver an inaugural address unless much larger issues had been
involved.
Learned societies, or perhaps one should say rather, societies
concerned with learned subjects, have been a marked and growing
feature in the intellectual or semi-intellectual life of England during
the last seventy or eighty years. One meets them everywhere, in
London, in the great provincial towns, in the circles of county
antiquaries and naturalists. Indeed, the social tendency towards
group-activity which they show, might almost deserve to be studied
by some future historian. That historian, I fear, will not wholly
praise the result. He will admit that they have to some extent
brought lonely students together and thus made easier those
" comparisons of counsels " which, whether Sophocles meant or
did not mean to praise them in a much disputed couplet, are
indispensable to successful research and to advance in knowledge.
He will admit, too, that they have to some extent furnished the
means for the publication of learned articles and even of learned
books. He may perhaps add that their voluntary intellectual
activities have saved the state from duties which fall on it in many
lands. But he may not be quite certain whether this last result
is good or bad, and he will certainly go on to observe some
unpleasant facts. Many of these societies, he will note, have
proved ineffective, many have altogether perished, others have
lingered on in a state little better than death, and while good
work has been published, a vast mass of rubbish has been printed
with it. He will probably conclude that the tendency to form
these societies, though seventy years old, is still immature, and
he may wonder whether, like the slightly younger Volunteer move-
ment which has led up to our Territorial army, this Society
movement may not have also its undeveloped possibilities, and
whether even in individualist England there may not be in future
room for collective study and research.
The fault, I think, and if I did not think so, I should not be
here, has not lain wholly with the societies. The character of the

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xii

nation is largely, perhaps mainly, to blame. We in England have

a poor, perhaps a disastrous, conception of learning, and particularly
of learning which is not natural science. It is not merely that
people think the learned man a social nuisance or an oddity. That
feeling is not confined to England or this age and, in truth, the
learned man is often himself responsible for it. But the English
have a special indifference to learning as such. They find no use
for it; they believe that any Englishman can go where he likes
and achieve what he wishes without training and without know-
ledge. In the regions of natural science they perhaps admit that
specialised knowledge is good. But it is a peculiar result of our
dominant classical education, which is, after all, a general and not
a specialising education, that in such branches of science as history
or literature, the average Englishman is comparatively indifferent
to accurate and scientific training, and practically believes that an
untaught and unprepared writer can produce first-rate work by his
intelligence.
There is another and kindred cause at work. In all ages a serious
gulf has yawned between the humanists and the savants, between
those who have a literary or general interest in a subject and those
who make a scientific study of it, and in all ages those who have
taken the general, human, interest have tended to deprecate
technical details and accurate thinking. Tacitus, I am inclined to
believe, got his modern soubriquet of the " most unmilitary of
historians " not from any particular indifference to military history,
but because he refused to load his paragraphs with any sort of
technical minutiae, whether of tactics and strategy, and of any-
thing else. He preferred the emotional and ethical aspects of war,
as of other things, and he eschewed the scientific description of
marches or maoenuvres just as he omitted all scientific or technical
detail.
Now, thanks again to our system of classical education, this
literary or general interest is extraordinarily diffused in England.
There are probably in Great Britain far more persons who take
real interest in ancient history and archaeology than in any other
country in Europe. On the other hand the scientific and technical
study of, let us say, history is proportionately ignored. There is
even a belief among some true friends of education in England
that advanced and accurate knowledge, and the research which goes
with it, is actually hostile to education, and that, except in the
form of natural science, it should be excluded, for instance, from
our newer Universities. The truth that, without a basis of profound
and accurate knowledge, education of any kind will be a sham, is
understood abroad far better than in England. Here, even the
criticism of a piece of research is apt, outside of a few special circles,
to become an enquiry into the practical value of the work. Not

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 xiil

long ago the Royal Commission for examining the ancient and
historic monuments of England, of which I am a member, issued
a minute and careful and scientific account of the " monuments "
of Hertfordshire. The volume excited the attention both of the
landowners of Hertfordshire and of antiquaries and others, was
reviewed at length and otherwise discussed. The critics were
uniformly friendly. But nearly all of them limited their attention
to a purely practical question, the best method of preserving these
national monuments. Hardly anyone reflected that before we set
out to preserve our ancient monuments, we must know accuratelv
what the monuments are and what are their real merits ; hardly
any pointed out that the Commission supplied, or at least tried to
supply, that accurate knowledge.
It is, of course, true that Englishmen like to hear expert opinions
they like to think that they have the nearest possible approach to
the truth before them. In this, I may say in passing, they have
been instructed or at least encouraged, by their modern journalism.
But while they desire the opinion of the expert, one must add
that they have the strangest notions of where to find hinm or how
to recognise him. In the view of some, the specialist is he who
has lived long in a place. I well remember reading an account
of a supposed Roman road in North Wales, compiled under state
authority, and finding the confident conclusion " All the oldest
inhabitants agree that it is a Roman road." To o.thers, a specialist
in one subject is forthwith a specialist in all. I should not like
to count the number of times that, being myself a student of
Roman Britain, 1 have been implored to decide problems of
mediaeval architecture, about which I naturally know nothing.
The result is what might be expected. Scores of " expert opinions "
are collected from the wrong persons.
If there is need to-day of real expert opinion anywhere in the
domains of literature and philosophy and history, it is in history.
The nineteenth century was in many respects an age of rapid
progress in historical knowledge. When, at its opening the
Demiourgos of the French Revolution, Napoleon, broke

"the kingdoms old

into another mould,"

there sprang up in each European people a new national conscious-

ness. With that came a zeal for national history, and an interest
in the history of administration, now become a popular possession,
and a lively sense that history deals with the ruled as well as with
the rulers. Now, too, the scepticism of the eighteenth century
matured into the beginnings of a critical method in the hands of
Wolf and Niebuhr; and later on (in I859) Darwin added the idea
of development. Inspired by national enthusiasm and by scientific

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xiv

method, historical studies grew apace. The nineteenth century

was the century not only of Niebuhr (I776-I83I) but of Grote
(I794-I87I) and Ranke (I795-I886) and Buckle (i8zz-6z) and
Treitschke (I834-I896) and Stubbs (I825-I9OI) and many more.
But if it was a historians' age, it was in a special sense an age of
Roman historical studies. In front of all its historians, stands the
historian of Rome, Theodor Mommsen, born in I8I7, dead in I903.
He was the greatest scholar of the European world since the
Renaissance, and his unequalled and amazing achievements stamp
the historical research of the nineteenth century with its peculiar
feature. It is the age when Roman history was newborn. I need
not here enumerate either Mommsen's chief writings or the depart-
ments of Roman history which he wholly changed, or the additions
which he made to the field of knowledge, or the new methods of
enquiry which he introduced. But it is important to realise the
consequences of the vast advance which we owe to him and to his
pupils and followers.
In the first place, there is much more to know: Roman history
in other words, has become more difficult, more full of facts, more
technical. Many things that were more or less vaguely realised
in the days before Mommsen are now accurately understood: many
things that were not dreamt of have been brought within the scope
of the enquirer. This is peculiarly the case with the history of
the Roman Empire. Here the clarification of our knowledge and
the increase in it have alike been enormous. Though Mommsen's
best-known book is a History of the Roman Republic, his life's
work was a vindication of the Roman Empire. Though in his
earlier days he looked on the Republic as the great age of Roman
history, and found in the Empire " wenig Geist, noch weniger
Geschmack und am wenigsten Freude am Leben," and once denied
that it had produced any ruler or statesman who could rightly be
reckoned great, his researches have spread out before us its pre-
eminence. In consequence, those who to-day study the Empire,
have before them a region that is far vaster and far more important
and far better known and far more open to exploration than had
any of their predecessors. This demands much more careful study,
much more accurate thinking. The old looseness of phraseology,
the old indifference to many branches of evidence, the old inaccurate
idea of what' things mattered have now to disappear.
Let me illustrate my meaning, not from abstruse points in the
Roman administrative system, but from an obvious feature in Roman
Britain. Take a Romano-British site like York or Lincoln, which
included both legionary and municipal elements. Sixty or eighty
years ago it did not much matter if the man who described such
a place had any clear conception-as a rule he had none-of what
a Roman legion or a Roman colony was. To-day it matters

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 xv

infinitely. The accounts written, perhaps, by local antiquaries

with real local knowledge but with no expert acquaintance with
Roman history, may and often do contain useful records of dis-
coveries. But judged as accounts of Roman Lincoln or Roman
York they are rubbish. Nor is this true of Britain only: it is just
as much the case in the other Roman provinces and in Italy.
Roman history has become, and is still becoming, a far more
complex subject.
But if the study has grown harder, the rewards for the student
have become immensely more abundant. When Mommsen recon-
stituted Roman historical research, he did not say the last word
on it. In a progressive study, indeed, the last word is never
said. Where knowledge is daily widening, the most scientific
scholar can only say " that which seems good at the moment,"
that which the existing evidence, critically sifted, shows to be the
best available truth. Our progress is not direct from falsehood to
truth, but from the incorrect view to a slightly less incorrect view.
From time to time a positive truth may be reached, but the advance
is seldom so rapid. That process is still going forward. Mommsen
and his pupils have no doubt settled much. But new fields of
work, new methods of enquiry remain for their successors to explore
and to employ. Perhaps there is no branch of study relating to
European man, prehistoric, classical or mediaeval, which offers
such chances at this moment to the properly equipped enquirer
as Roman history.
Let me instance a few of these open roads. Of the narrative
history of the Republic and of the earlier, Julio-Claudian Empire, the
narrative, that is, which rests on literary texts, we probablv know
nearly as much as we are ever likely to know, until some surprising
discovery alters all our horizon. The texts have been reasonably
edited and more than reasonablv studied ; the general features may
be considered as, for the present, fixed; where uncertainties remain,
such as the character of Tiberius, the puzzles are " psychological "
rather than matters of history. Yet even here Mr. Rice Holmes
has shown us, in respect of Caesar's Gallic War, and will, I hope,
soon show us in respect of the " Bellum Civile," that the most
familiar of school-texts can still yield fruits to real industry, scholar.-
ship and criticism. And for the second and following centuries
the fragmentary remains of Roman historical works offer no end
of important and unsolved problems.
The field of non-literary evidence offers a still wider and more
fertile area of virgin soil. That is, indeed, the chief work now to
be done in Roman history, to wring life and blood out of stone.
I noticed the other day a review of the late Prof. Pelham's papers
on Roman history, in which the reviewer contrasted two sections
of the volume. Both sections dealt with the provincial system of

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xvi

the Empire; the one was based on the literary writer Arrian, and
the other on archaeological sources. He concluded with the remark
that a story drawn from " any literary source" has an immense
advantage over one founded on archaeological evidence. " Did
Romano-British antiquities (he wrote) possess even their Arrian as
well as their walls and villas, interest in them would not be so
largely confined to antiquaries." The more I study the ordinarv
written materials, the harder I find it to learn the truth from them,
the more often I feel that the story which they tell is not the story
which is worth telling. I would sacrifice all that tract of Arrian
which Professor Pelham was discussing, for a little appropriate
archaeological evidence. It is no doubt hard to construct a " story "
out of archaeological evidence, but it is certainly possible to construct
history. It is possible to-day to write some sort of history of the
Roman frontier in Scotland, although the facts of that history are
known to us mainly through archaeological evidence: they are
the fruits of the labours of Mr. J. Curle and Mr. George Macdonald
and one or two others during recent years. Without these researches
we should still be struggling with vague Tacitean rhetoric or should
remain the victims of errors into which even Mommsen fell when
he tried to tell the tale of Roman Caledonia and suggested that
Septimius Serverus rebuilt the Wall from Forth to Clyde.
The archaeological evidences to which I am referring are of the
most varied kind. There are, in the first place, the great hosts of
inscriptions which Mommsen began to edit systematically, but
which start from the soil in fresh thousands as each year goes by.
These must be copied, interpreted, edited, and finally studied from
every point of view for the light which they throw on every stratum
of imperial civilisation and government. In this work there is no
need to ask for guides. Mommsen led the way: more recently
scholars like Hirschfeld, Domaszewski, Dessau and Cumont have
shown in their systematic treatises how to use epigraphic evidence
for descriptions of the government of the Empire, its army, its
religious tendencies.
Next there is the study of Roman art and architecture. My
Oxford colleague and friend, Professor Percy Gardner, would
probably say that there never was a Roman art, and, in the artistic
sense, I am free to admit that he is to some extent right. Yet
sculptures such as those of the Trajan column and many more in
Rome and Italy are unquestioned art, and even in the provinces,
Neumagen, Sens, Martres Tolosanes, to name just three sites from
one land, supply provincial carved work which is far more than
merely good decoration. The scholar who cares for artistic criticism
has here plenty to do. The exact meaning of " Graeco-Roman "
art; the Italian, perhaps Etruscan, elements in the sculptures of
imperial Italy, and the reality of the so-called " Flavian " style;

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 xvii

the influences of the East, whether Northern Isauria or any other

district, upon Roman or provincial decoration in the second and
third centuries of our era, are obvious examples of problems which
concern the art of the Empire and which have already elicited acute
and earnest research. There are also native provincial problems,
not least in the western world. To trace in detail the influence
of those " Late Celtic " art-forms which the Romans found in
Gaul and Britain, to appraise the possible influence of Germanic
on Roman ornamentation in the third and fourth centuries, to
account for the inspiration which lies behind the Neumagen reliefs,
to consider the Metz statue of a draped female figure carved in
the district but carved in Pergamene style and explain its presence
in Lorraine, are lines of artistic research which have received
much careful attention and deserve yet further study.
Art and epigraphy are old and familiar subjects for the
Roman historian to embrace. We have now to go further to forms
of archaeology which lack the written element natural to inscriptions
and the language inherent in pictures. The researches of the last
few vears have added fresh value to excavations. They have taught
us that the potsherd and the fibula and the ground-plan of house
or fort are, or soon will be, among the most valuable aids to the
Roman student. Potsherds, when we can date them, and we are
slowly learning how to do this, are as valuable chronological material
as even coins. I will not assert that we can go so far as our
colleagues in Germany seem to think, and distinguish " friih-ves-
pasianisch " from " spat-vespasianisch," the remains of A.D. 70-75
from those of A.D. 75-80; probably we shall never reach that
accuracy in dating. Certainly, a good deal that is now asserted
both in England and abroad about the date of these objects is mere
conjecture, if not positive error. The brutal monochrome of Roman
pottery gives us no such chronological clues as the varied colouring
of modern porcelain. Yet the study of the fashions and ornamenta-
tions of Roman pottery has already taught us some history,
as Roman Caledonia can testify, and we are not yet within sight of
the end.
So too with plans of houses. The traveller to-day who crosses
Europe from Warsaw or Bucharest to Ostend, and watches from
his railway carriage window the types of cottage which distinguish
the lands through which he passes, cannot fail to remark that various
types of house belong to various districts. Similar diversities of
house existed in the ancient Empire and excavation can detect
them, one type in Britain and north-west Gaul, another on the east
bank of the upper Rhine, a third in Africa, and so forth. That
rather disappointing task, which in this country at least is more
often begun than completed, which the historian tends to despise
and the local antiquary, or at least the local newspaper, to overrate,

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xviii

the uncovering of a Roman " villa," will tell us something about

this distribution of house-types, and thence we may gather how
the civilisation of the Roman world was divided, what forms of
development, national or other, prevailed in which regions, and
even, if finds be favourable, the periods when the phase flourished
and decayed. The thing has been hardly attempted yet: it waits
for Roman students to work it out.
This archaeological evidence at present helps principally the
student of the Empire. But the work of Adolf Schulten on the
hills round Numantia shows that archaeology will soon quicken
even the somewhat faded colours of republican history. Later on,
when not Rome only but Italy has been opened to the spade
of the excavator, more still may thus be learnt of the history
of the Republic. I do not, of course, imagine that either for
Republic or for Empire the evidence which I have now in view
will tell us everything or nearly everything. However many " villas "
we dug, I doubt if we should ever deduce from their ruins alone
the legal character of the agrarian system to which they belong.
It must be recognised also that a time may come when this buried
evidence will have been sufficiently explored to have yielded almost
all that it can yield. But that time is far off. There is scope enough
for Roman archaeological studies of this kind during many decades.
Need I ask, what is the use of it all ? 1 do not intend, at the
close even of an inaugural address, to discuss the value of historical
studies. I must leave other lecturers to beat that big drum. This
only will I say, that Roman history seems to me at the present day
the most instructive of all histories. In word, in language and
literature, Xo'T Greek *may be the more modern; in act and
fact, ep7 , Rome stands nearer to us. It provides few direct
parallels or precise precedents; the wise man does not look for
that in history. But it offers stimulating contrasts and comparisons
and those glimpses of the might-have-been which suggest so much
to the intelligent reader. Its republican constitution offers the one
true analogy to the seeming waywardness of our own English con-
stitution. Its imperial system, alike in its differences and simi-
larities, lights up our own Empire, for example in India, at every
turn. The methods by which Rome incorporated and denationalised
and assimilated more than half its wide dominions, and the success
of Rome, unintended perhaps but complete, in spreading its Graeco-
Roman culture over more than a third of Europe and a part of
Africa, concern in many ways our own age and Empire. Another,
and even vaster achievement of Rome may seem to-day less important.
We know that by desperate efforts it stayed for centuries the inrush
of innumerable barbarian tribes and that the pause insured to
European civilisation not only a survival but a triumph over the
invading peoples. We know also, or fancy we know, that our own

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 xix

civilisation is firmly planted in three continents and there is little

to fear from yellow or other peril. Yet if the European nations
fall to destroying each other, such dangers may recur; we have
still to look unto the pit whence we were digged. The
man who studies the Roman frontier system, studies not only a
great work but one which has given us all modern western Europe.
Even the forces which laid the Roman empire low concern the
modern world very nearly, more nearly indeed than do the reasons for
the downfall of any other empire about which we have full knowledge.
To me, of course, the chief of these forces seem to be the secular
assaults of innumerable barbarians, the carnage of uncounted wars,
the plague and desolation which walked in their train, the heavy
taxation and the inhuman savagery which follow upon struggles
prolonged through scores of years, and, if I may add, a very different
detail, the lack of any scientific knowledge which might have furnished
the Roman empire with better weapons than those of its assailants.
But other causes working in the region of internal decay need also
to be examined, even though, as I hold, some of them owe their
origin or their growth to the forces which I have already mentioned.
Such are corruption and incompetence in municipal life, the growth
of a caste system, the more technical evil of an export of bullion
eastwards. Some of these things come very closely home. A little
time ago a carpenter was fitting shelves in my library, and one day,
having noticed the kind of books which I possessed, he brought me
a number of The Clarion in which some contributor had declared
capitalism to be responsible for the fall of the Roman empire and
some other contributor had maintained the opposite view. He
wished me to decide between them. I had to tell him that I
thought both contributors somewhat astray. But I found that
here the problems of our own day lay strikingly near to ancient
Roman controversies.
There remains another aspect of Roman history which closely
touches Englishmen. To the three and a half centuries during
which Rome ruled Britain, we owe that section of our national
antiquities which we style Roman or Romano-British, and which
form, of course, my own pet subject. That is only a part of our
new Society's work. But it is a part which cannot be left out. We
recognise to the full that the Society of Antiquaries of London
is both the traditional and the natural guardian of these antiquities,
but we feel that we too may possibly do something to assist in their
study and perhaps even in their preservation. For this purpose
it is desirable to bring the Universities into closer touch with this
branch of national life. Hitherto, these bodies have paid very
little attention to it. They are antiquarian enough when you ask
them to alter an obsolete custom, but till very lately they have
limited their antiquarianism to themselves. In England at large

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xx

they are still looked upon as taking little interest in local archaeology.
Most people up and down the country suppose that the one source
of what I suppose must be called official knovwledge on British
antiquities, is the British Museum-a museum, by the way, whose
Trustees keep many of those antiquities in dark and inaccessible
cellars. However, the Universities are beginning to change. The
Corbridge excavations have been very largely officered from Oxford
and Cambridge, and I expect that the forthcoming excavations at
Wroxeter will find similar support. Other Universities are be-
stirring themselves: at one, as I am told, a knowledge of Roman
Britain has just been made an alternative for Latin prose-on which
I must make the comment that it is of no use to know about Roman
Britain in particular unless you also know about the Roman empire
in generals It is the more necessary that the Universities should
help bect-use, as I have already remarked, the whole of Roman
archaeology and history has become of late years far more difficult
and technical than it was when most of us began our studies, and
the general knowledge of the Roman empire is therefore more
indispensable than ever to the student of Roman Britain. If our
Society can do anything to bring about a good understanding
between workers in the Universities and workers up and down the
country, we shall not have formed it in vain.

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