BOOKS.
FREEMAN'S HISTORY OF SICILY.*
WE have accidentally delayed noticing the first two volumes of this book, which appeared last year, and now, just after the issue of a third, the work is cut short by the untimely death of Mr. Freeman. Under these conditions, we are naturally less inclined to dwell upon the special merits or defects of the book than to see how it displays the characteristics of its author, and makes us realise what we have lost in him.
In one direction Mr. Freeman may be said to have accom- plished the work of his life. He had been acting as a Historical Professor long before he was appointed to his Oxford professorship. It must be now some five-and-thirty years ago that, in the first days of the Saturday Review, he began the long series of articles in which, there and elsewhere, he set forth by precept and example his idea of the duties of a historian. To these was due in great measure the growth of a schoolof history that has done much to widen the bounds of our knowledge, and has been still more effective in setting
* The History of Sicily, from the Earliest Times. By Edward A. Freeman. Fob. I.-III. Oxford : The Olarendon Press. 1891.92.
up a higher standard of qualification for the writer who under- takes to deal with historical subjects. Any one who compares recent handbooks and popular histories with those which Mr. Freeman in his old days was wont to anatomise and hold up to ridicule, will see how great is the progress. Yet the new school has its weakness. It has not as yet set itself to do work on a large scale. Perhaps when every epoch has its epitome, and a short life has been written of every man of distinction, it will be found that these are but exercises for a longer flight. Meanwhile, we cannot help fearing that the absence of large enterprises is due to a want of courage on the part of our younger scholars. They are more anxious to avoid blunders than to communicate knowledge. On this point Mr. Freeman set them a splendid example. No sooner was his Norman Conquest finished, than he undertook this still larger task. One might have taxed him with audacity in beginning an enterprise of such scope when nearing seventy, and it was fated that he should not advance far in it ; but the rapidity with which the third volume followed the others, showed that his hopes were not in themselves unreasonable.
The subject of this book has a certain defect in central interest,—in being the story of an island, not of a nation. When first we get any certain knowledge of Sicily, we find it inhabited by three races, Sikel, Sikan, and Elymian. None of these attained to a national life ; they were all absorbed in the successive invasions which have from time to time given this land new masters or a fresh organisation. So little trace have they left, that we know not even what tongue was spoken by Sikan. or Elymian ; while even of the Sikels, who held the larger part of the island, we can only say that there is a very strong probability that they used a Latin speech. The unity which the native races failed to reach was not imposed upon them by their conquerors, as in our own country, where Englishman and Dane, welded by the Norman Conquest, took in as a part of themselves what remained of the Britons. Sicily continued to be the place of battle for hostile races ; where the Carthaginians contended first with Greek and th en with Roman; where after the Roman came the Arab, who in turn had to yield to the Norman. To Mr. Freeman this continual shifting made the real unity of the story. It was the land that be cared to tell of, not this or that people. Placed as it is between two continents, a stepping-stone from one to the other, it has been the bone of contention whenever a dominant people on either side of the Mediterranean aimed at enlarging its rule. It is this geographical position that attracted its latest historian, since, while it prevented peaceful development, it made the island the scene of most important struggles in what he likes to call the Eternal Strife,—the contest between East and West, between Aryan and Semite. Whether there is any such Eternal Strife may be doubted. When two races both possessed of the instinct of domination come into con- tact, they are sure to fight ; and when a people of expansive power like the Carthaginians or the Moors occupied North Africa, an invasion of Spain or Sicily was sure to follow. The Roman in his turn invaded Africa, as be would have done had the speech of Carthage been the purest Aryan. It must be allowed, however, that war was fiercer and more decisive, be- cause differences of blood and creed prevented amalgamation. Roman and Carthaginian, Goth and Arab, could not, like Gaul and Frank, end their strife by amity and fusion. This is not enough for Mr. Freeman. The Eternal Strife is (as its name implies) still going on, although perhaps for the moment in a state of suspended animation. Is there not still an Eastern Question, and is not the Turk still an intruder within the bounds of Christendom P This would be a matter of small importance if Mr. Freeman were only justifying his choice of a subject by trying to persuade him- self of its real unity ; but these views seriously affect his method of treatment. To him, the Greek fighting against the Carthaginian is engaged in a crusade or holy war, and against foes who are given over to a foul superstition. We know but little of the religion of the Phoenicians, but it seems not unlikely that the spiritual element in it was more strongly marked than in the Greek mythology. But Mr. Freeman rarely refers to it except as the worship in which children were made to pass through the fire to Moloch; unless when he suggests that the lascivious rites paid to Aphrodite at Naxos were due to an earlier cult of Phcenician Ashtoreth. Uncleanness was not so utterly unknown to the Greek that it is necessary to invent foreign predecessors to account for such impurity. Mr. Freeman even acknowledges that the Greeks cannot be altogether acquitted of human sacrifice ; but that acknowledgment once made, he feels himself free to insist on its prevalence among their foes. So with their political constitution. Here, too, all his interest is with the Greeks. Our sympathies, he says, must be with Athens, which, first of all States, was ruled by an assembly of freemen. Yet we should expect a political student to have some regard for an organisation which was more continuous and stable than that of any Greek city, and which, if it did not attain to pure democracy, gave the people some share in its direction, and had the great merit that it never degenerated into tyranny. A nation can hardly have attained to such civilisation and greatness as Carthage without doing some service to mankind ; and we cannot think that her destruction was an unqualified gain. No inquiry into such questions appears in these volumes, where Carthage appears only as the foe of Europe, the Canaanite who was to be rooted out of the land. Allowance once made for this bias, we can only admire the thoroughness with which Mr. Freeman has done his work. This is specially noticeable in the first two volumes, which deal with the beginnings of Sicilian history. The material for these early periods is scanty, but it is all put to use. Allusions in poetry, fragments of early writers embedded in later compilations, coins, inscriptions, ruins,—whatever may be learned from these has been turned to profit. No doubt the ground had been prepared by earlier workers, English and German, but without undaunted in- dustry the fruit of their labours could not have been gathered so fully. Perhaps mythical and legendary stories are dis- cussed at greater length than is warranted by the knowledge to be gained from them ; we cannot think five-and-twenty pages well bestowed on an inquiry into the existence of the hell of Phalaris, besides a good many devoted to Phalaris himself. But when we come to the really historical period, Mr. Freeman's great powers have full play. He traces the foundation and growth of the Greek colonies in Sicily with such freedom and sureness of hand as come only of a full. mind. One advantage he has in an almost unparalleled degree. It is rare for a historian to know the scene of action as Mr. Freeman knows his Sicily. Repeated visits, he tells us, have made the places of which he speaks as familiar to him as his home, and he notes carefully the physical features that determined the sites of the earliest settlements. These descriptions and the accompanying plans will make the book an indispensable companion to every traveller in Sicily with a care for antiquities. It is not merely in his formal descrip- tion that his local knowledge profits us ; we gain still more when it informs the narrative. Whether he is relating the Carthaginian defeat at Himera, or the later campaign, in which one great city after another fell into the hands of Hannibal, his story gains wonderfully in life and clearness by his familiarity with the scenes of action. Grote, in his descrip- tion of the Athenian invasion, studied the topography carefully, and, as Mr. Freeman says, knew the ground wonderfully well for one who had not seen it. But even in the account of the siege itself, Mr. Freeman's local knowledge tells for something, and it comes into play especially in the story of the attempted retreat of the Athenian-hrray. In this part of the history our author has to go over the same ground with Grote; but there is the difference that Grote is, as it were, a correspondent with the Athenian forces, 'chile Freeman is in Syracuse. Yet they both take much the same view. Grote, with all his favour for the Athenians, could not but recognise the right of self- defence in their adversaries ; while Freeman is only too lenient in his judgment of an enterprise in which the Athenians deserved disgrace by wanton aggression, and invited it by in- competence.
The latter part of the third volume is occupied by the Carthaginian invasion, in which the organising power and foresight of Carthage, and the activity of her General, is strangely contrasted with the divisions and incapacity of the Greeks opposed to her. It is at the very point where the victory of Carthage was rendered more com- plete by the treachery of Dionysius, that the narrative stops. His later and more creditable warfare will not now be told. Were Mr. Freeman still living, we might have been unable to refrain from a grumble at some of his peculiar ways. Ilere, as elsewhere, he sometimes interrupts his story by needless discussion ; he indulges in allusions and illustra-
tions that need a commentator, or uses words, such as "bar- barian," in an improper sense. Remonstrance on such points was of no avail in his lifetime; and now we think of them only to recognise how little they weighed against his splendid achievements. They can take nothing from the regret that we lost him when he had given us only the prelude to his greatest work.
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