The Muses: Clio or History

In this episode of The Maker's Rage Podcast, we follow Clio, the Muse of History, on an extraordinary journey spanning over 2,500 years of historical thought. Beginning with her classical iconography in the works of Cesare Ripa and Vermeer's The Art of Painting, we explore how the Muse of History evolved from a divine patron of memory into a symbol of historical inquiry itself.

From Herodotus and Thucydides, through Xenophon, Polybius, Tacitus, and Plutarch, we trace the birth of historiography as it gradually separates itself from epic poetry and myth. We then examine how Christian providentialism reshaped historical writing during the Middle Ages before the Renaissance restored critical inquiry through figures such as Lorenzo Valla, Machiavelli, and Guicciardini.

The journey continues through the Enlightenment with Voltaire, David Hume, Edward Gibbon, and the nineteenth century's great debates between Ranke, Hegel, Marx, and the architects of national history. Finally, we arrive in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, exploring the Annales School, Marxist history, microhistory, feminism, postcolonialism, postmodernism, and the profound challenges posed by AI, deepfakes, algorithmic bias, and the digital archive.

Along the way we ask enduring questions:

• Can history ever be objective?
• Are historians discoverers of truth or creators of narrative?
• Is history driven by great individuals, material forces, or culture?
• Can artificial intelligence become the next custodian of historical memory?
• And has Clio herself returned—not as a goddess with trumpet and scroll, but as an algorithm interpreting an ocean of data?

Blending mythology, philosophy, art history, literature, and historiography, this episode is both a history of history and a meditation on how every generation rewrites the past in order to understand the present.

Whether you're fascinated by the ancient world, the philosophy of history, or the future of knowledge in the age of AI, this is an exploration of Clio's enduring legacy—and of humanity's endless struggle to distinguish truth from illusion.

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Transcript

Speaker 0:04

Hello, my name's Darren, and welcome to the Maker's Rage Podcast. So continuing the series on the Muses, this time the muse of history, Clio, sometimes referred to as the proclaimer, she's often represented with an open parchment scroll, a book, or a set of tablets, and also a heroic trumpet, as well as a klepsidra or water clock, representing time. In early modern depictions of the muse of history, we don't often see this ancient water clock. Take Cesare Ripa's depiction, as set out in the Iconologia for its published in fifteen ninety three. She's represented as young, of course, like all the muses, and whether seated or standing, composed, though attentive, her posture may even encode a temporal function. When standing, history in action, proclaiming deeds, as the trumpet signifies. When seated, she's history in reflection, inscribing what is already passed for posterity. Ripa's engravings are stylized, classical, as you'd imagine Praxiteles would carve her. Several decades later, Johannes Vermeer in the Art of Painting depicts her quite differently. The art of painting or the allegory of painting is a quiet manifesto disguised as a studio scene, featuring his daughter dressed as Clio. She's shown illuminated by soft daylight posing calmly, crowned with a laurel and holding the trumpet and book, which could be a copy of Herodotus or Thucydides. Also featured is the artist himself painting her portrait. Cleo isn't necessarily the most popular of the muses for visual artists, especially painters, and remember, there is no muse of painting. So why is Vermeer enlisted her to feature in his art of painting? The map of the Dutch Republic behind her might be a clue, still defining itself politically and culturally. Maybe Vermeer is insisting that painting can perform the double function of the history in action is the portrait in progress, the shifting borders of a bourgeoning republic, recorded for all time, not in the closed book which the model holds, but on the large expansive canvas in the Kunsthistorisch Museum in Vienna, which millions flock past each year. Perhaps he's trying to say that in painting nationhood, memory, and art are co produced, and by featuring a young girl who might be his daughter, dressed as Cleo before a map of the Dutch Republic, he wants to align painting not with myth, but with the writing of national history. Then why call it the art of painting if history is the subject, and is Vermeer really co opting Cleo here as his muse of painting? I suppose Cleo isn't the only subject in the painting. The painter is there, the map, and the unfinished portrait in the process of being created. So it's not history but painting itself that's the true subject. Cleo doesn't inspire the artist. She is produced by him. Neither is she proclaiming or recording the past here, but posing silently, and yet the painter needs her. The painter depends upon her presence, for he's fixing something real, as the historian should aspire to do when recording the past. It is the book, or in this case the painting that makes history authoritative, not the muse. And yet Cleo, with a book in one hand and the trumpet in the other, becomes a kind of facilitator of memory and fame, as her name suggests from Cleon, to celebrate, make famous, to proclaim, so that succeeding generations won't forget the events, the deeds, the people inscribed in that book. I suppose therefore Cleo, more than any of her sisters, takes after her mother, memory. That said, like her sisters, Cleo has a tangle of children and lovers, depending on the source. She was the mother of Hyacinth by King Pyrus, with whom Aphrodite made Cleo fall in love, as punishment for Cleo's mocking the goddess's affair with Adonis. Hyacinth was another one of these beautiful youths, beloved of Apollo, and accidentally killed by him when a spear he threw was directed by the jealous Zephyrus towards Hyacinth's head, the distraught Apollo, who never seemed to get his way when it came to matters at the heart, made a hyacinth flower spring from his blood. Among her other sons, depending on the tradition, Hymen or Hymeneus, associated with marriage ceremonies, Rhesus, another Tracian king, who fought on the side of Troy during the Trojan War, and Linus, brother of Orpheus, a master musician as well, and supposed teacher of Heracles, but other traditions have called these last three sons of Calliope, Euterpe, Urania. The only one that's definitively consistently associated with Cleo is Hyacinth. Incidentally, the Hyacinthia which commemorates him was one of the most important Spartan festivals, lasting three days. It involved solemn mourning and fasting for his death, and the celebration of his rebirth and ascent to Olympus as a minor deity. It was so sacred in fact that the Spartans would frequently delay military campaigns or called truces to return home for it. So though Hyacinth's life was short, his Cleos or fame would endure through his mother's influence. Herodotus, who's been called a father of history, and also the father of lies, but I'll get to that, doesn't invoke Cleo at the beginning of his great chronicle on the Persian Wars. The historian doesn't depend upon the kiss of the muse for his materia poetica. He or she isn't singing or rhapsodizing and producing out of airy nothingness, a product of divine inspiration. History is shaped by human inquiry and evidence, and Cleo represents a move away from mythic invocation, which is why Herodotus and later historians never name her. Herodotus is the force to deliberately reject the epic as the proper convention for historical writing. So instead of sing goddess the wrath of Achilles, Herodotus writes Heroditu Alicarnaseos historis apotexis. Herodotus of Halicarnassus sets out his inquiry. The first word he writes is his own name. Homer's name never appears in his works. Nowhere in the Iliad and the Odyssey does the word omoros appear. And you feel even in Herodotus' day, this was reason enough to question whether or not there was indeed a Homer. From the very first word of the histories, by contrast, Herodotus would remove all doubt, and later Thucydides would follow his example. His history of the Peloponnesian Wars opens with Thucydides an Athenian wrote the history of the war between the Peloponnesians and the Athenians, believing that it would be a great war and more worthy of relation than any that had preceded it. So a little bit of the anxiety of influence there, as he clearly intends to outdo his precursor Herodotus. What they both have in common, of course, is that neither of them opens with an invocation, but with authorship and purpoise, and the fact they chose to write in prose, not verse, was another departure. The fact that later Hellenistic commentators chose to name each of the nine books in Herodotus' histories after the nine muses was an editorial choice I doubt Herodotus would have endorsed. Both Herodotus and Thucydides had a methodological aspiration to inquire into human causes. The fact Herodotus' practice tolerates credulity, storytelling, even hearsay to an extent, was critiqued even in antiquity. By Cicero, for example, who charged that Herodotus invented the oracle's secretis, and Plutarch outright attacked him. But we can't blame him for wanting to strike a balance between truth telling and entertainment. The histories is a gripping narrative, it's one of the reasons we still read it after two and a half thousand years. An archaeology has vindicated Herodotus in many instances, for example, the discovery of the Nile Barris ship, which perfectly matched the detailed description given by Herodotus, or confirmation of the Tonis Heraclion's existence, a major Egyptian port which skeptics doubted existed for centuries, until the city was discovered underwater in the year two thousand. I suppose the tradition of calling him both a father of history and a father of lies dramatizes, in a sense, the birth pains of prose historiography, but like pioneers who discovered a new continent, we should perhaps be a little more tolerant of the imperfections in their maps. Antides, who fought in the Peloponnesian War, aspire to be more faithful in describing the events in his history, yet he too has been accused of some fabrication by inventing speeches, for example, that were never spoken, although he said he adhered as closely as possible to the general sense of what was actually said. So if Herodotus risks gullibility by reporting marvels like gold digging ants and flying snakes, guarding spices, Tucydides risks autorial ventriloquism by inventing speeches that were never spoken, such as the famous funeral oration attributed to Pericles. And I suppose these are writerly decisions that complicate our modern ideals of accuracy when it comes to historical reporting. After Herodotus and Thucydides established the genre of history writing, I was gonna call it an art form. After all, this is a series on the muses, but Cleo shares with her sister Urania the curious distinction of having their art forms, history and astronomy transmuted into sciences, into modes of inquiry. Anyway, I was gonna say after Herodotus and Tucydides, I'll be adopting a chronological approach, as I usually do in these episodes, and it's all the more apt in this one. I suppose what I'm doing here is technically historiography, the study of how history is written or has been written throughout history, history per se, being the study of past events, people and societies, focusing mainly on what happened, if you ignore the flying snakes, that is. You can imagine after Herodotus and Thucydides there were a series of lesser imitators of their styles. The first notable historian after them was Xenophon, writing in the late fifth century BCE, although his style is more straightforward and plain than Thucydides, and he lacks the deep philosophical analysis, and is often criticized in fact for his pro Spartan bias. His most famous work, Deanabasis, is about ten thousand Spartan mercenaries who are hired by Cyrus the Younger to help him seize the throne of Persia from his brother Artaxerxes II, and it is a fantastic read. It's technically a nostos, or a tale about heroes trying to get home and suffering all kinds of ordeals along the way, like traipsing through several deserts before finally seeing the familiar, wine dark sea of the Mediterranean, and in unison screaming Talasa, Talasa de sea the sea. A couple of hundred years later, Polybius, another Greek, who was considered the true heir of Thucydides because of his commitment to accuracy, if you ignore the made up speeches, of course, and as Thucydides, who was a soldier and historian, Polybius believed historians should be men of action, soldiers or politicians. He focused more on universal history, how disparate events across the globe connect, and we'll get to how many more recent historians in our day have been bitten by this bug. Sallust in the fourth century BCE and a near contemporary of Julius Caesar, was the first major Roman historian to adopt a Tusitan pessimistic lens. Polybius, who wrote about the rise of the Roman Republic, handed over the baton to Sallust, who used it to diagnose its moral decay. With Livy not long after, the pendulum swung back again towards Herodotus and a more literary approach to history writing, although unlike Herodotus, he didn't shirk away from an epic register, though more the epic style of Homer's Roman counterpart Virgil, who focused more on pietas or duty, and providing examples for Romans to follow than on the Homeric quality of arete, which manifests as physical strength, bravery, and effectiveness in battle. After him, Tacitus, considered the greatest of Roman historians, adopts a dark, incisive, epigrammatic style to expose the corruption and hypocrisy of the Roman emperors. He wrote about the German tribes, the conquest of Britain, and cast a jaundiced eye on Rome itself, writing with characteristic irony, the more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws. Edward Gibbon, who of course we'll come to, considered Tacitus the very model of the philosophic historian. So with this back and forth going on between Greek and Roman historians, each expressing in their own way, their anxiety of influence, and mainly the influence of the forced among them, Herodotus and Thucydides, it's not surprising that eventually an historian would emerge who would draw a direct comparison between Greece and Rome, in doing so to a series of parallel lives, comparing Greeks and Romans of similar destinies. So great generals like Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar, or great orators like Demosthenes and Cicero. Plutarch, who happens to be Greek, and who writes his parallel lives in Greek, I suppose betrays a bias here and there, and that he's very self aware, because he knows that it is people who write histories. In his life of Pericles he writes, It is so hard to find out the truth of anything by looking at the record of the past. The process of time obscures truth of former times, and even contemporaneous writers disguise and twist the truth out of malice or flattery. He might have added that even when they strive after truth, it's near impossible not to betray a bias, even unconsciously, and his quote reveals that, although he's writing biographies, he's doing so within a tradition that started with Herodotus and Thucydides, and his reference to Pericles and to twisting of truth out of malice or flattery is probably a slight jab at Thucydides. Shakespeare mined him for inspiration, and Emerson called the lives a Bible for heroes, and who in his own representative men wrote a kind of latter day Bible of heroes, featuring Shakespeare, Goethe, and indeed Montagna. In it, Emerson writes, It is natural to believe in great men. If the companions of our childhood should turn out to be heroes and their condition regal, it would not surprise us. This is controversial today, of course, when it's more fashionable to say social forces and class warfare, writes history. Let's see how long the fashion lasts. Between Plutarch and Emerson's friend Thomas Carlyle, nearly two thousand years had elapsed, and yet no doubt Plutarch would have agreed wholeheartedly with Carlyle's outrageous assertion that the history of the world is but the biography of great men. I'll of course return to this and interrogate it more properly later on when we get to the twentieth and twenty fourth centuries. So what have we learned as we leave antiquity that ancient historiography oscillates between moral narrative, political analysis, national storytelling, investigative critique and biography? That's pretty much what it is today. By the time we get to the early Middle Ages, or what used to be called the Dark Ages, and for good reason in many respects, history writing goes into a decline, and not in its rhetorical power. There were still great writers in the early Middle Ages who were doing something like history. Part of the problem was that history wasn't recognized as an autonomous scientific discipline. Instead it was typically classified as a branch of grammar or rhetoric. But the biggest problem was that it ceased to be secular. People were no longer trying to capture history as it supposedly happened, but interpreting it from the start as an eschatological unfolding of divine will. And although some writers like Amianus Marcellinus, Zosimus, and Procopius retain secular explanatory frameworks to try and demonstrate that Christian providentialism can coexist with classical habits of history writing, ultimately during a period of time when the Catholic Church was dominant and its power absolute, and the only literate people around were members of that church, priests and monks. Anything resembling history writing inevitably passed through a theological lens. Eusabius of Caesarea, for example, even before the fall of Rome in the fourth century CE, becomes a foundational figure for Christian historiography. In his ecclesiastical history he integrates classical narrative models with a theological vision of time. So events derive meaning not from political causation, but from their place within salvation history, in other words, from creation to the incarnation and ultimately the last judgment. So time becomes linear and teleological. The end is already in mind. In God's mind at least, in the events of history and those of us who participate in them all just tend inevitably, inescapably towards that apocalypse or revelation. During the early and high middle ages, historiographical production increasingly adopts chronicles, annals, and year by year registers, particularly within monastic and ecclesiastical settings, and I suppose we have to give credit where it's due. Chronology, even in this podcast, is a central organizing principle. What it's done best in medieval writing is when events are placed in temporal sequence with minimal rhetorical framing. That said, an historian's interpretation of events is what makes his or her narrative interesting. The venerable Bede in the eighth century CE exemplifies a merger of chronology and moral interpretation, dating events in other words from the incarnation, anno domini, and anchoring universal time to Christian theology, which we still do today, even if some, like myself, have adopted a habit of saying CE common era instead of anno domini AD. It's the exact same dating at the end of the day, even if we don't think or hope it's tending towards some kind of apocalypse. So instead of human causation or agency defining the events of history, it's the unfolding of God's will. Well at least we have a chronology. Well I suppose I shouldn't be so dismissive of a period of time that spanned hundreds of years. The French historian Bernard Guenet famously observed every medievalist today knows that the Middle Ages never existed, and even more so that the spirit of the Middle Ages never existed. Who would think of lumping together the people and instructions of the seventh, eleventh, fourteenth centuries when it comes to periodization? The year ten hundred or thirteen hundred has no more than more or less right than the end of the fifth or the end of the fifteenth century. The truth is that in a complex fabric that is history the changes that occur in each field and at different levels of each field do not coincide. The more general the periodization, the more controversial it turns. So with that proviso in mind, let's turn to the Renaissance. By the way I'm sure you've noticed the muse of history has receded into the background, and could look finding much mention of Cleo during the period we generalize as the Middle Ages, when the church would at minimum have frowned upon anyone turning their mind to these pagan eidolons. And of her emblems the trumpet was certainly decommissioned. You could argue music was decommissioned until the High Middle Ages, except for the DS and the other Gregorian chants and who has them in our playlist these days. But her other emblem, the book was becoming ubiquitous, and with the invention of movable type and a printing press there wasn't just a renaissance in historiography or a reawakening of ancient practices of writing and reading history. Historians like Valla, Machiavelli and Guicciardini were pioneering new methods in philology and linguistic criticism for example. Humanists like Lorenzo Valla revolutionized the study of documents by analyzing the evolution of language. When there are enough documents around for comparison you can come to the realization that language is like Latin change over time. And this allows historians like Valla to detect anachronisms in text and even determine if a particular source is genuine or a fake, such as the donations of Constantine, a fourth century document which was proven by Valla to be a medieval forgery and this caused a bit of an earthquake in the Vatican with significant aftershocks across Europe because the donation of Constantine served as the primary legal and historical foundation for the Catholic George's secular power, territorial ownership and supremacy of Western European monarchs during the Middle Ages. And the consequence? Well it meant that the papacy's direct political rule over all these territories across Europe and its authority to crown of the postsecular monarchs was no longer legally backed. It even opened the door for people like Martin Luther to attack papal legitimacy. Another novel approach to historiography during this period was contextualization, so analyzing ancient texts within their original political, social and cultural contexts, and this was all helped by the ongoing recovery of texts by the likes of Poggio Bracciolini, who travelled across Europe searching monastic libraries for lost manuscripts of classical authors like Cicero, Tacitus, Vitruvius etc, and moreover editing them to create authoritative versions. The most important change though was a return to the secularization of history, so departing from divine providence as the sole driver of events. And it was Machiavelli and Guicciardini among so many others who focused on political realism and the treating of history as a record of human decisions, as well as social and environmental forces. I'm sure you've noticed by the way that a lot of the names mentioned are Italian. There are lots of reasons the Renaissance began in Italy and primarily in Florence during the fourteenth century. There's like a unique convergence of immense wealth and the peninsula having a competitive city state political structure. And of course they had direct access to Roman classical heritage. Bracciolini and others didn't have to travel too far to find many of the ancient texts they were recovering, considering the Italian peninsula was the center of gravity of what was the grandeur that was Rome. And after the fall of Constantinople to the Torques in 1453, Italy was the first stopping point for all those Greek scholars who arrived with Plato and Aristotle under their arms and many other Greek texts lost to Western Europe for centuries and with them perhaps a certain stowaway muse as Cleo is beginning to be referenced again. For example Leonardo Bruni named his history of the Florentine people simply Clio. I already mentioned at the start Cesare Ripa's Iconologia and as the Renaissance moved north she was even invoked by poets like Franco Van Est, who describes her as a Parnassian figure recording the deeds of rulers and protecting them from devouring time or George Peel who invokes Cleo to proclaim with golden trump and pen the happy days of Queen Elizabeth I. In painting Artemisia Gentileschi depicts her following Ripa's instructions, standing front and centre, looking proud, defiant, crowned with laurels and bearing a trumpet and an open book, apparently she originally intended to depict another goddess, fame, with whom Cleo was often conflated. By the time Vermeer depicts her before a great map of the Dutch Republic, she's once again in the periphery, though at least still in the frame, and maybe the comparison of these two paintings only tenuously suggests the changing focus that was happening as their chronology moves into the so called age of reason, a move away from focusing on individual agency, like Machiavelli's princes, an over reliance on classical imitation, even on literary style. In fact history was becoming less rhetorical and more forensic the study of history, all knowledge should be based on evidence, method, verification. Some of this began of course in the Renaissance, but with the success of Galileo Descartes, Newton and the scientific revolution, a more rigorous standard was demanded. A greater skepticism towards even the authority of the ancients, and the comparison of ancients and moderns became a popular polemic in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, typified of course by Jonathan Swift's Battle of the Books and by Charles Perot who wrote Le docte Antiquite dont toute la duree and Egal de Nauge Nefout Point Declare "Learned Antiquity to all its extent was never as bright as our age of enlightenment", and the figures who epitomize this enlightenment approach to history writing Voltaire, Hume, Herder, Gibbon, for sentimental reasons I'll start by giving a shout out to Jean Batista Vico. His cyclical idea of history isn't exactly scientific and will be dismissed by the likes of Volta who will come to he didn't view history as a straight line towards progress, a very enlightenment view, which itself will be critiqued in more recent times, especially the progress part. Vico believed all civilizations passed through a recurring three stage cycle the age of gods, the age of heroes and the age of men, and that significantly when the age of men becomes too rational, cynical or individualistic a steady called the barbarism of reflection, society collapses and returns to the age of the gods, when people interpret the world through religion and myth, and governance is by oracles. But this isn't a total reset but more like a spiral where society restarts with the lessons of the previous cycle. So there is a linear, progressive aspect to it nonetheless. He also said that ancient myths shouldn't be dismissed as primitive nonsense but viewed as poetic wisdom, the only way early humans could organize their reality. What makes him a proto enlightenment historian I guess is that his view of history wasn't providential. God wasn't literally intervening in events. He believed that when humans act out of selfish interests, the underlying structure of society, family, religion, burial naturally guides them toward civilization. And these structures, these aspects of the human world, like laws, languages, myths, could be understood more deeply than the natural world because we created them. The true is precisely what is made he said and while our knowledge of God if exists or nature can never be fully known we can achieve a certain knowledge of history because it is a human construction, a human science and therefore subject to revision. No text that pulpits to be history or contain history writing, even those texts considered sacred, should be exempted from this scrutiny, something Voltaire especially would have insisted upon. The historian Guillaume de Sion writes not only did he reject traditional biographies and accounts that claimed the work of supernatural forces, but he went so far as to suggest that earlier historiography was rife with falsified evidence and required new investigations at the source. His most notable works The Age of Louis XIV 1751, his essay on the customs and the spirit of the nation 1756, in which he broke with the custom of just narrating historical events and instead emphasizing customs, social history and achievements in the arts and sciences. One of his earlier works is History of Charles XII was in fact one of Napoleon's favourite books. Of course he also wrote the article on history in Diderot's Encyclopedi. My chief object he wrote as early as seventeen forty nine is not political or military history, it is the history of the human mind. He was also among the fourth to attempt a history of the world and was among those who helped free historiography from antiquarianism, Eurocentrism, religious intolerance and a concentration on great men. David Hume, more famous as a philosopher and rightly so, was having a similar effect to Voltaire on the study of history in Great Britain. His sixth volume History of England is very likely inspired by Voltaire's works and adopts a similar scope, not just focusing on kings and events, armies, but examining culture, including literature and the sciences. He even wrote a series of biographies of leading scientists, seeing scientists in the context of the times and examining the process of scientific change and how it is a reflection of the society in which these ideas arose. Hume's history of England covers the period between the invasion of Julius Caesar in fifty five BC until the Glorious Revolution in sixteen eighty eight and how much history has happened since sixteen eighty eight, like many historians he shirked commenting on events too close to his own time and he died in August 1776, a year future historians would mark for obvious reasons, I wonder if he passed comment on it whilst on his deathbed and being visited by so many luminaries of the time, including James Boswell, to whom we famously stated that he was no more disturbed by the idea of annihilation than by the thought of not existing before he was born and yet with events going on all around him and across the pond, even he had to admit that history happens everywhere all the time and would continue happening even after his story has ended. As for Voltaire, he died a couple of years later in 1778 and didn't directly comment on the American Revolution, though he, like so many European Enlightenment figures, directly inspired it, and as I mentioned in my episode on the Enlightenment, Thomas Jefferson famously had a bust of Voltaire at his home in Monticello. So towards the end of the eighteenth century writers like Voltaire and Hume decisively severed history from the grip of divine providence it would thereafter and remain a secular instrument for analyzing human nature, society and progress as loaded award as that last one is, but Hume and Volta were both great writers, great stylists who liked the grand sweep of history and making cultural generalizations about certain periods in history and neither had much time for the antiquarians, whom Voltaire mocked as collectors of useless facts, but they're useless until a future historian needs them to support his and history which must be grounded in fact and as Hume insisted, approached empirically, needs the kinds of minds that excavate the past with forensic punctilium as much, if not more than the mere literary stylist, but it's at this fracture point between the ironic, speculative brilliance of the French and Scottish Enlightenment and the dense, documentary scholarship of the antiquarian tradition that Edward Gibbon emerges. In his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, he preserves the Enlightenment's grand narrative ambition while simultaneously anticipating the rigorous source critical standard that would define the professionalization of history in the next century, the nineteenth The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire is a tome or a series of tomes. I once bought the eight volume Folio Society set and barely got through two volumes. Not that it wasn't engaging, I just always got distracted by other works. I did recently complete the audiobook version on Audible though, which was narrated by the very or rotund Charlton Griffin, unlike some readers, I still find it difficult to commit myself exclusively to one large literary enterprise. Churchill for example, wrote in my early life I set out upon Gibbon's decline and fall of the Roman Empire and was immediately dominated both by the story and the style I devoured Gibbon. I rode triumphantly through it from end to end and enjoyed it all. Churchill notably modelled his style after Gibbon and he did win the Nobel Prize, not for peace, but for literature and his account of the Second World War, which I did in fact finish. As mentioned Gibbon was famous not just because of his literary style, but because as he wrote, he always endeavored to draw from the fountain head, that is, from primary sources where possible, and where these eluded him he carefully marked the secondary evidence, on whose fate a passage or a fact were reduced to depend. This insistence upon the importance of primary sources and the relative deficiency of secondary evidence is why many consider him to be one of the first modern historians and why the decline of fall is considered the locus classicus of history writing in the English language. He has had his detractors though, especially among those who believed he blamed the fall of the Roman Empire on the rise of Christianity. In fact he cast a jaundice eye upon all modes of worship equally, and famously noted that the various modes of worship which prevailed in the Roman world were all considered by the people as equally true, by the philosopher as equally false and by the magistrate as equally useful. A hint of Machiavelli's influence perhaps and I'm sure he read the prince and his discourses on Livy, and it can be argued he was following Polybius in diagnosing the real reason for Rome's decline and fall. Polybius claimed that ancient Greece's glory began to wane when it substituted martial discipline with luxuriating and Gibbon noted the same tendencies chipping away at Rome's grandeur long before the rise of Christianity. Still the book was banned for its apparently skating view of the Christian church. It was only taught skating because he treated Christianity as a phenomenon of general history and didn't hold back from criticizing its adherence. Gibbon's critical treatment of Christianity had a significant influence notably on continental Europe. Though his famous translation into French initially met with backlash and Catholic censorship, the Germans were certainly more receptive. Do you feel he was tapping into the Zeitgeist as it were? If Gibbon hadn't written the decline and fall someone else would have, just as many others besides him were beginning to analyze the church as a secular historical phenomenon rather than the product of divine revelation. Friedrich Schleiermacher for example in Germany, the father of modern liberal theology, and shortly after him David Friedrich Strauss, who wrote in his Life of Jesus critically examined the author of the earliest gospel Mark, writing at a time when the disciples have long been accustomed to regard Jesus as a wonder worker, has collected a mass of anecdotes which many are evidently legendary and others are so colored by mythical elements that it is impossible to disentangle the true from the false. The Germans had a bit of an intellectual monopoly in the nineteenth century, which is why the most notable historians after Gibbon were German Leopold von Ranke for example, seventeen ninety five to eighteen eighty six, another who is considered the father of modern history, more so on the continent though, because he famously declared that the true task of the historian is simply to show Vichinist how it actually happened. There was also Barthol Georg Nibur, another pioneer of source criticism who invented the philological critical method, a way of analysing how ancient texts evolved over time, to extract actual history from layer upon layer of myth, and Theodore Monson, the so called master of epigraphy, who organized massive collaborative efforts to catalogue thousands of surviving Roman inscriptions, coins, and legal codes, one of those antiquarians or collectors of useless facts Voltaire would have mocked, Male O de Tai famously exclaimed Woe to the details, when this collector of details would go on to win one of the early Nobel prizes in literature for his own history of Rome. And I suppose I have to mention Hegel and his philosophy of history, certainly not an archivist or collector of facts, but still influential for another one of those grand narrative approaches to history, which he interpreted certainly not as a random sequence of events, but a rational teleological process, in other words, an unfolding of human freedom, spirit, geist, however you want to translate that word, through a dialectical process or an ongoing dialogue between different opposing ideas or narratives or ways of looking at and interpreting the world, which always inevitably reconcile, synthesize towards a goal, a finish line, the end of history I guess, the new Jerusalem, and his contemporaries and those who came after him certainly had strong opinions, most notably Karl Marx. Hegel's influence on nineteenth century thought was profound and transformative, but it can be argued that it was those who reacted negatively against him who had the most lasting impact, as Marx, who like Hegel, viewed history as a directional, progressive process driven by a dialectic, but where Hegel argued history is driven by the evolution of abstract ideas and consciousness or geist, Marx took Hegel's Geist or spirit and bottled it, made of it something perceptible and real. It wasn't ideas that drove history, with material, economic conditions and class struggle. According to Hegel, the role of the historian or philosopher of history is interpretive to look back and understand history after it has occurred. For Marx, the role is transformative, to actively change the world True political action and revolution. They are both teleological in that they have a goal in mind, an end goal, and Hegel's is absolute spirit, whatever that means, a state of perfect self awareness and rational freedom. For Marx, it is a classless communist society, in other words the end of exploitation and alienation, for as long as there are people who own the means of production and those who do the labour, there must in the latter be a tendency to revolt. Workers of the world unite until they achieve a state of affairs where all workers are equal, but some workers more equal than others. We return to Marx when we get to the twentieth and twenty fourth centuries. His ideas are very much alive and well, even at this very moment in twenty twenty six. Besides the purveyors of grand narratives with capital letters like Hegel and Marx. Other notable historians in the nineteenth century were becoming architects of national identity and public myth. The nineteenth century was after all a century of revolutions, of wars of independence and national unification, which resulted in the founding of the German and Italian states. There were the revolutions in eighteen forty eight, of course, the year Karl Marx published the Communist Manifesto. Was it a spark or a symptom? Well it was published when the so called Spring of Nations was already breaking out across Europe, so perhaps more the latter. But the result of these series of upheavals was a tendency among some historians like Jules Michelet, writing romantic nationalist histories of their people, in his case of course the French people, and departing somewhat in their writing from the more rigorous standards being set a generation earlier. This was an historian with a political agenda, the fact that he abhorred the Middle Ages and celebrated our end as a radical transformation, and attempted to clarify how a lively Renaissance could originate from an ossified culture proved influential. He associated Renaissance, of course, with revolution, and his history of France in fact culminates with the outbreak of revolution in seventeen eighty nine. Jacob Burkhart was another who disdained the so called Middle Ages. He claimed the Italian Renaissance was the birthplace of quote unquote modern man, where distinct self aware individuals emerged to shape their own destinies, but whereas Michelet's gaze was patriotic, focusing mainly on France, Burkhart's gaze was pan European and cultural, looking at the fraught, though lively disunity of the Italian city states during the Renaissance as typifying what was happening in Europe in the nineteenth century. There were other teleologues of course like Marx and Hegel who had a linear, optimistic view of the progress of history, Auguste Comte, who influenced Marx, perhaps again negatively, who argued that ideas and the evolution of human intelligence drive history, aiming for social order managed by scientific elites, and Thomas Babbington Macaulay's Whig interpretation. He crafts a dramatic narrative of English history viewed as an inevitable progressive march towards greater constitutional liberty, Protestant enlightenment, and imperial stability. But all this optimism was beginning to sour at the end of the nineteenth century and the turn of the twentieth century, when broad civic nationalism decayed in a sense, into an aggressive, exclusive chauvinism, and imperial rivalries and competitive arms races shattered the illusion of inevitable progress, and of course that culminated in a total devastation of World War I, and all these great men of history writing and their grand narratives failed to explain the systemic global catastrophe that was the Great War, failed to explain it or to predict it. Although Marx probably would have taken credit for predicting the Russian Revolution, but that was more a self fulfilling prophecy. Marx predicted it would happen first in an advanced capitalist nation like Germany or Great Britain. Instead it happened in Imperial Russia, a largely agrarian economically backward empire, and if the revolution succeeded, it wasn't because Marx's quote unquote laws of history played out naturally, but because key historical actors like Lenin and Stalin and others believed so fiercely in his writings that they forced reality to bend to his texts. And if historiographers or philosophers of history wanted their discipline to aspire to the condition of science, it had to do a better job at predicting things. And though some may say history repeats itself, and others say it doesn't, but it rhymes, science demands a far more rigorous standard than mere rhyme. So in the early twentieth century, historians shifted focus away from grand narratives and grand predictions to analyzing deep structures and social forces, material conditions and longer term processes that don't inform on future events, but allow for a more considered interpretation of what has already happened. And in the first decades of the twentieth century, I suppose if the muse of history was deigning to bestow her reflators on anyone, they were likely to be found in France. The Annal School, founded in the nineteen twenties and thirties, completely revolutionized the field of historiography. Key figures in the so called force generation were Mark Blosh and Lucien Febre. They championed focusing less on political, diplomatic or military histories, or the biographies of so called great men, and focusing more on social history and very long term trends, and ensuring they have enough by way of number and statistics to justify their long term claims. There was also an interdisciplinary synthesis and less focus on great events and chronologies. History was to be written now at a consideration of geography, sociology, and even psychology, and not that of the individual, but of collective mindsets, and not in the Jungian sense, but more simply the intellectual worldview of the common people, what the analysts called Mentalite. Later figures like Fernand Brodell would go forward and consider deep material and environmental structures over even vaster stretches of time, subordinating human agency to the environment and geography, famously declaring that deep history is slow, almost motionless, and this would later shift towards microhistory and the history of the everyday or everyday life. I'm sure Volta would have called them the school of antiquarians, collectors of useless facts, but Brodel's repost would have been that Voltaire focused on surface politics, battles and great events, and the individual choices of great men. These Brodel would say are just flashes of light, mere crests of foam on the waves of time. Considering the long dura, the deep, almost motionless history of climate, ecology, soil and geography that silently constrains human possibility, these flashes of light fade to insignificance. And yet as interesting as deep history is and long duray, I can't help but think of what the poet Terence said Homo sumani nihilami alianamuto. I am a human being. I consider nothing human to be indifferent to me, even if the universe happens not to care. And twentieth century Marxist historiographers perhaps took this into account by humanizing to an extent the Marxist paradigm that history unfolds as a result of rigid economic determinism. Eric Hobsbawm, for example, famous for his tetralogy of works about what he called the long nineteenth century, the age of revolution, of capital, the age of empire. And he also wrote of the quote unquote short twentieth century, or the age of extremes, or perhaps it may have seemed short, because everything was moving faster. Anyway, he also wrote of invented traditions, the idea that certain cultural practices haven't existed since time immemorial, or originated with some shadowy group of prehistoric forebears who handed these practices down and began a continuous unbroken tradition down to the present. He argues that many are in fact relatively recent and often consciously invented by historical actors. He says this phenomenon is particularly clear in the modern conception of the nation and of nationalism. Another British historian and contemporary of Hobsbawm, although he didn't live nearly as long, was E. P. Thompson. In his landmark 1963 book, The Making of the English Working Class, he argued that class is not a rigid economic structure but a cultural and historical relationship that people actively form through shared experiences, traditions and consciousness. So unlike Hobsbawm, who focused more on the overarching mechanics of society, Thompson prioritized human agency, focusing on the lived culture of artisans and ordinary workers. Like Hobsbawm though, Thompson was a foundational British Marxist historian, and both were members of the Communist Party historian group, but the fact they differed so significantly in their historical methodologies and their political responses to the Soviet Union is perhaps a lesson to those inclined more towards the right of the political spectrum, not to paint all left wingers with the same brush. In Eric Hobbsbaum, despite being a member of the Communist Party, signed letters of protest against Soviet actions in Hungary and later supported a Prague Spring. While the debate between Eric Hobbsbaum and EP Thompson marked a kind of fracturing point of social history's reliance on sweeping unified frameworks like those of the nineteenth century, Hobbsbaum's mapping of the vast macroeconomic gears of global capitalism was in stark contrast to Thompson's championing of the collective cultural agency of the English working class, but both still operated within a shared master narrative, the Marxist narrative that history possessed a coherent direction driven primarily by class relations and material structures. However, from the nineteen sixties and into the final decades of the twentieth century, more fractures and even breaking points emerged. History, historiography was moving consciously away from universalizing theories and towards an explosion of plural, reflexive, and deeply skeptical methodologies. Historians increasingly argue that the grand narratives of white, western, class bound history had ignored the vast majority of human experience. In this new era, and we are still living in its aftershocks, the focus shifted from unified socioeconomic structures to the fragmented realms of culture, identity, marginality, and representation. History therefore became explicitly plural, highly self reflexive, and aggressively interdisciplinary. So scholars began borrowing tools from literary criticism, anthropology, and sociology, even physics, frustratingly enough, to investigate how power operates not just in factories or parliaments, but in language, daily habits, and cultural identities. So historians began abandoning the idea that culture was a merely passive superstructure determined by an economic base, instead being heavily influenced by the interpretive anthropology of Clifford Geertz, for example, and of disciplines like semiotics or theory of science, of linguistics and literary theory, they began to treat culture as an active web of meaning that shapes reality itself. So instead of counting grain prices or voting patterns as some of the analysts would have done, historians began decoding the symbolic language of the past. So a carnival, a witch trial, a coronation, or colonial census could be read as a dense cultural script, revealing how a society imagined authority, gender, religion, violence, community, and social order. And because interpretations of these quote unquote texts change over time, meaning was no longer seen as fixed, but constantly constructed and contested. And as grand sweeping histories lost their dominance, Italian and American scholars developed the idea of microhistory to look at the past through a microscope as it were, were mentioned American and Italians, among them Carlo Ginsborg, Natalie Zeman Davis, and Giovanni Levy, whose method involved the intensive reduction of the scale of observation, so instead of focusing on long term structural trends, as if you recall another analyst Fernand Brodel would have insisted with his concept of the Long Dur, microhistorians focused on small scale, deeply specific cases, a single village, a bizarre trial, or some obscure individual, that left behind exceptionally rich archival footprints. They argued that analysing a small fracture in detail could reveal hidden truths about the larger social, religious and legal macro structures that standard histories overlooked. Again, it was another attempt to reduce the scale and rescue individual agency and the messy reality of lived experience from the flattening effect of statistical long term trends. For example, Carlo Ginsburg in his nineteen seventy six work The Cheese and the Worms studies the inquisition trials of a sixteenth century miller named Menocchio, who believed the world created itself out of chaos, just as worms emerge from cheese. Ginsburg illuminated the vibrant, independent world of popular peasant culture and its friction with elite religious authority. Concurrently, there was the rise of second wave feminism, which forced a radical reevaluation of whose stories were deemed worthy of historical record. This was more than what the first wave was attempting to do, simply adding women back into the narrative. Cultural theorists like Joan Scott, for example, argued that male and female was a power relation rather than a biological fact, and this way of signifying relationships of power became a crucial analytic tool for decoding politics, labour, and state craft. Consequently, historians began demonstrating how power operates through social constructs of masculinity and femininity. Political systems, warfare, and economic structures were then shown to be deeply dependent on maintaining rigid gender hierarchies, and thus everything from the Agricultural Revolution, the Renaissance, and the Industrial Revolution were interpreted as mere periods of progress for men which often coincided with the systematic loss of women's rights. The second wave feminist critique of so-called patriarchy and the systemic exclusion of women from historical narratives gave postcolonial historians a light bulb moment when they adapted this critical lens to analyze imperialism. And by the way, at the intersection of this there was postcolonial feminism or Toward War feminism, but I'm not going down that rabbit hole. Postcolonial history was most heavily influenced certainly by Edward Saeed's Orientalism in 1978, but also Ranajit Guha and the South Asian subaltern studies collective, and whereas second wave feminist history sought to dismantle the patriarchal monopoly on historical truth, postcolonial history sought to dismantle its Western monopoly. So Eurocentrism was critiqued and the ingrained assumption that Europe was the main actor in world history and that all other nations were merely catching up to Western modernity. These historians also targeted the biases of the imperial archive, because colonial archives were written by the conquerors. Postcolonial scholars pioneered techniques to read against the grain as it were, to recover the voices of the colonized, enslaved and illiterate. And so the history of empire was reframed, showing that identities, both of the colonizer and the colonized, were forged through complex, messy and ongoing dynamics of cultural hybridity, of subtle resistance and collaboration. Second wave feminism and postcolonialism are just two of the isms that contributed to the theoretical upheaval of the late twentieth century, which culminated in a profound epistemological crisis. Eventually, tinkers such as Hayden White and Michel Foucault turned the analytical lens onto the historians themselves, questioning the very possibility of historical objectivity. Hayden White, for example, in his Meta History nineteen seventy three, argued that history is fundamentally a literary act. He asserted that past events do not inherently possess a story, so we might as well take the story out of history, and the second way feminists would say take the his out of it as well. So what do historians, or whatever we're gonna call them now, actually do? They impose, according to Hayden White, poetic and narrative structures onto raw data to create meaning. Meanwhile, Michel Foucault argued that knowledge and power are inseparable. He demonstrated that historical categories, institutional archives, and definitions of quote unquote truth or quote unquote madness are not neutral reflections of reality, but tools used by institutions to control and discipline human bodies and societies, and archives were no longer viewed as pristine treasure troves, but as highly political gatekeepers, what was saved, what was destroyed, and how documents were categorized were all recognised as expressions of historical power. And what of Cleo, this singular, authoritative muse of history who subsumes and personifies her great subject? Well, she's nowhere to be seen, of course, and perhaps the second wave feminists would say they've liberated her from her epistemological prison or something. And that more generally, the theoretical upheaval of the late twentieth century I referenced earlier, liberated the subject of history itself from the tyranny of the single authoritative voice. We're well into the twenty fourth century at this stage of twenty twenty six, and I don't envy future historians having to interpret our age of digital chaos, of fake news and deep fakes. What would be their primary sources? Wikipedia, YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, X? How will they possibly determine what actually happened? As for historians today, they're no longer just archival scholars, they're data analysts, public arbiters of truth with a small t, and more certainly participants in culture wars. And yet the culture wars and political factionalism can make us forget that we live in a time when more information is readily available to the vast suede of humanity than in all of history or prehistory for that matter. Matter, since history means inquiry or knowledge obtained by inquiry, and it seems we've only been doing it for a few thousand years. But despite the digital revolution making global archives instantly accessible and digital repositories collapsing geographical barriers, enabling transnational research at unprecedented speed, to whom should we give the keys? Or should we decide there are no keys, no locks, no custodians? What we call historical knowledge may be more readily available than ever, was this doesn't make it more reliable than ever. The more abundant the archive, the more unstable, manipulable, and where computational methods exist like text mining, GIS mapping and network analysis, allowing not just historians but anyone to process millions of documents, and where machine learning can detect linguistic, cultural, and ideological shifts across centuries, whom can we trust to inquire into all this and give us the story, the history? And even if this philosopher saint had no political agenda, how do we know they'd be immune to algorithmic bias? For every algorithm shapes what we see, and if humans are prone to seeing virgin Marys in misshapen potatoes, or some mythical hero in a local asterism, can we really trust historians today to have that analytical detachment that preserves credibility and methodological rigor? Or will they see in the mass of data only what they want to see, what confirms their own biases, like the scholar activist who argues that historical scholarship must actively dismantle injustice, whatever it manifests in the world, even if it's already happened, for this is an opportunity to correct past injustice, to rewrite history, and ensure the just and correct version is taught to young children and college students? Or maybe we shouldn't trust these scholar activists to interpret a past or present, but let the data speak for itself. The data doesn't care about our ideology. What if historical knowledge can be grounded in measurable patterns, structural forces and only verifiable evidence? Ironically enough, in this landscape, Clio can make a reappearance, at least etymologically. Clio metrics, a word coined by the economist Stanley Writer, is the systematic application of economic theory, mathematical modelling, and statistical techniques to the study of history. And the idea is that this data driven approach will complement rather than replace the traditional textual approaches. Cleo's name being there in words like Cleometrics and Cleodynamics should remind us not to reduce the past to numbers and risk flattening human agency and emotion, even if these methods are seductive precisely because they offer structure, regularity, and verifiable signals, especially at a time when it's becoming increasingly difficult to verify if an Instagram post is real or AI. And what was Cleo's ancient mandate, even if Herodotus never invoked her, to set out an inquiry, distinguish truth from illusion, and record it faithfully? Or what happens when we lose faith in our ability to distinguish truth from illusion, and we no longer trust our interpreters to record what happened faithfully? I know I said I'd be following a chronological approach in this podcast, but I'm tempted to go back to Jean Baptiste Vico, who, if you remember, had a cyclical view of history, beginning with the age of gods, of myth and poetic imagination, followed by the age of heroes, when history is the biography of great men. Then comes the age of reason, philosophy, and universal human rights, what he denotes the age of men. But Vico warned that the age of men, despite its intellectual and democratic triumphs, harbors the seeds of its own destruction for when societies organize themselves too much on abstractions and ideologies, instead of community bonds, what results is the erosion of social trust, and the people become deeply cynical, fragmented. And when a civilization loses its fate in its ability to sustain itself, even to govern itself, according to Vico, a brutal collapse or recorso is triggered. The civilization effectively self destructs and is forced to reset, to restart an evolutionary spiral, returning to a new age of the gods. And what would that look like in the West? We start believing in the gods of Olympus again, and in the muses, and Cleo, the Muse of History, this time embodied as an AI powered algorithm, or emblems, not a book and trumpet, but perhaps a quantum archive cube and a temporal pulse emitter. So thanks for listening and waiting on this one. I knew the history episode of the Muses would be a difficult one. Certainly one of the more time-consuming ones as far as research is concerned. And there's still some big ones in this muses series to go. I'm gonna take a break for a couple of episodes though, and do something a little different, featuring my favorite American poet and the greatest American poet in my opinion, Emily Dickinson. And I promise you won't be waiting three and a half months. Bye-bye.