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Updated: June 1, 2025
For if I had not known the Roman kings by heart, it would subsequently have been quite indifferent to me whether Niebuhr had proved or had not proved that they never really existed. . . . But oh! the trouble I had at school with the endless dates. And with arithmetic it was still worse.
Carsten Niebuhr was the first to make and bring to Europe an exact and complete copy of inscriptions at Persepolis in an unknown character. Many attempts had been made to explain them, but all had been vain, until in 1802 Grotefend, the learned Hanoverian philologist, succeeded, by an inspiration of genius, in solving the mystery in which they were enveloped.
Constitutional questions, in which Livy is singularly ill informed, are hinted at, but generally in so cursory and unintelligent a way, that it needs a Niebuhr to elicit their meaning. Conformably with his promise at the outset he traces with much more effect the gradually increasing moral decadence.
The view of the mosque given by d'Ohsson, in his valuable work, is tolerably correct, except that the Kaaba is too large in proportion to the rest of the building. The view of the town of Mekka, on the contrary, is very unfaithful. That in Niebuhr, which was copied from an ancient Arabic drawing, is less accurate than d'Ohsson's.
Niebuhr requires you to believe that some of the greatest men in Rome were burned alive in the Circus; that this event was commemorated by an inscription on a monument, one half of which is sill in existence; but that no Roman historian knew anything about it; and that all tradition of the event was lost, though the memory of anterior events much less important has reached our time.
What is it which makes us love them still; find, even at times against our consciences, new meaning, new beauty in them; and brings home the story of Perseas or of Hercules, alike to the practised reason of Niebuhr, and the untutored instincts of Niebuhr's little child, for whom he threw them into simplest forms?
"The Parthians had been barbarians; they had ruled over a nation far more civilized than themselves, and had oppressed them and their religion." Niebuhr, Lectures on Roman History, vol. iii. p. 270.
Countess Gisela Niebuhr sat in the long dusk of Munich staring over at the beautiful park that in happier days had been famous in the world as the Englischer Garten, and deliberately recalled on what might be the last night of her life the successive causes that had led to her profound dissatisfaction with her country as a woman.
Names are there of undoubted splendor, a splendor, indeed, far more glowing than that of any subsequent monarch of the bays; but the legal title to the garland falls so far short of satisfactory demonstration, as to oblige us to dismiss the first seven Laureates with a dash of that ruthless criticism with which Niebuhr, the regicide, dispatched the seven kings of Rome.
We have been reading with profound interest the life and letters of one of the great men of Germany, Barthold Niebuhr, published very recently in an English garb.
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