Isaac Newton: Historian

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Isaac Newton H istorian

Isaac Newton Historian

FRANK E. MANUEL

THE BELKNAP PRESS OF HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS Cambridge, Massachusetts 19 6 3

© Copyright 1963 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College All rights reserved O Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 63-10869 O Printed in the United States of America

ONULP

FRANCES

AND

PAUL

Preface I first encountered Newton’s historical writings in 1957 while working on eighteenth-century theories of myth and primitive re¬ ligion. Though intervals have been occupied by other studies, his manuscripts have been with me ever since. The day has come to call a halt. Archaeologists have sometimes reserved an unexcavated portion of their site for future diggers. With the same humane regard for the rights of posterity, I have refrained from sifting every cubic centimeter of soil. Much remains to be done: a professional historian of astronomy may find profit in analyzing the variant manuscript computations for the proofs of Newton’s new system of chronology; a student of ancient Egypt might conceivably be intrigued enough by the consecutive folios on the Egyptian Empire to edit them as reflecting the state of Egyptology in England at the turn of the seventeenth century; the codicil to the will of Newton’s vivacious niece Catherine Conduitt, that his “church history compleat” be published, has not yet been executed. The study of Newton’s historical writings requires no apology. Though they cannot in good faith be recommended for their liveli¬ ness to a reader of the second half of the twentieth century, they are significant revelations of Newton’s own culture and of the intellectu¬ al climate in which his genius flourished. There has been a long tradition of studies in the metaphysics of Isaac Newton: from Richard Bentley’s sermons through Samuel Clarke’s letters to Leib¬ niz, from Madame du Chatelet and Voltaire through E. A. Burtt, Helene Metzger, Markus Fierz, and Alexandre Koyre, remarkable reconstructions of his philosophical and religious views have been achieved. This book has little to add to the discussions of these eminent commentators, though it makes bold to assert that Newton was probably a better historian than metaphysician. And those who are in quest of Newton and his God will probably find a more au¬ thentic record of their relationship in the hundreds of manuscript vn

PREFACE folios on history, chronology, and interpretation of prophecy than in the scholia and queries appended to the later editions of his scien¬ tific writings. It is conceivable that, by a happy inversion of eight¬ eenth-century procedure, Newton’s circumstantial description of God’s way in the historical world of men, to which this work is de¬ voted, might shed some light upon the avowedly more intricate and nobler problems of the Newtonian philosophy, a system which had to be fashioned with only meager assistance from its great author. Scholar's in many fields have been generous with suggestions and information on specific points. I wish to express my gratitude to Paul Baran, Frederick E. Brasch, I. Bernard Cohen, Henry Guerlac, Peter Laslett, Abraham Maslow, Harry S. May, A. N. L. Munby, Lionel Pearson, Giorgio de Santillana, Meyer Schapiro, Jonathan Schwartz, Isadore Twersky, Lancelot L. Whyte, and Harry A. Wolfson. To Professors David S. Berkowitz and William D. Stahlman I owe especial gratitude for their advice at an early stage of my work and their perceptive reading of the proofs. Miss Elma Leavis typed the manuscript with her renowned skill in decipherment, and Mrs. Barbara Sessions assisted valuably with the checking. The keepers of Newton’s manuscripts in King’s College, Trinity College, and the University Library in Cambridge, the Babson Institute Library in Wellesley, the Pierpont Morgan Library, New York, the Bodleian Library in Oxford, the Royal Mint, and the British Museum opened their collections, extended special privileges, and expeditiously provided microfilms, photostats, and reproductions. Keepers of man¬ uscripts in the Bibliotheque Nationale, the Institut de France, and the Bibliotheque de l’Observatoire have been invariably helpful. Librarians in Berkeley, Budapest, Leningrad, London, Paris, Stan¬ ford, and Venice have clarified moot points and graciously made their resources available. My debt to the Boston Athenaeum and the Harvard College Library, where most of my work is done, is a con¬ tinuing one. During its final stages this book was aided by a grant from the American Council of Learned Societies. Last but by no means least, my hearty thanks go to the Director and staff of the Center for Ad¬ vanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, where this preface is written. F.E.M. viii

Contents Introduction: The Diversions of Genius I. Academic Piracy: A Narrative History of the Short Chronicle 11. III.

VI.

37

The False Chronologists Routed

50

78

Israel Vindicated

89

VIII. The Growth of Great Kingdoms

X.

65

The Primitive Sphere of the Argonauts

VII. The Pragmatization of Ancient Myth

IX.

21

The Learning of a Christian Chronologist

IV. A Demonstration of Astronomical Dating V.

1

103 122

History Sacred and Profane Connected

139

The Battle of the Dates: A Posthumous Relation

166

APPENDICES

A. A Summation of the New System of Chronology

195

B.

The Original of Monarchies

198

Bibliography

225

Notes

251

Index of Names

313

Illustrations facing page 1.

2.

3.

Isaac Newton. Mezzotint by John Simon, 1723, after a painting by Sir James Thornhill From the Stanford University Library

4

Draft of a letter concerning Newton’s candidacy for a seat in Par¬ liament, with marginal and interlinear historical notes Bodleian Library, Oxford, MS. New College 361, II, fol. 34ar

5

Isaac Newton. Engraving by George Vertue, 1726, of a painting by John Vanderbank, 1725 From the Stanford University Library

36

4.

Nicholas Freret. Engraving after a portrait by La Tour From the Bibliotheque Nationale

5.

Map of the southern celestial hemisphere, from Hevelius’ Prodromus astronomiae (1690), used in Newton’s system of astro¬ nomical dating From the Houghton Library, Harvard

6.

A random leaf, apparently from Newton’s youth, on the historical origins of the signs of the zodiac Bodleian Library, Oxford, MS. New College 361, II, fol. 217r

7.

Opening page of “The Original of Monarchies” King’s College Library, Cambridge, Keynes MS. 146, fol. 1

8.

Complimentary letter in Latin to Newton bordered by his auto¬ graph notes on ancient history Bodleian Library, Oxford, MS. New College 361, II, fol. 92r

9. 10.

11.

12.

Sketches by Newton of devices for medals Newton MSS, The Royal Mint Newton’s autograph addendum to page 382 of the Optics (2nd ed., 1717), on the precepts of Noah and their relation to Greek philos¬ ophy Babson Institute of Business Administration, Newton Collec¬ tion, No. 133 Drawing by Newton of the ground plan of the Temple of Solomon, in his MS “Prolegomena ad Lexici Prophetici partem secundam” Babson Institute of Business Administration, Newton Collec¬ tion, No. 434 A page from Newton’s MS “Prophecies. The Language of the Prophets,” interpreting the historical meaning of the “three woes” of the Apocalypse King’s College Library, Cambridge, Keynes MS. 5, fol. 130

37

68

69 100

101 116

117

148

149

1

Isaac Newton H istorian

INTRODUCTION

The D iversions of Genius

W

HILE of late years there has been some scholarly in¬ terest in the writings of Isaac Newton on economics, alchemy, prophecy, and theology, the voluminous manuscripts which he left on these subjects have by no means been investigated with any thoroughness.1 The historical works culminating in the post¬ humously published The Chronology of Ancient Kingdoms Amended (1728) have received even shorter shrift in studies on Newton de¬ spite the fact that they had become the chief preoccupation of the octogenarian scientist in the final period of his life and the cause of a major imbroglio among erudits on both sides of the Channel.2 In addition to the great mathematical and physical syntheses upon which Newton’s fame rests secure, rival inquiries always en¬ gaged him. There is a curious letter to Robert Hooke in which he treated natural philosophy as a diversion from scholarship, though the weight of this ambiguous and sometimes supercilious note of 1679 in which he virtually rejected science should not be exagger¬ ated.3 A world geography amended 4 was published in his youth and stood him in good stead in his later chronological researches; experiments to lay bare the ultimate unity of the chemical elements were conducted in the Cambridge laboratory whose fires he stoked himself; in a theology, kept secret, he tackled the awesome problems of the Trinity; he devised a universal language, a draft of which has only recently been analyzed.5 Newton’s historical writings, com¬ prising an interpretation of mythology, a theory of Egyptian hiero¬ glyphs, a radical revision of ancient chronology founded upon as¬ tronomical proof, an independent reading of the sense of the Bible, and circumstantial demonstrations of the fulfillment of prophecy in the historical world, represent another facet of the genius who in his long life fully discharged the obligation of man as it was set forth in 1

ISAAC NEWTON, HISTORIAN Sir Thomas Browne’s Religio Medici, published within a few months of Newton’s birth /^The World was made to be inhabited by Beasts, but studied and contemplated by Man: ’tis the Debt of our Beason we owe unto God, and the homage we pay for not being Beasts. . . . The Wisdom of God receives small honour from those vulgar Heads that rudely stare about, and with a gross rusticity admire His works: those highly magnifie Him, whose judicious inquiry into His Acts, and deliberate research into His Creatures, return the duty of a devout and learned admiration.” The existence of Newton’s manuscripts on mythology and theology was known to his Scottish friends David Gregory and Archi¬ bald Pitcairne at least as early as 1694-95.7 The Conway Letters show that Newton was discussing the Prophetic Books with the Platonist Henry More in 1680, and the bulk of the correspondence with John Locke in the nineties is concerned with the meaning of sacred texts and early Church history.8 At the time of the Sotheby sale of Newton’s papers from the Portsmouth Collection in 1936, lots totaling close to 200,000 words were described as relating directly to chronology,9 as distinct from what were called the theological writings, which amounted to more than a million.10 Most of these are now dispersed in various hands throughout the world, though a substantial portion, perhaps the better half, acquired by Lord Keynes, was presented to King’s College Library, Cambridge.11 In addition to manuscripts salvaged from the Portsmouth Collection, there are four volumes, about a thousand folios, chiefly on chronology and theology, which the Ekins family gave to New College, Oxford. The history of these manuscripts prior to their donation has been set forth by Sir David Brewster in his Memoirs of the Life, Writ¬ ings, and Discoveries of Sir Isaac Newton and will not bear repeti¬ tion.12 Today King’s College, Cambridge, owns a greater number of manuscripts on ecclesiastical history and Church doctrine; the Bodleian, acting as repository for New College, is richer in chro¬ nology and ancient history. These major collections by no means exhaust the manuscripts in which there are passages of greater or less length treating of ancient history, Church controversies, and the history of science. Lord Macclesfield may well have papers dealing with prophecy in his carefully guarded collection at Shirburn Castle;13 the Babsons 2

INTRODUCTION

bought a good number of pieces for the Sir Isaac Newton Library in Wellesley, Massachusetts; there are a few items at Stanford Uni¬ versity; the Cambridge University Library in England has the last of many versions of the Chronology and sections of what became the Observations upon the Prophecies in elegantly bound red morocco; and finally, the papers relating to Newton’s activities at the Mint, which found their way back to the Mint after the Sotheby sale and were meticulously catalogued by Sir John Craig, include numerous notes for the historical works intermingled with records of the plate that was being melted into the coin of the realm. In fact, after an examination of the Newton manuscripts one quickly reaches the conclusion that any watertight division of the papers by sub¬ ject matter is virtually impossible. There is no knowing when com¬ putations of the location of the equinoctial and solstitial colures on the “primitive sphere,” crucial for the Chronology, will turn up among papers for the Optics, or when commentaries on the Apoca¬ lypse will appear among the records of ingots at the Mint.14 That Newton devoted a vast portion of his time to historical studies the sheer bulk of the manuscripts he left behind is incontest¬ able evidence. Though the memoir which John Conduitt prepared for Fontenelle in October 1727 calls these works a divertissement of his leisure hours and Newton’s formal statement before the Royal Society supports him, the passion with which he defended his chronological system in his last years belies this impression.15 New¬ ton’s own testimony about his works cannot always be accepted at face value. Over the past two hundred and fifty years Newton’s manuscripts on chronology and theology have been approached in a wide variety of ways. Ecclesiastical friends, like John Craig the mathematician and Prebendary of Salisbury, were eager to have them published immediately in order to demonstrate what a devout Christian the eminent scientist was. In answer to a request from John Conduitt, the husband of Newton’s niece, for personal recollections of Newton, Craig dwelt upon the merits of the manuscripts and the unifying religious purpose of all his labors. “But it is proper to acquaint you that his great application in his inquirys into Nature did not make him unmindfull of the great Author of Nature; they were little ac¬ quainted with him who imagine that he was so intent upon his studys 3

ISAAC NEWTON, HISTORIAN of Geometry & Philosophy as to neglect that of Religion and other things subservient to it. . . . And Sr Is: Newton to make his in¬ quiries into Christian Religion the more successful had read the ancient writers and Ecclesiastical Historians with great exactness, & had drawn up in writing great collections out of both; &, to show how earnest he was in Religion, he had written a long explication of remarkable parts of the old & new Testaments, while his understand¬ ing was in its greatest perfection, lest the infidells might pretend that his applying himself to the study of Religion was the effect of Dotage. . . . Rut now its hoped that the worthy and ingenious Mr. Conduit will take care that they be published that the world may see that Sr I: Newton was as good a Christian as he was a Mathe¬ matician and Philosopher.” 16 Scientific colleagues in the Royal Society were less enthusiastic. One of Newton’s executors, Thomas Pellet, who wrote “Not fit to be printed” on the cover of Newton’s commonplace book — now in King’s College, Cambridge — would have preferred to see the 4000odd folios of manuscript consigned to oblivion in the hope of pre¬ serving the reputation of the genius from any blemish.17 The papers were as annoying to “enlightened” Englishmen as Pascal’s Pensees were to deistic Frenchmen. Other friends — or former friends — like William Whiston were keen to have them published because of the opportunity it would offer to excel in demolishing them. Bishop Horsley, editor of Newton’s complete works, and like-minded mid¬ eighteenth-century Anglicans, when they came to examine the papers, were abashed to learn that this overtly loyal member of the Establishment who had been buried with great ceremony in a state funeral had been a crypto-Unitarian; consequently Horsley limited himself to republishing the manuscripts already in print, correcting errors in the footnotes wherever possible, and he left the rest of Newton’s nonscientific writings alone. From correspondence in the Bodleian it appears certain that the Bishop had at least perused all of the chronological and historical papers in the possession of Mr. Jeffrey Ekins, who had inherited them from Lady Lymington, and that he had kept them for an unconscionable length of time. On numerous occasions he wrote reassuring Mr. Ekins that he would publish nothing without express permission.18 Since Bishop Horsley could find no one capable of copying the manuscripts, he undertook 4

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Draft of a letter concerning Newton’s candidacy for a seat in Parliament, with mar¬ ginal and interlinear historical notes (MS. New College 361, II, fol. 34ar)

INTRODUCTION the task himself, and the New College papers now include tran¬ scripts in Horsley’s hand of three letters on the corruptions of Scrip¬ ture, though there is no copy of the history of the monarchy of Egypt which he is supposed to have made at the same time. Of the three letters — a Unitarian polemic based on a study of texts — Bishop Horsley printed the first two, which were already available in another version, and suppressed the third. It has only recently been published in the Royal Society’s remarkable edition of Newton’s correspondence.19 While the first two letters might still pretend to be historical inquiries without doctrinal significance, the same could not conceivably be said about the third. Anglican reluctance to propa¬ gate such flagrant heresies about the Trinity under Newton’s name is comprehensible enough. Conversely, Unitarians in both old and New England have been glad to reveal as many of his theological frag¬ ments as possible, bolstering their faith with the testimony of his adherence.20 In the eighteenth century there were unsuccessful attempts by a number of prominent scholars to consult the historical and theologi¬ cal manuscripts. The editor of Newton’s collected works in a Latin edition (1744), Giovanni Francesco Salvemini di Castillione, wrote to the secretary of the Royal Society inquiring into the whereabouts of Newton’s “Dictionarium Biblicum.” Edward Gibbon vainly sought access to the papers on the Athanasian Fathers as serious works of historical analysis when he was writing the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.21 The French astronomers Marquis de Laplace and Jean-Baptiste Biot, sound scientific positivists, took a dim view of these writings as dangerous to the cause of science, and they first spread the rumor that the works were not the creations of the real Newton but the aberrations of a sick man who had suffered a complete breakdown in late 1693.22 Sir David Brewster, Newton’s first great nineteenthQgjj^uj-y biographer, combatted their malicious hypothesis, examined the theology most seriously, and in the tradition of the ecclesiastical friends of the previous century used it as an important witness to the truth of Christianity. Brewster reproduced excerpts from the manu¬ scripts as appendices, but he somehow managed to conceal the full implications of Newton’s Unitarianism both from himself and from his readers. 5

ISAAC NEWTON, HISTORIAN In the latter part of the nineteenth century, when English positivist science was in full triumph, the “school” was ashamed of these lucubrations from the pen of its greatest genius, and while the scientific manuscripts in the Portsmouth Collection deposited at Cambridge were available for study, the materials on chronology and theology were restricted by the family that owned them. The report of a Cambridge group headed by H. R. Luard which catalogued the manuscripts for the Portsmouth family was almost contemptuous of anything not directly related to Newton’s major scientific discover¬ ies. “The Historical and Theological manuscripts cannot be con¬ sidered of any great value. . . . Much is written out as if prepared for the press, much apparently from the mere love of writing. His power of writing a beautiful hand was evidently a snare to him. And his fastidiousness as to the expression of what he wrote comes out very curiously in these papers; thus there are six drafts of the scheme for founding the Royal Society, seven drafts of his remarks on the chronology published under his name at Paris (which made him very angry), many of the Observations on the Prophecies. . . . The four elaborately bound volumes, containing ‘the Chronology of Ancient Kingdoms Amended,’ the Chronicle to the Conquest of Persia by Alexander, Observations on the Prophecies, and the trea¬ tise ‘De Mundi Systemate,’ are very remarkable specimens of their author’s care in writing out his works, and of his beautiful hand¬ writing.” 23 Thus although the contents of the papers left by Isaac Newton have been generally known for some time to modern investigators, they were usually avoided as heretical, nonsensical, or “mysti¬ cal,” the dark side of the hero. This attitude persisted well into the twentieth century. A learned book on religion and science in the seventeenth century has identified Newton as the last of the Chris¬ tian virtuosi, totally neglecting the chronology and emphasizing only those aspects of his religious outlook which were a bridge to simple eighteenth-century rationalism. Among modern psychologists and sociologists there has been much clucking of tongues over the theologico-historical works. Lombroso 24 and Pareto 25 joined those who chanted madness, and Ernest Jones, in his memorial lecture on Freud, singled out Newton as a case study of the strange inter¬ mingling of skepticism and credulousness often found in great men.26 6

INTRODUCTION Dean More was one of the first to comprehend Newton’s theology, but his disproof of the chronology seems naive and beside the point. In recent years, as the intimate relationship between science and theology in the crucial formative period of modern science has come to be appreciated, it has been easier to reconcile the multifarious activities of Newton’s life, and there has been a tendency to regard all his works as inspired by the same profound religious sentiment, a position set forth by Professors Burtt and Brett, by Helene Metzger, by Koyre, and with impish fantasy by Lord Keynes. “Why do I call him a magician?” he wrote in an imaginative tour de force prepared for the tercentenary celebration of Newton’s birth. “Because he looked on the whole universe and all that is in it as a riddle, as a secret which could be read by applying pure thought to certain evidence, certain mythic clues which God had left about the world to allow a sort of philosopher’s treasure hunt to the esoteric brotherhood. He believed that these clues were to be found partly in the evidence of the heavens and in the constitution of the elements . . . but also partly in certain papers and traditions handed down by the brethren in an unbroken chain back to the original cryptic revelation in Babylonia.” 27 Vavilov, the Russian biographer of Newton, took a similar view. “Newton doubtless envisaged the whole of his scien¬ tific work from a religious viewpoint. Both of his major works, the Principia and the Optics, have religious endings which are written with extraordinary pathos.” 28 Professor Marjorie Nicolson has gone so far as to suggest that “Newton would have preferred the proud title 'theologian’ to that of either philosopher’ or 'scientist.’ ”29 It was never easy to smoke Newton out on the subject of God. “I was with him in the year 1720,” William Stukeley reported in a letter to Dr. Richard Mead, “when he sat for his picture to Sir G. Kneller. Was pleased to hear Sir G. in his wild way of discourse sifting Sir I about his notions of religion, with what caution and modesty he was answered.” 30 Newton was a man of many secrets. Some had profound psychic roots. Others were prudent secrets: it surely would not do for the world to know that the Master of the Mint was a Unitarian, or that he dabbled in alchemy. In the same year, 1707, two of his proteges overstepped the permissible re¬ ligious bounds of their society and were severely punished. Fatio de Duillier was pilloried as secretary of a millenarian group from

7

ISAAC NEWTON, HISTORIAN the south of France that prophesied the destruction of London, and William Whiston renounced the Trinity in St. Paul’s Cathedral, a proclamation of Arianism that ultimately led to his dismissal from the University. A gentlemanly infidelity, a mocking spirit of dis¬ belief, coffee-house atheism, were not dangerous; indifference in matters of religion and foppish jests were tolerated, but not religious extravagance or advertised anti-Trinitarianism. Newton never ut¬ tered a word in public about the incidents involving his young friends. Despite difficulties in comprehending Newton’s various religious expressions — and many of them were not philosophically felicitous — some things can be vouchsafed: he never upheld a simple mech¬ anistic view of the universe, nor was he a partisan of plain deistic natural religion.31 And nothing could be further from the truth than Boswell’s report of a Johnsonian remark, “Sir Isaac Newton set out an infidel, and came to be a very firm believer.” 32 He was always a firm believer in the Christian God. It may seem wicked to quote the devil on the God of Isaac Newton when there are so many pious bishops to bear witness, but Voltaire’s report, after conversations with Samuel Clarke, has the virtues of clarity and brevity: “Sir Isaac Newton was firmly persuaded of the Existence of a God; by which he understood not only an infinite, omnipotent, and creating being, but moreover a Master who has made a Relation between himself and his Creatures.” 33 Newton was deeply committed to every word of his well-known letters to Bentley of 1692-93. Creation was a specific act in time by a Lord, even though the process of His labors may perhaps have been more complex than the popular impression of the Mosaic account in Genesis might indicate — as in the “con¬ jecture” on the history of the world he described for Burnet. The planets had to be distributed in a certain manner by an initial act before the principle of gravity could become operative. Comets were phenomena in whose progress God had to intervene from time to time, and in 1680 the world came pretty close to destruction. A re-peopling of the earth after major geological catastrophes — and there may have been such incidents in the past — required a divine decree.34 And as the world had a beginning there was likely to be an apocalyptic end. Every discovery of a scientific principle of matter, every correct reading of a prophetic text, demonstrated the 8

INTRODUCTION essential goodness and orderliness of the universe which God had created — and what higher praise could be uttered by the religious philosopher, be he Maimonides or Isaac Newton — but this did not signify that He was an absconding Deity. Newton’s secret Unitarianism was an intense passion, not a pallid religious formula of the later Enlightenment. My reading of the historical works sustains the image of a tradi¬ tionalist Newton, despite his heterodox views on the Trinity. Since the documents show that explication of prophecy and chronological researches in the service of religion ran parallel with his studies of natural philosophy throughout his life, from his student years at Cambridge to the day of his death, it is not warrantable to dis¬ tinguish sharply between the more philosophical religious ideas embedded in the scientific works of his prime and what have some¬ times been dismissed as the religious tracts of his old age. To appreciate fully the emotional quality of the scholia and queries introduced into his great scientific treatises the historical manu¬ scripts must be seriously examined in all their prolixity. For Newton the most compelling proofs of the intimacy of God’s relations with His creatures were to be discovered in history, not in “theology” and “vain philosophy.” Religious truth was determined by the accuracy of prophetic transmission, not by the metaphysical argu¬ ments which Newton left to Samuel Clarke to develop in the corre¬ spondence with Leibniz. If Richard Bentley found material for his sermons against atheism in Newton’s scientific achievements, nothing could “rejoice” him more. But the real evidences of Christianity, for Newton as for divines and Fathers of the Church extending back before Augustine, were historical: the narration of true events, wit¬ nessed, and the demonstration of true prophecy. This religious and secular history of the world, an apology conceived in the grand dimensions of the City of God, Newton wrote himself, with his own hand; he did not leave it to others. The new scientific spirit pervaded Newton’s most recondite an¬ tiquarian investigations. He was diligent, he read prodigiously, and he employed a comparative method of analyzing disparate texts. Quotations from authority were almost always accurate, and he in¬ sisted upon multiple proofs for a new proposition. There was a criti¬ cal attitude toward sources and a strongly realistic tone: measure9

ISAAC NEWTON, HISTORIAN ments of time and space reported in a wide variety of data had to be reduced to commonsense English terms to bear credence. The mysterious and the occult were for him evil conceptions, or at least so he said. He was always unmasking falsifiers; fanciful allegorical interpretations of myth in the Renaissance tradition were brushed aside; his exegesis of the Bible was literal. Newton’s deductions pointed out discrepancies in documents and judged according to the rules of evidence with a rationalist skill worthy of the Talmudic rabbis. The habits of the Master of the Mint and the physicist are not absent in the Bible commentator and the chronologist. Newton’s historical studies were always aimed at reducing events, persons, and objects which were by tradition surrounded with a vague mystical aura to matters of fact, preferably to mathematical terms. He had precious little interest in historical character or moti¬ vation. To know a quantity and an exact date was one of the ultimate goals of his realistic history. In the end his passion for factual detail shriveled the past to a chronological table and a list of place names. His history was sparse; specific as a businessman’s ledger, it allowed for no adornments, no excess. It had the precisianism of the Puritan and his moral absolutism; existence was stripped to a bony frame¬ work. The world had been full of deceivers — the lying chronologists, ancient and modern, and the fraudulent Athanasian Church Fathers. In separating the true from the false in myth, in the Gospel, in Greek and Roman historians, Newton was performing God’s work. But when this scientific character has been drawn, one again turns the coin on the other side. The belief in prophecy as a hieroglyph which contained within it all future historical truth, his theory of the analogy between the world physical described in a prophetic image and the world of political history, his elaborated correspond¬ ences between the earthly details of the Holy Temple in Jerusalem and the Heavenly City of the future, and his faith in miracles (though not recent ones) 35 are religious convictions which, though still held by many of his learned contemporaries, had already been abandoned by the more skeptical. There is even an anecdote — un¬ corroborated to be sure — to the effect that Newton’s friends were worried lest he be infected by the prophets of the Cevennes.36 Newton does not always fit neatly into the common intellectual categories of his age. While he insisted upon the absolute truth of

10

INTRODUCTION the prophetic word, this did not exclude his independent right to interpret the texts according to the light of reason. Israel was exalted as the chosen people of God not only for the propagation of the truth about religion, but also for the invention of the first arts and sciences; and all other ancient peoples were mere imitators of the Hebrews. Newton was scornful of the careless use of ancient texts by others, was always seeking out “corruptions”; and yet he identified the sphere of Eudoxus with a sphere which Chiron the Centaur purportedly prepared for the Argonautic expedition, largely on the basis of a phrase in a lost Greek poet quoted by Clement of Alexan¬ dria. His etymologies dependent upon vague auditory similarities were no worse, but also no better, than the run of productions in this pseudo science.37 Newton clung to the four monarchies of Daniel as the framework of world history for more than a century after it had been summarily rejected by Jean Bodin in his Methodus ad facilem historiarum cognitionem. That Newton suffered a temporary breakdown of sorts in 1693 is now well documented, but this was not a crucial turning point in his life: his earlier behavior as reported by his servant and his assistant was also at times “distracted,” and in later years he seems to have conducted the affairs both of the Mint and of the Royal Society with complete competence.38 It is not likely that analysis of his personality can infuse new meaning into his chronological and theological writings. When all the data are assembled we might hastily conclude that he was obsessive, compulsive, paranoid, and a structure builder — perhaps the most magnificent of all time. His father died before he was born, he loved his mother, and he had no heterosexual love relationships to our knowledge (though a Mrs. Vincent of Grantham once told his friend Stukeley that Newton wanted to marry her) ,39 but such facts do not cast a great light on the darkness.40 The works of his unfathomable genius are perhaps more amenable to broad historical than to psychological inquiry. The learned questions of ancient history which preoccupied him were significant to contemporaries and were neither extravagant nor eccentric if judged by the standard of the age. Absorption in Biblical exegesis was widespread among scientists physical and human — Robert Boyle is an illustrious example from one group, Dr. Locke from the other. Because our experience has moved in a

11

ISAAC NEWTON, HISTORIAN different direction, the idea of correspondences between the world physical and the world political in prophetic language or between an earthly temple and the heavenly city is more difficult to assimi¬ late, but we can at least imagine that a human mind might not regard these prophetic correspondences as any more esoteric than mathematical symbols. Newton was, moreover, at great trouble to prove through the historical record that the particular relationships he perceived in prophetic texts were constant, that they applied at all times in the same manner, that they were not fortuitous. That the man who insisted in every major work, “Hypotheses non fingo,” should allow himself wild conjectures in historical research is not against nature. One discerns in Newton a denial, a censor¬ ship, a repression if you like, of his flights of imagination and re¬ ligious visions. And so he did what other men do. He wrote them out, secreted them, and on occasion even mocked them. He was nonetheless psychically committed to them even when they were disparaged: on this there is evidence from his ambivalent attitude toward alchemy, from a playful reference to his “mystical fancies” about prophecy in a letter to Locke, from his devotion to the chrono¬ logical studies which he casually belittled. Among the manuscripts acquired by Lord Keynes at the Sotheby sale and presented to King’s College Library in Cambridge is a nearly complete autograph fragment of twenty-six folios entitled “The Original of Monarchies,” which deals with the same general subjects as the published Chronology—the foundation of the ancient kingdoms and a rectified chronology, and, peripherally, the nature of mythology and the origin of pagan religion. While parts of this fragment were paraphrased or repeated in the later treatise, and in one respect it could be considered a preparatory draft for a work similar to the Chronology, it has an individual quality and stands in its own right, for it sets forth Newton’s theory on the beginnings, growth, and consolidation of ancient empires in a manner not found in any of his printed historical writings. Though the initial purpose of the present study was the publication of this Cambridge fragment, the text was so closely related to the Chronology itself that it seemed opportune, after an examination of Newton’s papers and an investigation of Continental sources, to

12

INTRODUCTION disentangle the intricate record of events surrounding the appear¬ ance of the final work. Furthermore, an exploration of the New College manuscripts in Oxford cast a completely new light on the scope of Newton’s historical researches. As my inquiry progressed it became evident that neither the Chronology nor the fragments were understandable unless they were set against the background of those scholarly controversies on mythography and the concordance of sacred and profane history which were intellectual passions of the age. Though any subject he touched upon bore the unique imprint of his genius, Newton’s historical method was characteristic of a substantial body of late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century thought. If his ideas are juxtaposed with those of his contemporaries Nicolas Freret, the Abbe Antoine Banier, Samuel Shuckford, Humphrey Prideaux, William Whiston, and their lesser colleagues, a whole school of learning which has often been dismissed as a mere curiosity of literature assumes fresh meaning. Since polemics about world chronology were still absorbing scholars when the problem attracted Newton’s interest, his work invites comparison with the numerous rival systems which had been elaborated since Joseph Scaliger’s De emendatione temporum. Newton’s revolutionary system of astro¬ nomical dating has not been elucidated by a historian, even though it was ardently discussed for a century after his death. It also seemed necessary to relate Newton’s chronology with his interpreta¬ tion of prophecy and to show that these were but two aspects of a unified world view. (A simultaneous interest in chronology and prophecy was not peculiar to Newton, as the works of Bishop Ussher amply testify.) Finally, a rehearsal of the great eighteenthcentury debate occasioned by Newton’s ‘new system of chronology” appeared worthwhile, though the reader will be spared, insofar as such scholarship permits, the details of turgid disputations which accumulated mountains of learned error on both sides of the Channel. The title Isaac Newton, Historian may require explanation. The historical works are broadly defined in this book to encompass writ¬ ings which others have classified as theology. They include the Abstract of Chronology (the only work published in Newton’s life¬ time, though without his consent) and The Chronology of Ancient Kingdoms Amended (1728), “The Original of Monarchies,” here

13

ISAAC NEWTON, HISTORIAN published for the first time, and the extensive New College manu¬ scripts which complement it, the “Dissertation upon the Sacred Cubit of the Jews,” which was translated from Latin and first pub¬ lished by Thomas Birch in 1737 as an addendum to The Miscel¬ laneous Works of John Greaves, and a fragment on the calendar of the ancients, now in the British Museum, parts of which were repro¬ duced in the Gentlemans Magazine for 1755 and by Edleston in 1850, as well as stray manuscript drafts on the Temple of Solomon, on Judaic institutions, and on Church doctrine, in various university and private collections, particularly those in King’s College and the Babson Institute, Wellesley. An Historical Account of Two Notable Corruptions of Scripture (1754) has been treated here as Church history with a polemical thrust, as have the “Paradoxical Questions Concerning the Morals and Actions of Athanasius and his Followers,” printed fully by McLachlan (1950), and the “Irenicum or Ecclesiastical Polity Tending to Peace,” Appendix XXIX of the second volume of Brewster’s biography. A somewhat unortho¬ dox inclusion of the Observations upon the Prophecies of Daniel and the Apocalypse (1733) and a long manuscript on the language of prophecy will be justified in the course of the argument. Lastly, there are reported conversations with friends and disciples on the early history of mankind, particularly in Newton’s final years, which serve to round out his vision of the historical world. A few words about the New College manuscripts, the most important source for an understanding of the Chronology. John Conduitt was evidently not satisfied with the summary verdict of Thomas Pellet — “loose and foul” — who in a few days had examined the thousands of manuscript folios on history and chronology which Newton left behind. There was one parcel of papers of about seventy consecutive folios, now among the New College manu¬ scripts, entitled “Original of the Kingdome of Egypt. Chap II,” which Conduitt found particularly attractive when he studied them in May 1729. After he had outlined these papers folio by folio he appended an analysis of arguments for and against their publica¬ tion: “It does not appear, that Sr. Isaac ever finished this his work on the Origin of kingdoms — But in his Chronology, (which book he prepared for the press towards the conclusion of his life) several passages are inserted, copied with but small alterations from this 14

INTRODUCTION his former work on the Origin of Kingdomes [these last words are crossed out]. Such being the case, it is submitted to the proper judges, whether or no it would be proper that these papers should be published. Against their publication it may be said: That several passages of them are already printed (& perhaps more correctly) in the Chronology. That these papers, particularly the first sheet & Sheet & an half, are very imperfect. For their publication it may be said That tho’ several passages of them are inserted in the Chronol¬ ogy, yet there are several others, which perhaps have never been published. That however imperfect some of these papers may be, yet certainly they must contain something valuable to the publick, being the works of Sir Isaac Newton. The whole 2d chapter seems complete which will fill above 113 pages in 4to if printed in the same letter with the Chronology. . . .”41 The general confusion of the New College manuscripts is not easy to describe. Sometimes Newton wrote from left to right, then turned the page and wrote from top to bottom over the same sheet. The chance juxtaposition of ideas is delightfully surrealistic: on a receipt of two pounds two shillings dated January 31, 1721, “towards the Relief of Poor Proseleytes, for the Year 1722,” there is a compu¬ tation of the year of the return of the Heraclidae. Stray notes for the Principia collide with reckonings of the precession, lists of kings of Israel, summonses to meetings at the Mint, drafts of letters to eminent scientists, chits addressed to himself on his chances of reelection to Parliament (a coldly objective calculation of how the votes are turning), lists of books, letters begging for charity. The subjects run into each other, and one must be wary lest Chiron the Centaur appear as a worker at the Mint for whom a raise (delayed sixty years) is being requested by the new Master. The matters treated in the “Original of Monarchies” manu¬ scripts in Oxford and Cambridge do not differ substantially. Among the New College papers one can find batches of folios with titles such as “Chronologia veterum Graecorum & Latinorum emendata,” “Of the Times before the Assyrian Empire,” “Of the Ancient Phoe¬ nicians & their Colonies in Egypt and Greece,” “Of the Monarchy of Egypt,” “Of the Empire of the Medes,” “Of the Chronology of the first ages.” Many of them are labeled “Chapter I,” as is the Cambridge manuscript of “The Original of Monarchies”; others have chapter 15

i

ISAAC NEWTON, HISTORIAN numbers that run as high as IV. The folios in both Oxford and Cam¬ bridge clearly indicate that Newton was for many years planning some long, coordinated work on ancient history; he was not merely compiling stray notes on various subjects, practicing penmanship as Luard facetiously suggested, else why the numerical chapter headings in his manuscripts? If the work had ever been completed it would have contained long digressions on those aspects of the ancient world that were of special interest to him: the history and transformation of the ancient calendar, the history of astronomy, the history of ancient chronologists and the source of their errors which he was rectifying, the foundation of cities and their growth into empires, the origins of idolatry, the history of the discovery of the first arts and sciences. It seems likely that at one stage Newton contemplated an overall title such as “The Original of Monarchies,” or “The Origin of Kingdoms” — there is a brief note in David Greg¬ ory’s “Memoranda of May 5, 6, 7, 1694” which reads, “He has composed a tract on the origin of nations.”42 The narrower title, The Chronology of Ancient Kingdoms Amended, was probably suggested by the controversy over the Abstract of Chronology. A Newton manuscript now in the University Library, Cambridge, once bore the heading “The Chronology of Ancient Kingdoms Ex¬ amined.” The contradictions of fact and interpretation among the Abstract, or Short Chronicle, the greater Chronology, and the various Cambridge and Oxford manuscripts are too numerous to dwell upon (I leave to future generations the Herculean task of preparing a variorum edition); since these papers were written at different periods in his life he changed his opinions on the detail of many subjects — though never on the fundamental revision of world chronology. It is difficult to know exactly when Newton first embarked upon his studies of ancient chronology. A notebook now in the Morgan Library in New York includes a number of pages on the ecclesiasti¬ cal calendar which have been dated a year or two before 1662, about the time he first arrived in Cambridge.43 There is minor evi¬ dence of his very early interest in the origin of the signs of the zodiac and in ancient astronomers — he was at least acquainted with the name of Eudoxus — from a fragment among the New Col¬ lege manuscripts scrawled in the same clumsy hand as a boyish 16

INTRODUCTION university declamation on “Henricus Sextus” now in the Babson Institute, Wellesley.44 Abraham Hill tells us that Isaac Barrow, the mathematician and divine who held the Lucasian Chair at Cam¬ bridge before Newton, was also interested in chronology, and New¬ ton may have been smitten by the same morbus chronologicus,45 The manuscripts cannot be dated with accuracy; at best there is a terminus a quo for notes Newton wrote on the backs of correspond¬ ence which he had received, a parsimonious habit.46 There is a reasonable temptation to accept the dates on these letters as an indication of the approximate period when Newton composed his drafts, though a rigid observance of the canon would constrain one to admit that he might have kept stray sheets of paper around for decades, using them for notes as occasion might arise. The same holds true for undated letters whose general period can be estimated from Newton’s shifting London addresses. While some of the hand¬ writing of his early and his very last years seems easy to distinguish, the determination of dates from the middle period of his life on this basis is extremely hazardous. Neither do internal stylistic differences lend much aid and comfort. The papermarks, too, are of little help, for the London, Amsterdam, and French papers he used were on the market for a long time. For example, the watermark in New College MSS, II, fol. 82, can be identified only as that of an Amster¬ dam paper current in the first quarter of the eighteenth century.47 One early manuscript on the uses of the precession for chronology seems to date itself — “and now in ye year 1680” (New College MSS III, fol. 252v); a number of others refer to 1696, 1700, and 1720. Any refined chronological arrangement of the manuscripts would be no more than a surmise, and in the end of dubious value. Suffice it as proof of a continuing interest that the first three volumes of the New College manuscripts include specimens of handwriting from nearly every period. During the last three decades of Newton’s life a dated letter addressed to him, with his historical or chrono¬ logical notes crammed into its unused spaces, can be found for almost every year. While the final version of the Chronology is a work of Newton’s old age, the views expressed in it are not those of his dotage nor are they the consequence of his psychic malaise in 1693. Newton’s worldly advancement and his increased interest in 17

ISAAC NEWTON, HISTORIAN chronology, theology, and Church history coincided. The advent of a new royal house which he supported made him a prominent figure, and though his sinecure was somewhat delayed, this does not alter the fact that after the Convention Parliament the im¬ pecunious boy from Grantham (extant bits of a letter from his mother and a note from his sister Hannah, when seen in manuscript, testify to his humble origins) was on easy terms with great and fashionable men of the realm — with Samuel Pepys, who could write to him about mathematical problems relating to games of chance and about financial speculations discussed in the coffee¬ houses; with Princess Caroline herself, who consulted him about the education of her children and allowed Leibniz and him (with Samuel Clarke as intermediary) to battle for her philosophicoreligious soul; with Montague and Somers and the Monmouths; with many Anglican bishops. One can hardly deny that there is a touch of the social parvenu in his conduct toward the elegant cosmo¬ politan aristocrat, the Venetian abate Antonio Conti. But while Newton left his Cambridge cell to become a man of affairs in his outer life, in his inner life he remained a man of learning, concen¬ trating more and more on history and chronology as a revelation of the divine intent. In defining his own role in the world Newton was ambiguous. While he sometimes considered himself an innovator, a discoverer of the historical principles of the physical universe, and fought ruthlessly for his rights of priority against usurpers, at other times he expressed himself as if there had been ancients, not only Moses but also Greek mathematicians like Apollonius, or the wise men Thoth and Pythagoras, who had arrived at some of the same principles in another form. Moderns were rediscovering what had once been known in antiquity and had thereafter been forgotten — the traditionalist manner of explaining apparent novelty.48 Read in context, Newton’s famous avowal in his letter to Hooke, February 5, 1675/6, “If I have seen further it is by standing on ye sholders of Giants,” is less a commitment to the idea of progress as the late eighteenth century meant it than an attempt to be polite and com¬ plimentary to his correspondent.49 But though the greatest scientist of the age of genius does not seem to have been excited about the advancement of science in the sense that Francis Bacon or Glanvill 18

INTRODUCTION was, on occasion he wrote of the “promotion” and the improve¬ ment of knowledge. If Newton was often unbearably arrogant in treating with his scientific contemporaries — witness his letters to Flamsteed — there were times when he depicted himself in images of naive wonderment and humility. “I do not know what I may appear to the world; but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.” 50 Abrupt pendulum swings between moments of self-maximation and self-denigration are not infrequent in men with Newton’s character structure. Neither should one be surprised by his capacity to battle with ferocity over questions of scientific priority and over his “new system of chronology” while he dreamed of the consummation of all things, to appear gentle to some and irascible to others, and to be scrupulous in the governance of the Mint while he interpreted sacred texts to illustrate the imminence of the Second Coming. There were many mansions in the spiritual house of Sir Isaac. The opening chapter of this book describes the circumstances leading to the publication of Isaac Newton’s historical writings, both the Abstract of Chronology, or Short Chronicle, and the greater Chronology. Chapters II through V are an analysis of Newton’s historical method, primarily in The Chronology of Ancient King¬ doms Amended, in the light of the preparatory scholarly materials and early manuscript drafts which he has left behind for the more extensive work which was probably to be called “The Origin of Kingdoms.” The basic astronomical and literary proofs for his system are set forth against the background of the major prevail¬ ing chronologies of his day which he was determined to refute. In Chapter VI a hypothesis is presented concerning the dominant religious motive behind Newton’s revision of ancient chronology, and in Chapter VII his multifarious techniques for grappling with myth as source material for “remote ages,” and particularly for the be¬ ginnings of idolatry, are explained. Chapter VIII expounds Newton’s doctrine of the growth of monarchies from small kingdoms. Chapter IX relates the view of the historical world presented in the Chronology to Newton’s historical commentary on the books of prophecy in the Old and New Testament and to his studies of 19

ISAAC NEWTON, HISTORIAN Christian ecclesiastical history and doctrine. The last chapter re¬ sumes the narrative of the first, carrying forward the account of the controversies that Newton’s novel hypotheses raised throughout the Continent, particularly during the course of the eighteenth cen¬ tury.

20

CHAPTER I Academic Piracy: A Narrative History of the Short Chronicle

I

N the 1720’s rumor spread among the antiquarians of Paris that the aged Newton, already crowned with the laurels of immor¬ tality, had descended from the heavens where he had divined the laws of movement of the planets and had deigned to study chronol¬ ogy, mythology, and the revolutions of states and empires. The learned abbes of the Academie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres and their secular colleagues were all agog because it was reported that the conqueror of the physical universe had devised a system of chronology founded upon novel principles which disrupted the traditional concordance of ancient sacred and profane history. The chronologists were at first delighted, or that at least is the acade¬ mician de Bougainville’s later testimony, to welcome Newton into their company, as he sought new triumphs in a savage land where the common herd saw only rocks and thorny bushes. Mathematics in his hands seemed a universal instrument capable of resolving all problems. Why should he not free history from its alloy of mytho¬ logical fictions? Word went around that the Signor Abate Conte Antonio Conti, a Venetian nobleman, one of those brilliant picaresque figures of the eighteenth-century intellectual world, a poetaster, a tragedian, a translator of Racine and Pope, a dabbler in the sciences, a dilettante who intrigued with equal adroitness among princesses and natural philosophers in England, France, Germany, and Italy, was in actual possession of an abstract of Newton’s chronology which contained the whole system in brief.1 The Abbe Conti, as he was known throughout Europe, had acquired a copy of the text in England 21

ISAAC NEWTON, HISTORIAN from Caroline of Anspach, Princess of Wales, who kept the original manuscript among her most treasured possessions.2 Newton had been persuaded to prepare the abstract when during a conversa¬ tion on education with the Princess he intimated that for many years he had been working on an ancient history with a new plan, though his papers, dating back to Cambridge days, were faulty and in disorder.3 Sir Isaac granted Conti’s request to have a transcript made, with the admonition that it must be kept private. Though he habitually and perhaps intentionally enveloped his writings with secrecy and mystification,4 he was often deceived about the discre¬ tion with which they were handled in England. Without his knowl¬ edge a number of copies of the abstract had been made, at least three of which are extant, one in King’s College Library, Cambridge, its first page decorated with a foliated border and an illuminated initial, two in the British Museum suffixed by polemical appendices from unknown disputants.5 Of course he himself had written, re¬ written, and revised more than a dozen drafts of the abstract, bestowing different names upon the various versions as he went along. The best copies in English are entitled “A short Chronicle from the first memory of things in Europe to the conquest of Persia by Alexander the Great. The times are set down in years before Christ.” Latin abstracts sometimes cover a longer period and are called “Rerum ante Imperium Romanorum gestarum Chronicon parvum” or “Rerum ante Imperia quatuor summa gestarum Chroni¬ con parvum.” Some of the English drafts occasionally lapse into Latin; and one Latin text includes a number of dates from Chinese history. While the Abbe Conti in Paris did not surrender his manuscript to a printer, he certainly talked freely about its contents and pa¬ raded his intimacy with Newton in the aristocratic and scholarly salons which he frequented. He whetted the appetite of many erudits; the text itself he showed only to favorites, among them the Jesuit Father Etienne Souciet, an authority on ancient chronology. The abstract was really nothing more than a chronological index to ancient history, about twenty pages in length, and scholars were left to guess the theoretical basis of the revolutionary system from passing hints. Through the agency of scientists in Newton’s circle with whom he had established amicable relations during his sojourn

22

ACADEMIC PIRACY i

in England, Abbe Conti sought clarification of moot points, but he met with a wall of silence. Newton had previously warned him that he would not reply to objections. There seems to have been only one exception to the rule. Father Souciet’s learned queries prepared in 1720 were shown to Newton by John Keill, the Oxford astronomer,6 himself involved in controversies on the early revolutions of the planet, who received by word of mouth the intelligence that the Conti manuscript was an abstract of a much longer work, “and he hath not set down the proofs”;7 in another laconic pronouncement Newton casually quoted from memory his source for redating the Argonautic expedition, whose crucial significance for the whole new system of chronology the perspicacious Father Souciet had sensed at once. Keill transmitted the great Newton’s oracular answer to Brook Taylor, former secretary of the Royal Society then in Paris, who in turn communicated it to Father Souciet.8 The Keill letter released the astronomic key to the mystery of the new chronology even before its publication: the principle of the retrogression of the equinoctial points. “According to his best remembrance he [Newton] found that the ancients had recorded that at the time of the Argonauts Chiron had found the equinoctial points to be in the middle or 15th degree of the constellation Aries. In Meto’s time it was found to be in the 8th and in Hipparchus’ in the 4th degree of that constellation. Hipparchus reckoned the reces¬ sion to one degree every seventy-two years [sic] and by that means if we compute we shall find the time of the Argonautical expedition to have fallen out at the time Sir Isaac puts it.” 9 The Jesuit chronologist was by no means satisfied with this response to his inquiries, but he maintained “la religion du secret” 10 and published nothing on the subject, though he at once set to work in private to under¬ mine the Newtonian system and to raise his own in its place. By 1724 the garrulous Abbe Conti could restrain himself no longer, and he began passing the text about indiscriminately to learned men. M. de Pouilly of the Academie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres allowed his colleague Nicolas Freret, a scholar of antiquities then at the height of his powers, to copy and translate the manuscript he had been lent by Abbe Conti. When Freret, who had command of Greek, Latin, Hebrew, and Arabic and could dispute the etymologies of Samuel Bochart11 and other polyhistors 23

ISAAC NEWTON, HISTORIAN of the previous century, analyzed Newton’s text he was aghast. The abstract had fixed the Argonautic expedition at 936 b.c., had cut about four hundred years off the traditional record of Greek history, telescoping events in an unprecedented manner, and had then slashed even greater chunks of time from the antiquity of the other ancient kingdoms. More than twenty-five years later JeanPierre de Bougainville was still apologizing uneasily for the next step taken by his predecessor in the permanent secretaryship of the Academy — the unauthorized publication of the abstract, with a critique. “At the prospect of a revolution about to change the face or at least the perspective of the historical world it was natural, shall we say it was correct, that M. Freret should become alarmed and that he should move to the frontier to reconnoiter the terrain.” 12 Freret remains one of the most enigmatic figures of eighteenthcentury scholarship.13 He had been an intimate of the Count Henri de Boulainvilliers, an aristocrat-scholar of the older generation who was early impressed with his astounding erudition and introduced him to the notorious freethinking circle of the Duke de Noailles.14 Ancient chronology and the history of religion were frequent topics of serious inquiry in the private “academy” of this group, where they could express themselves freely without fear of censorship. The Count, one of the leading secret propagators of heretical ideas in the early part of the century, had himself written a heterodox “Abrege de l’histoire universelle” (1700) for the education of his children which has survived in manuscript copies in the Mazarine and the Bibliotheque Nationale. Flis protege the young Freret was no sober academician. After his reception into the Academie des In¬ scriptions et Belles-Lettres as eleve, on November 13, 1714, he delivered a “Discours sur l’origine des Frangais” so defiant of ac¬ cepted opinion that it was denounced by an indignant senior member and earned him a sojourn in the Bastille, where he is said to have devoured Bayle’s dictionary in its entirety.15 After his liberation he became more circumspect, assiduously pursued traditional historical studies, and was ultimately raised to the secretaryship of the Academy. Clandestine manuscripts circulated under his name, how¬ ever, among them the Lettre de Thrasybule a Leucippe, one of the subtlest antireligious diatribes of the age. Though the mid-nine¬ teenth-century secretary of the Academy, Baron Walckenaer, in24

ACADEMIC PIRACY dignantly contested the imputation of authorship to Freret,16 his name has been associated with Boulainvilliers, Levesque de Burigny, and the author of Le Militaire philosophe as a purveyor of impiety, a predecessor of the Holbachians.17 In the Newton controversy Freret wore his official mask, that of the meticulous scholar, the defender of tradition, the French Catholic academician prepared to pinpoint Newton’s scientific errors and Protestant prejudices. Before Freret resolved to enter the lists against the great Newton he experienced some qualms about publication of the abstract without authority, and he therefore asked the printer, Guillaume Cavelier fils of the rue Saint-Jacques, to write Newton in May 1724.18 The request for permission to publish was later renewed through a personal intermediary in London and finally in a rather peremptory and semiliterate communication on March 20, 1725: “Sir, six months ago I had the honor of informing you that a copy of your chronology had fallen into my hands. I asked you to inform me whether you had any additions or corrections to make in it be¬ cause of errors on the part of the translator. Since the savants await anything which comes from a man as talented as you with great eagerness. Sir, I have the honor of writing you this second letter to ask you to inform me immediately if you have something to change in it. If I do not hear from you I shall take your silence for consent and let it appear as it is and I shall give it to the public with Remarks.” 19 This time Newton replied with a sharp letter refusing to have anything to do with an unauthorized translation and explicitly prohibiting it. By the time Newton’s answer arrived in Paris the work was already in print. On November 11, 1725, he received a complimentary copy from Cavelier. A glimpse of the deliberations behind the closed doors of the Academie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, whose minutes are preserved in a manuscript registre in the Institut de France, will help explain the havoc raised by the publication of Newton’s ab¬ stract, which in a few meager pages covered history from creation through Alexander. In the world of antiquities this body held a position equivalent to that of the Royal Society of London in physi¬ cal science, and the intrusion of Newton aroused resentment as well as curiosity. In their secret sessions the twenty-odd members of the Academy engaged for the most part in the presentation of 25

ISAAC NEWTON, HISTORIAN limited specific problems of textual interpretation in the theogonies and mythology of the classical corpus, or in the description of par¬ ticular pagan and Jewish religious rites, when they were not prepar¬ ing inscriptions for new medals celebrating royal birthdays and military triumphs.20 Precisely at the time when the abstract of Newton’s universal system was being printed, Freret, their most brilliant if contentious member, was reading dissertations on the chronology of the kings of Lydia; Abbe Banier was discussing a passage in Xenophon; Abbe Gedoyn was analyzing terminology in Pausanias; Elie Blanchard, a few paragraphs in Sextus Empiricus. On occasion a freakish contribution was made, such as Abbe Fontenu’s study of changes in body size during night and day, not legitimately in the province of the Academy but tolerated. The private debates were vehement; during the session when the intro¬ duction of horseback-riding into Greece was under discussion — Freret was one of the contenders — the president of the session, Gros de Boze, was unable to calm his excited scholars and had to resort to the reading of the history of the Academy in order to silence them.21 Freret’s papers delivered at intervals between February 15 and March 17, 1724, are of special interest because this was the period when Cavelier the Parisian printer first contemplated the issuance of the abstract. Their subject was unwontedly philosophical for the Academy, “Reflexions generates sur l’etude de l’ancienne histoire et sur le degre de certitude des diferentes preuves historiques,” and though Newton’s name was not mentioned they seem clearly aimed at the historical method of the new chronology.22 A man of cultivated intellect and keen perception, Freret died before archaeology re¬ vised and gave new life to the world view of antiquity. His death in 1749 occurred at the very moment when the excavations at Hercu¬ laneum were being made known in northern Europe. Restricted as he was to mythological sources for his reconstruction of the remote past, he posed before the Academy the essential problem of the reliability of this kind of evidence. His language reflected the spirit of pure reason, and many a passage is so far in advance of his contemporaries in its appreciation of fact and of scientific accuracy this his memoire calls to mind Dr. Cabanis’s famous treatise on the degree of certainty attainable in medicine, published on the 26

ACADEMIC PIRACY i

eve of the Revolution. Freret’s position lay midway between the uncritical chronologists and polyhistors of the seventeenth century, who blindly accepted every shred of literary evidence at face value if only it bolstered one of their favorite schemes, and the Pyrrhonism which had become associated with Pierre Bayle and was represented in the Academy by de Pouilly. Having reviewed the works of Scaliger, Petau, Ussher, Marsham, Pezron, and Dodwell, chronologists who thought they had definitively fixed the dates of major events in the ancient history of Assyria, Egypt, Phoenicia, Babylonia, and Greece, Freret found their method “corrupt”23 because of their failure to distinguish not only between the true and the false but between the more and the less probable. History, dependent as it was upon literary sources, could never achieve the exactitude of the mathematical sciences, which had begun to dominate all forms of knowledge because of their widespread prestige; rather it was necessary to establish the “differences in the various kinds of certainty appropriate to each science and to each matter, for there is not one but it has its own dialectique,” 24 a most sophisticated conception for the period. The old chronologists constructed arbi¬ trary hypotheses after only a “light and superficial inspection of a few of the fragments which remain.” In drawing upon sources they accepted whatever fit their purpose and discarded the rest, violat¬ ing the basic principle of criticism that “testimony is indivisible.” 25 Freret was particularly sharp in his treatment of John Marsham, who had become possessed of an inordinate passion for system.26 The parallel with Newton, who had misused texts with equal brash¬ ness and was also addicted to a system, is transparent. On the other hand Freret would not reject literary evidence merely because it was by definition polluted with error and exag¬ geration. Though contemporary eyewitness accounts were subject to hyperbole, they were not for that reason dismissed outright. Like a good man of his age he would strip the ancient narratives of the fantastic and the absurd, but he would not thrust them aside merely because of their admixture of superstition. Though the myth of Alexander’s divine ancestry was no longer given credence, educated men did not therefore deny all other details of his biography. In euhemerist fashion Freret was brought, in this paper (he later changed his mind), to accept most of the mythic heroes of Greece 27

ISAAC NEWTON, HISTORIAN as historical personages when divested of the marvelous. Theseus, like Alexander, had once existed, only he was not the son of Neptune. The rationalist spirit of his eminent colleague Fontenelle as ex¬ pressed in the recently published Origine des fables seems to pervade Freret’s critical evaluation of mythology. The duty of the historian was to “examine everything, to weigh the various degrees of proba¬ bility, to cast aside the false, and to assign to each fact the degree of truth or of probability which belongs to it.”27 Newton had steadfastly refused to admit the credibility of any literary historians before Herodotus; hence his fundamental reliance upon “astronomic” evidence in the Abstract of Chronology. Freret saw no basis for their exclusion. The ancient historians of Egypt, Assyria, and Greece wrote in the presence of monuments more antique still, and their contemporaries had been able to control the accuracy of their assertions. If in Freret’s day there were Greek inscriptions over two thousand years old, why should monuments not have existed at the time of Pisistratus that were a thousand years old? Like modern monks, temple priests kept records of sacrifices and other important events which provided source materials for later historians. The chronology of the ancient writers was therefore established on solid ground. Freret ridiculed the intrusion of the theorie des combinaisons into history and morals; a work by New¬ ton’s intimate friend John Craig, the Theologiae Christianae Principia Mathematica (1699),28 which abounded in complex algebraic equations to demonstrate the truths of Christianity and to fix the end of the world at 1500 years thence, was chosen to illustrate and mock the new fad. In the numerous dissertations he read before the Academy Freret often failed to practice the lofty critical principles he had outlined, and he was not always averse to the discovery in the poets of ref¬ erences to astronomic and geological events, which he too presumed to date with the aid of the new science; but his “Reflexions” of 1724 was a manifesto of common sense after a century of foggy etymolo¬ gists and monist systematizers. Though buried in the Memoires of the Academy and rarely noticed, the piece is a brilliant examination of the problems of historical method and historical skepticism and the validity of the use of mythology as a source. At a time when sober men in French academic circles were moving away from 28

ACADEMIC PIRACY i

voluminous, comprehensive theories, Newton’s work seemed to be another fanciful elaboration of a single principle. The pirated edition of the Abstract appeared in 1725;29 it was then attached as a supplement to the French version in seven volumes of Dean Humphrey Prideaux’s History of the Jews and Neighboring Nations, from the Declension of the Kingdoms of Israel and Judah to the time of Christ. This was a most unfortunate union, for though the Dean had corresponded with Newton on ancient calendars and there is a British Museum manuscript setting forth Newton’s opinions on the subject to the Bishop of Worcester which passed through his hands, Prideaux in the preface to the first London edition of his work in 1716 had declared Archbishop Ussher’s to be “the exactest and most perfect work of Chronology that hath been published.” 30 The two chronologies did not mesh; they flagrantly contradicted each other. Cavelier the printer had prefixed the Abstract with a notice which detailed the circumstances of the publication, insisting that Newton’s letter of May 27, 1725, had arrived too late. He freely admitted that his translator’s acquisi¬ tion of the text might have involved “une infidelite,” but that was not his affair — he merely wanted to prove that he had behaved towards M. Newton with scrupulous propriety. Freret’s remarks appended anonymously to the translation of the Abstract were on the whole deferential. He pleaded before the public that final judgment be reserved until the appearance of Newton’s complete system. For the first time in print allusion was made to Father Souciet’s criticisms, which had been bruited about, and Freret aligned himself on his side. He questioned two of Newton’s fundamental propositions, the advancement of the date of the Argonautic expedition to 936 b.c. and the contention of the great mathematician that the ancients erroneously reckoned royal reigns as averaging three to a century when the empirical evidence proved that kings lasted on their thrones an average of only eighteen to twenty years. Freret upheld the antiquity of the Egyptians and their discovery of the arts and sciences on Biblical grounds. It seemed inconsistent for Newton to brush aside the testimony of Egyptian priests on the beginnings of their culture and yet to accept uncritically the mythic traditions of the Greek poets, certainly less reliable sources. Doubt was cast on Newton’s identification of 29

ISAAC NEWTON, HISTORIAN Sesostris and Osiris. Freret politely praised Newton’s ingenuity, then detracted from the purported novelty of many of his findings by noting the priority of John Marsham and his friend Count de Boulainvilliers. When word of this illegitimate French publication reached New¬ ton, the aged scientist was outraged. In high dudgeon he prepared a defense of his system in a paper to the Royal Society, seven separate drafts of which exist, testimony to his deep involvement.31 He created an international scandal.32 As with his major scientific discoveries, Newton was reluctant to publish, but once the plunge was taken he was acutely sensitive to criticism and passionate in defense of his position.33 From the presidency of the most august scientific body in the world he denounced the pirated edition and uncovered a plot in which Abbe Conti was the mastermind, Freret his agent, and Cavelier the printer a mere tool. Newton’s comments on the “Observator” Freret, not mentioned by name though known to everyone in Paris, were superior and magisterial in tone. The French critic had completely misunder¬ stood Newton’s dating of the Argonautic expedition. He had pre¬ sumptuously undertaken to refute a work whose very principles he did not comprehend. Though it was true that in his Cambridge period, Newton confessed, he had occupied himself agreeably with history and chronology when he was fatigued by other studies, he had never intended to prepare a work on the subject as the “Obser¬ vator” had announced. The full barrage of Newton’s invective was aimed at Abbe Conti, who had once played a major role in the Leibniz controversy. He had violated a solemn trust in communicating the manuscript. New¬ ton dismissed the apology of the printer; a man would have to be completely deprived of his senses to acquiesce in the publication of a translation of his work which he had never seen by a writer with whom he was not acquainted and weighed down with a hostile appendix that was a refutation of his theories. Discreetly he left the royal name out of his recapitulation of events. About seven years before, the Abbe Conti had indeed paid him a visit informing him that a “friend” wished to speak with him. The “friend” expressed a desire to see what he had composed on chronology, and though he 30

ACADEMIC PIRACY remonstrated that his papers on the subject were confused he finally consented to present him with an abstract if it were kept secret. But once in France, Newton charged, Conti spread copies about and directed the whole cabal. Freret had been treated mildly in comparison with the formal public denunciation of Abbe Conti. This man was a false scientist, an intriguer who under the pretense of mediating the quarrel with Leibniz had tried to entice Newton into further disputations on universal gravitation, the Sensorium of God, on time, space, the perfection of the universe. Newton disdainfully concluded with the hope that he would no longer be troubled by Conti’s scientific com¬ munications, any more than by perpetual motion. While the paper inserted in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society for 1725 was rational and pointed, it was irascible, not at all in harmony with the image of majestic calm which was the official portrait of Newton toward the end of his life. Conti had the last word. He published a French translation of Newton’s communication along with a rejoinder, Reponse aux Ob¬ servations sur la chronologie de M. Newton, avec une lettre de M. VAbbe Conti au sujet de ladite reponse.3i Newton had erred when he claimed that Conti’s was the only copy of the abstract; he knew of the existence of three or four others. The promise of secrecy did not preclude criticism, and he had tried in vain to discover the basis for Newton’s identification of Sesostris and Osiris. He openly admitted his discussion of the system and Father Souciet’s attempts to receive further clarification. Newton might have avoided the whole affair had he deigned to transmit in writing the reply he had just printed. Conti’s excuses for his breach of confidence were rather lame. Was it not patent that a work of which there were several other copies would sooner or later be presented in print? Was that a crime which merited a public reproach? “Anyone but Mr. Newton would have been delighted by the favorable idea which I had formed of the merit of his work and by my eagerness to make it known that he was as enlightened in history and criticism as he was profound in Mathe¬ matics and in Philosophy.” Turning the tables he maliciously re¬ minded his readers that Newton himself published without per¬ mission a letter by Leibniz which Conti had shown him. As for the 31

ISAAC NEWTON, HISTORIAN accusation that he was a perfidious friend, Conti called to witness a whole galaxy of French learned men and aristocrats in whose presence he had defended the Newtonian system. The Venetian noble who had been insulted before the whole of Europe could not allow the charges to stand without a counter¬ thrust. “It is astonishing that Mr. Newton, who in Philosophy is only willing to reason on facts, abandons this method in the judgment of human actions. If he persists in his accusations is he not obliged, ac¬ cording to his own principle, to prove them, at the risk of becoming guilty of calumny? Now how will he demonstrate, as he would a geometric curve . . . my masquerade of friendship, my clandestine intervention, and the other chimeras with which it has suited him to embellish the opinion he has formed of me?” Abbe Conti gave vent to a full measure of aristocratic scorn for the commoner, for he was above the pettiness of scientific controversy. “I apply myself to learning neither to make a fortune nor to acquire a great name. I study as I travel, that is to say, for my pleasure.” In experimental philosophy and mathematics he had no great involvement, hence Newton’s opinion could not touch him. “I like this sort of study very much but it does not at all agitate me. At bottom I do not hold it in any greater esteem than the quadrille or hunting. It all comes to the same when one examines the matter dispassionately. And moreover I am of the opinion that if one should make exception of fifteen or twenty problems useful to the arts and practices of society, all the rest will perhaps one day be as much an object of contempt as certain scholastic problems.” With this flippant denigration of science he avenged himself on its most celebrated genius. After the Abbe Conti’s death the editor of his papers described amicable conversations with Newton in 1715 on ancient history and religion, during which the fundamental principles of the new chro¬ nology had been received by word of mouth.35 He suggested direct intent on the part of the French scholars to smoke Newton out and force him into a defense of his system by publishing the Abstract. Newton’s was the intemperate reply of an old bigot, touched in the head by the Camisard “Prophets of London,” seeing visions. “In Paris they generally took Conti’s side.”36 Once Freret had published the text Father Souciet considered himself absolved of the vow of secrecy. His five mammoth disserta32

ACADEMIC PIRACY tions against the little Abstract of Chronology published in 1726 were an avalanche of astronomical, literary, and numismatic evidence presented with logical precision which did not leave a Newtonian date unassailed. The later dissertations had been written after New¬ ton’s outburst, and Father Souciet joined the fray in sympathy with his friend and protector Abbe Conti. “Good God!” he exclaimed in a most unecclesiastical apostrophe, “How little these gentlemen make use of their Philosophy! Or what a strange Philosophy theirs must be.” 37 Defending Conti’s integrity and dedicating his work to him, he taunted the Englishman: “But why all this mystery? Does Newton want to repeat with some new Leibniz the scene that was enacted over the infinitesimal calculus?” His conclusion was complacent: “M. Newton’s Chronology cannot stand ... he has made an error of about 530 years and . . . mine on the contrary is correct.” 38 Souciet’s plan had envisaged a complete demolition in four stages. “The first will contain the astronomic proofs which destroy this new system. The second will expound the historical proofs. Those which I have drawn from medals will make up the content of the third. And the fourth will refute the changes which Mr. Newton has introduced into the length of a generation.” Some of Father Souciet’s arguments outdid Newton’s wildest conjectures. One was based upon the hypothesis that Columella, in his reading of a text of Meton (ix. 14), had confused A, the letter equivalent of number one, with H, the letter for eight, a plausible error because the scribe had somehow opened the two vertical bars of the letter instead of closing them. Meton had thus really fixed the equinox in the first degree and not in the eighth — hence Newton’s hypothesis fell because he had accepted Columella’s error.39 Souciet was rewarded with the plaudits of his fellow Jesuits. On March 24, 1727, Father Joseph Ignace De Rebeque wrote him, “I have read with pleasure your dissertations against Mr. Newton”; and though he suggested minor rectifications on April 19, 1727, he assured Souciet that “nothing would change the correctness of his demonstrations against the system of Mr de Newton.” 40 When John Conduitt heard of the Souciet assault he was so afraid of further upsetting the aged scientist with the prospect of another international polemic that he had the main points summarized by a friend, excising the more contentious animadversions. Much to 33

ISAAC NEWTON, HISTORIAN Conduitt’s surprise, when Newton later read the text in full he seemed not at all perturbed, but his opinions remained unaltered; the Jesuit was simply wrong.41 The scientific war in which eight¬ eenth-century scholars reveled was on, and it continued inter¬ mittently for a solid century — theologians, historians, astronomers, and amateur scholars all joined the contest. The battle array was by no means exclusively national, even though there were echoes of the clash between English Newtonians and French Cartesians.42 The fight had hardly gathered momentum when its principal contender died and was buried with honors such as had not yet been bestowed upon any European scientist. To the astute Fontenelle fell the task of reading his eulogy before the French Academie des Sciences, which had honored Newton with membership. Primed by memoranda from John Conduitt, Fontenelle delivered a classical panegyric, but he could not avoid reference to the Abstract which had involved a colleague of Freret’s eminence in the “little acade¬ mie.” With consummate skill he managed to turn the piracy and critique of the Abstract into a compliment to the great deceased. “Does not their very eagerness do honor to Mr. Newton? They quickly seized the chance for the glory of having such an adver¬ sary.” 43 If Freret sinned in allowing the Abstract to be issued without permission, strange historical vengeance was wrought upon his memory later in the century when the wicked Baron d’Holbach, without leave, printed scurrilous atheist pamphlets as the post¬ humous works of the renowned permanent secretary of the Acade¬ mie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres.44 Abbe Conti, pursuing the quarrel with relentless tenacity even after Newton’s death, soon discovered a rival Italian system on the early history of mankind to pit against his enemy. Its author was the obscure Giambattista Vico. With pathetic gratitude the unrecognized Neapolitan reproduced favorable letters from Conti in the intro¬ duction to the 1730 edition of the Scienza Nuova. Abbe Conti had sent extracts of the work to Father Souciet in Paris; he had en¬ couraged the impecunious Vico to rearrange his materials and to issue a new version in larger type; above all he praised the origi¬ nality of his ideas which even the English would be “obliged” to concede.45 The bombshell Newton hurled into the staid world of the chronol34

ACADEMIC PIRACY ogists largely depended for its effect upon the scientific prestige which he had won elsewhere. The idea that the new astronomy could establish a number of irrefutable benchmarks in the history of antiquity was in itself a very attractive one, particularly at a time when there were few archaeological monuments which had been dated with any certainty. Newton, if he were right, might rescue history from Baylean skepticism; his work appeared at the very moment when a new group of chronologists like Freret, who had re¬ viewed the mammoth compendia of the seventeenth century, were themselves troubled by grave doubts about the easy findings of the previous age. It was no passing incident in the lives of the antiquar¬ ians when the great Newton was reported to have discovered un¬ impeachable dates for the major events and when these dates de¬ parted substantially from tradition. When it appeared, however, that the system presented in the Chronology was dependent not upon pure mathematics but in the last analysis upon the reading of a classical fragment which might in itself be corrupt, there was great disappointment — and secret rejoicing. Newton could not be the arbiter of the historical world, and men would have to proceed with laborious individual studies, making interpretations of myth and early history vested with greater or lesser degrees of probability. Newton had been greatly wounded by the foreign criticism of the Abstract. The Right Reverend Zachary Pearce, Lord Bishop of Rochester, described him sitting in dimmed chambers — his eyes could no longer endure the sun upon which he had gazed for so many years seeking to penetrate its mystery — working day and night on manuscript drafts of chronology which had been piling up for decades.46 There is ample corroboration of Newton’s preoccupa¬ tion with the system in his last year, for most of his reported con¬ versations center about ancient history and the beginning of things. On Christmas Day 1725 he showed his friend Stukeley a copy of his drawing of the plan of Solomon’s Temple which became the basis of the fifth chapter in the Chronology.117 After Newton’s death, when executors began to examine and appraise his voluminous manuscripts, they were generally unim¬ pressed with what they found. It was then that Thomas Pellet wrote his condemnation, and the greater Chronology might have been consigned to oblivion, leaving nothing but the paltry Abstract, had 35

ISAAC NEWTON, HISTORIAN it not been for William Whiston’s prodding and not disinterested insistence that it be brought out.48 Whiston had for years stored up rancor against his former patron, and he was chafing at the bit, eager for a chance to destroy “the system.” Newton’s manuscript finally appeared in 1728 as The Chronology of Ancient Kingdoms Amended, with a dedication to the Queen by John Conduitt, a bit of florid prose which had benefited from the revision of none other than Alexander Pope himself.49

36

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Q

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Isaac Newton

4.

Nicholas Freret

CHAPTER II The Learning of a Christian Chronologist

A

DEVOUT Protestant Englishman writing world history .about 1700 could combine an unquestioning acceptance of every fact in the Bible, a euhemerist historicization of pagan myth, and a literal reading of the later Greek and Roman historians into one grand concordance. If he had the requisite training he might attempt to amalgamate even a fourth element, the new physicoastronomical science. Unfortunately this body of data proved less assimilable with the literary and the religious traditions than men like Sir Isaac Newton imagined. When Newton embarked upon his studies of antiquity, chro¬ nology was still the pivotal problem of universal history. One of the lesser-known chronologists of the seventeenth century, whose work was in Newton’s library, was Henry Isaacson (1581-1684), author of Saturni ephemerides; sive. Tabula historico-chronologica. Con¬ taining a chronological series or succession of the foure monarchyes, with an abridgement of the annual memorable passages in them. As also a succession of the Kings and Rulers over most kingdoms and estates of the world, with a breife chronological description of them, theyre several storyes epitomized, with a compend of the history of the Church of God from the Creation . . . The grand eulogy of chronology with which Isaacson prefaced his tables of dates was not mere professional idiosyncrasy; his sentiments were widely shared, for synchronized dating of sacred and profane history was not yet taken for granted. ‘The Masse of Historians would prove but a con¬ fused Heape, and be like a Monster, if Chronology did not helpe to forme and frame them into fashion, by digesting them into a certainetie of articulate Times. And lastly, it is termed the Soule of History giving life to it, as the Soule doth to the body.” 1 “History 37

ISAAC NEWTON, HISTORIAN without Chronology is confused . . wrote Newton in a similar vein in one of his draft notes.2 The major Christian chronologists of the sixteenth and seven¬ teenth centuries had firmly established Hebrew history as the axis of world chronology,3 since the Biblical genealogies from Adam down presented them with a continuous reckoning in years unique among ancient historical records. Though Scaliger, Petau, Ussher, Marsham, and Dodwell — to mention only the grand masters of the art — argued vehemently among themselves and with learned passion about details, they were all in substantial agreement with computa¬ tions based on the Old Testament which proved that the world was about four or five thousand years old at the birth of Christ.4 While the mystical idea of the early Church chronologists that the world would last six thousand years and that Christ was born in the middle of the sixth millennium had perforce been weakened, the main in¬ tervals from Adam through the Deluge, through Phaleg, Abraham, Joshua, David, the Babylonian Captivity, and Christ, were still the basic historical units in seventeenth-century chronology as they had been in the works of Theophilus of Antioch and Saint Hippolytus. To break with this tradition, profoundly rooted in Hebrew and patristic writings, meant abandonment of the community of Chris¬ tians. The libertines who read Lucretius and the new Epicureans were secretly reviving ancient opinion that the world was eternal or that it was hundreds of thousands of years old, as the Chaldean and Egyptian priests had maintained to the Greek historian travelers, but to lend credence to such fantastic notions meant excluding one¬ self from the society of the faithful. “For my part I can have no great veneration for Chaldaean antiquity,” said Richard Bentley in one of his apologetic sermons based on the Newtonian physical system. Nor could he countenance as Christians “those Atheists that will have mankind and other animals to have subsisted eternally in infinite generations already past.” B Chronology was far from a neutral subject circa 1700. Determin¬ ing the precise antiquity of the Gentile empires had more than scientific interest, important as was the establishment of a synchro¬ nism among the annals of the divers nations. The authenticity of the Biblical account was at stake and thus by implication the truth of 38

A CHRISTIAN CHRONOLOGIST religion itself. In a traditionalist world there was a presumption of superior excellence in prior antiquity, because wisdom was always transmitted by the great founders, the originators of things, to the lesser men of later generations. The idea of the simultaneous and autonomous discovery and development of the arts and sciences among different nations was not commonly held. There was a prej¬ udice, based upon Biblical records, in favor of a single source for the diffusion of both religion and culture. When an orthodox writer was confronted with gravely heretical ideas, such as the belief that the world was very ancient, far more than five or six thousand years old, or that it had perhaps never been created, or that Greek culture was older than Hebrew, he had to enter the lists in defense of the faith. The contention that Bacchus antedated Moses and may have been his prototype, or the supposition that Platonic learning had been original and was not derivative, was not merely an esoteric matter of historic precedence. It was vital to the Christian religion to uphold the rabbinic and patristic position that Plato had studied with Jeremiah in Egypt and that the Egyptian priests who extolled their own antiquities were boastful liars. Vindication of Biblical chronology became a central issue in the battle of pious Christians against the philosophers, deist and atheist. In the eighteenth century the freethinkers spitefully exalted the priority of civilizations other than that of the Jews in order to humble the pretensions to uniqueness in the Jewish dispensation and to impugn the authority of the Bible. New geological hypotheses, which later culminated in the writings of Count Buffon, even pushed back the act of creation itself tens of thousands of years. Newton’s devoted friend Dr. Halley was not immune to the influence of these heretical conjectures, for it was he who proposed long-term experi¬ ments with the rising saline content of the Dead Sea in an effort to determine scientifically the age of the earth, the presumption being that it was far older than five thousand years. The Jesuits who ab¬ stracted the Chinese annals were, strangely enough, also playing into the hands of the libertines in vaunting the antiquity of the Asiatic society they were trying to convert. Newton would have none of the innovations; in this respect he was in the conservative tradi¬ tion of Scaliger, Petau, Ussher, and Marsham, despite his occasional 39

ISAAC NEWTON, HISTORIAN deviation from their dates for sundry important events of Biblical history. While he never committed himself on the precise day of creation with anything like the punctiliousness of Bishop Ussher — who had begun his Annales Veteris Testamenti, a prima mundi origine deducti: una cum rerum Asiaticarum et Aegyptiacarum chronico, a temporis historici principio usque ad Maccabaicorum initiam producto (London, 1650) with the authoritative pronounce¬ ment: “In Principio creavit Deus Coelum & Terram quod temporis principium (juxta nostram Chronologiam) incidit in noctis illius initium, quae XXIII diem Octubris praecessit in anno periodi Julianae 710 [4004 b.c.]” 6 — he generally accepted Hebrew chronology as it had been presented by Petau and Marsham with minor modifi¬ cations. Among respectable writers like Newton Hebrew chronology was not fundamentally in question, though different results could be reached, particularly for the generations from Adam through Abra¬ ham, depending upon whether one followed the Massoretic text, which Jerome used, the Samaritan version, or the Septuagint. The really thorny problem was to synchronize the events reported in Egyptian, Assyrian, Babylonian, Persian, Greek, and Roman annals with Biblical history. The establishment of “connections” with Chinese history, whose records were being introduced into Europe by the Jesuit missionaries, was as yet hardly faced by the orthodox, though Father Philippe Couplet had made an attempt; most chronologists were still beset by the difficulties involved in determining the correspondences among the Four Great Monarchies. In the chronol¬ ogy of Gentile nations, unlike the Biblical genealogies, the certain elements were meager. There were priestly traditions from Egypt and lists of pharaohs recorded in the Greek historians and in the Church Fathers; Greek chronology was largely dependent upon the Olym¬ piads and upon more lists of kings; Assyrian and Persian rulers mentioned both in the Bible and by the Greek historians could be identified and dated in terms of Hebrew chronology, but this applied only to a relatively late period, while the sharpest polemics con¬ cerned the beginnings of things, the authentic dates of the origins of the great monarchies. Here darkness prevailed, illuminated only by mythic tradition and the assertions of comparatively recent Greek and Roman writers. 40

A CHRISTIAN CHRONOLOGIST Despite wide divergencies among the major chronologists when they dealt with Gentile history, there was some tendency, obviously inspired by a reading of the Bible and Herodotus, to accept the great antiquity of the Egyptian and Assyrian monarchies. A similar con¬ sensus had set key incidents of early Greek history, such as the voyage of the Argonauts and the Trojan War, in the thirteenth or fourteenth century before Christ. But while vast tomes had been compiled by literally scores of chronologists establishing the syn¬ chronism of events century by century for the whole of the eastern Mediterranean and the Tigris-Euphrates valley, the data had never been accepted with anything like the general assent accorded the chronology of Biblical history. Even though the Jesuit scholar Petau enjoyed European prestige as the last great emendator, his chronol¬ ogy was not Holy Writ, and he was not above criticism.7 Newton was surely not the first chronologist to use astronomy to rectify world chronology. The major sixteenth-century pioneer in this field, Joseph Scaliger, who reduced the bewilderingly numerous calendar systems among the ancients to the Julian year, had derived his system from astronomical as well as literary evidence. Petau had published fragments of the ancient astronomers and had invoked them in slashing away at Scaliger and in establishing his own dates. The general problem of the calendar and its emendation was much in the public mind in the early eighteenth century because Protes¬ tant countries had finally begun to accept calendar reform in either the Gregorian or the more palatable Weigel version. (Newton also advanced proposals for calendar reform.) A sounder world chro¬ nology, based on a combination of astronomy and literature, was of course ultimately dependent upon the reading and interpreta¬ tion of ancient texts, and even if scientists agreed on the astro¬ nomical method there could still be bitter controversy over the elucidation of documents. Sir Isaac Newton set out to revise world chronology as well nourished with literary and scientific data, what Lord Bolingbroke called “learned lumber,” as any man of his day with the possible exception of that phenomenon of scholarship, his antagonist Freret.8 If a manuscript inventory of Newton’s library (part of which is in Trinity) prepared incident to its sale to John Huggins, “the very notorious warden of the Fleet Prison,” who was Newton’s neighbor 41

ISAAC NEWTON, HISTORIAN in St. Martin’s-in-the-Fields, is a reasonably accurate index of Newton’s learning — he does not seem to have been the sort of man who would expend money for books he did not use — he not only controlled the whole classical corpus and patristic literature but he read the voluminous seventeenth- and early-eighteenth-century Latin folios on the origins of religion and the diffusion of the pagan gods, and the sundry learned compilations of the religious rites of Jews and heathens, as well as the major universal histories and chronologies.9 He culled information from Latin texts and wrote the language freely; he was even able to deliver extemporaneous elocutions in Latin when his duties as President of the Royal So¬ ciety required it. His Greek quotations are generally accurate,10 and he was far more proficient in the language than most contemporary English university scholars. The library included some French and Italian books.11 Usually he relied upon the great Renaissance and seventeenth-century editions of Greek pagan and patristic texts which were printed with parallel columns in Latin and Greek. While he doubtless availed himself of the standard Hebrew lexicons and concordances and had access to Philo, and to portions of the Talmud, especially the Mishna, in translation, his acquaintance with medieval Hebrew scholars was probably confined to Maimonides and David Kimchi in Latin, and his dabbling in the mystical Hebrew tradition of the Kabbala was, it seems, restricted to the one work cited in his “Commonplace Book,” a seventeenth-century Latin compilation, the Kabbala Denudata of Knorr von Rosenroth.12 In the Chronology Newton quoted from the Seder Olam Rabbah (the earliest postexilic Hebrew chronicle, which had first been printed in Mantua, 1514, had been translated into Latin, Paris, 1577, and had received a new edition with translation and notes in Amsterdam, 1699), the tractate Yoma, and the chronology of Rabbi Gedaliah Ibn Yahya.13 Though he surely knew the meaning of Hebrew words in a polyglot Bible, understood ordinary texts, and was able to reproduce the printed Hebrew alphabet in block letters from his childhood on — witness one of his first extant letters to a friend 14 — in this area he had none of the original Talmudic knowledge of a John Selden, an Edward Pocock, or even a Humphrey Prideaux, with whose work the Abstract of Chronology had been bound so unceremoniously in 1726. 42

A CHRISTIAN CHRONOLOGIST In “The Original of Monarchies” and in the Chronology the dominant tone is still that of the seventeenth-century polyhistors Vossius, Bochart, and Buxtorf. The view of primitive man popular¬ ized by the travel literature left but a slight mark upon Newton’s writing, despite his well-stocked collection of “voyages,” almost the only light reading in his whole library, which is scarcely sullied by modern belles-lettres. He never approached Bayle’s or Fontenelle’s psychological interpretation of pagan religion, since the whole new way of thinking and feeling about primitive mentality was alien to him, though he corresponded with Fontenelle and had in his library a copy of Willem Bosnian's Voyage de Guinee (1705), a work in which fetishism was described in detail. Even his friend John Locke, a great reader of travel literature — which he utilized extensively in his study of human nature — does not seem to have touched Newton in this respect. It is known that Vico sent Newton a copy of the first edition of the Scienza Nuova through a learned rabbi of Livorno, but unfortunately no record of the work has been found in Cambridge,15 and if Newton ever received it he would not have remotely compre¬ hended its meaning. Of the eighteen hundred or more volumes in the Huggins list, by far the majority are on the history of the ancient world, the history of pagan religions and mythology, the history of Israel, the history of the Christian Church and its doctrines, especially in the early ages, Biblical criticism and commentaries (particularly on the works of prophecy), and contemporary English theological disputa¬ tions. There is a respectable sampling of modern European his¬ tories, though not of the great Benaissance Italians. Geography is well represented and there are a number of histories of non-European peoples, the Saracens, the Mongols, the Ethiopians, and the Chinese. There are not many great mystics — no Jacob Boehme. The body of patristic writings Newton owned is probably as complete as one could find in his day. The chronologists are numerous, though the collection is not exhaustive. The ancient and modern writings on astronomy were plentiful, and the latter often included sections on the history of astronomy. Learned journals such as the Journal des sgavans, L’Europe savante, the Acta Eruditorum, the Journal literaire, and memoirs of the major academies were usually kept up to date. In sum, the library specialized in works of solid information 43

ISAAC NEWTON, HISTORIAN and tended to eschew products of the imagination and “vain phi¬ losophy,” though he did have Malebranche’s Recherche de la verite (1712), Leibniz’ Essais de Theodicee (1710), a 1602 edition of Plato, a Descartes, Stanley’s Lives of the Philosophers, and of course the writings of his friends Henry More and John Locke. The works on alchemy, a representative sample of the art, have been commented upon often enough before; the large number of medical writings in Newton’s library has perhaps not been noticed as frequently. Milton’s works, Pope’s translations of Homer, and a Hudibras are exceptions to the general dearth of modern literature. An isolated item such as the Histoire de la peinture ancienne is perhaps explained by the fact that he was for a brief period a Commissioner of Paintings, though his expert judgment in this field cannot have been outstanding. The medieval world of thought has been almost completely blotted out and there is relatively little contact with major Continental Protestant thinkers except for the Socinians and Jean Le Clerc. Where manuscript codices of the Bible were involved Newton had more than ordinary learning: he sought out rare versions avail¬ able in the English universities and kept abreast of the critical literature in France and Holland. His Biblical collations bear wit¬ ness that he would not have casually neglected to examine a manu¬ script of which he had received word. But though he was for many years in close relationship with Richard Bentley, one of the great pioneers in the critical analysis of classical texts, Newton never seems to have evinced a similar curiosity about pagan docu¬ ments; as less worthy historical sources their printed form sufficed him. Newton also had at his disposal various historical tools that had been introduced by the Italian humanists and widely adopted to control the purely literary traditions of antiquity and the Middle Ages — numismatics, epigraphy, and diplomatics. Though the gentle¬ man’s cabinet of coins was largely faddish in the seventeenth cen¬ tury, it was useful to scholars in England and France in their chronological skirmishes. In the years following Newton’s death the French chronologists were particularly skillful in belaboring the grand astronomical conceptions of the Master of the Mint with the solid contradictory data they had assembled in the aristocratic 44

A CHRISTIAN CHRONOLOGIST coin collections to which they had access. In Newton’s library there were about a dozen works on the history of ancient coins, Greek, Roman, Hebrew, and French — there was a Oiselius, an Hardouin, and a Reland — but he resorted to numismatic evidence only for corroboration. Though he was acquainted with the brilliant epigraphical reconstruction of Greek chronology by John Selden, who had first published the Parian marble, he tended to shy away from this type of historiography when, in his judgment, the archaeo¬ logical fragments had described events that were not contem¬ poraneous. As for diplomatics, a form of knowledge dramatically initiated by Lorenzo Valla, Newton was more respectful; he con¬ sulted the works of its great seventeenth-century practitioner Jean Mabillon in connection with the authentication of early medieval Biblical texts; and it is probable that he once owned the copy of the 1704 supplement of De Re Diplomatica now in the Babson Institute. But while he had occasional recourse to these technical aids to dating he continued to show a preference for plain “literary” historians when he could not bring the certainties of mathematics or astronomy into play. The marginal notes of the Chronology il¬ lustrate this predilection. Occasionally a Newton manuscript records the names of addi¬ tional works of erudition to which he had access though they did not find their way into his library. The King’s College commonplace book from his Cambridge days is replete with quotations from the Church Fathers, religious disputations ancient and modern, and passages on “Religio ethnica,” proof of his early absorption in many of the historical problems which preoccupied him throughout his life.16 On its first page there is a list of seventy-three “Historici,” some of them with Trinity College shelf-marks, not all of which are on Huggins’ list. The group — “historici” is defined very broadly — included most of the historians in the classical corpus, medieval writers such as Isidore of Seville and Matthew Paris, and the Renais¬ sance historian Guicciardini. His favorite “modern” historian seems to have been Carlo Sigonio, whose works are often referred to in the Observations upon the Prophecies,17 There are a number of important catalogues which hint at still other intellectual influences upon the development of Newton’s view of the historical world. Of these a manuscript at the Bodleian Li45

ISAAC NEWTON, HISTORIAN brary in Oxford, inscribed “A Catalogue of the bookes of Dr. Isaac Barrow sent to S.S. by Mr. Isaac Newton Fellow of Trin. Coll. Camb. July 14, 1677; obiit Dr. Barrow Maii 4, 1677,” 18 is of particular in¬ terest. While in a general way it contains the same type of literature as Newton’s library, in all fields there are significant works con¬ spicuously absent from the Huggins list which do appear in the Barrow catalogue — above all Spinoza’s Tractatus Theologico-politicus (without the author’s name); Hobbes’ De Cive and De Honl¬ ine; Pascal’s Pensees; Bodin’s Republic; the writings of Machiavelli; the Mythology of Natalis Comes. There were scholastics in Barrow’s collection, not in Newton’s. While there is no certainty that Newton read these books, he may well have thumbed them through. Locke’s library, for which a number of different catalogues exist, has perhaps less direct bearing, but the closeness of their intellectual relationship in the nineties makes it useful in approaching Newton’s Church his¬ tories. Sylvester Brownover’s catalogue of Locke’s books in 1693 with additions in Locke’s hand up to 1697 19 also included Spinoza’s Tractatus (reflections of which appear in Newton’s Biblical criti¬ cism), Filmer’s Patriarcha (important for “The Original of Monar¬ chies” ), and a great many of the more radical deists such as Blount and Toland, who are not in Huggins’ list. Hobbes’ Leviathan and Bayle’s Dictionary of 1697 are other works owned by Locke which Newton did not admit into his own collection, but whose ideas may have penetrated orally.20 If one were to guess at a source which in the last decades of Newton’s life served as a handy reference book for the ancient “oriental” and Greek historians, it would be the erudite Louis Ellies Du Pin’s Bibliotheque Universelle des historiens, contenant leurs vies, Vabrege, la chronologie, la geographie, et la critique de leurs histoires, of which Newton owned the Amsterdam 1708 edition (it had originally appeared in Paris in 1706; the English translation was published in London in 1709). While its subtitle promised Oriental, Greek, Latin, French, German, Spanish, Italian, English, and other historians, it did not get beyond Alexander; and except for long ex¬ cerpts from Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophon, and Ctesias, it is a sort of descriptive dictionary of historiography. Here all the an¬ cient historians were conveniently catalogued by nation, with sepa¬ rate sections on the historians of Egypt, Chaldea, Phoenicia, and 46

A CHRISTIAN CHRONOLOGIST India; and the estimates of Du Pin and Newton usually coincide. This does not mean that Newton failed to consult major sources directly, but for many minor writers Du Pin’s compilation seems to have served. Similarly, while Newton’s collection of patristic writ¬ ings was extensive, the seventh volume of Marguerin de La Bigne’s Bibliothecae veterum patrum et auctorum ecclesiasticorum tomi novem (Paris, 1624), which Newton owned, was a compendium of passages from the Fathers on chronology and universal history to which he often turned.21 Spanning the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries, Newton experienced revolutionary intellectual change, but he is not to be envisioned as a man in the vanguard of all developments in knowl¬ edge. There are areas of science in which he is the great innovator, others in which he synthesizes already formulated conceptions; but much of his learning and erudition and many of his historical ideas look backward to the polyhistors and Bible commentators of the mid-seventeenth century rather than forward to the new histori¬ ography. The spirit which animated the works of Newton the Christian chronologist is of even more ancient lineage. The canon of Eusebius, expanded into a world vision by Augustine, had remained — with sectarian variations to be sure — the pattern of historical time for all Christendom, for Bossuet in his Histoire universelle as well as for a host of English divines writing “concordancies.” Despite New¬ ton’s doctrinal distance from the Trinitarian Latin Fathers, the City of God (from which there are excerpts in his commonplace books) found a powerful reverberation in his writings. Newton may quote the ante-Nicene Fathers by ecclesiastical preference, but the Augustinian image of the two cities with their two histories, sometimes separated from each other and sometimes intertwined, still pro¬ vides a sturdy historical frame. The apologetic purpose, modified to suit the times, was as vital with Newton as it had been with Augus¬ tine. Many other elements common to both can readily be dis¬ covered — above all, the movement of the unified progression. New¬ ton too has an exortus, a procursus, and debiti fines: no inkling of a pagan or Renaissance conception of historical cycles intrudes. The Chronology of Ancient Kingdoms Amended dealt circumstantially with the earthly city before Christ; the interpretations of the prophe47

ISAAC NEWTON, HISTORIAN cies, with the corruptions of men after the foundation of the Church. Together they formed one world history that was destined to cul¬ minate in the triumph of the city of God. If Newton’s published Chronology is collated with his hundreds of manuscript folios laboriously accumulated over a period of half a century, an intricate structure founded upon a series of diversified proofs emerges. Unfortunately the reasoned demonstrations of his principles are scattered rather haphazardly through a work which is almost devoid of form; it has none of the elegant rigor of the Princi'pia. Newton ordinarily resorted to two alternative methods of presentation, both of which served only to obscure further his central thesis: either he drew up tables of dates which listed the re¬ sults of his revolutionary theory without comment, or he composed rambling narrative histories of the major empires of antiquity in which his postulates became lost in a thick jungle of irrelevant detail. Isolating the various proofs therefore involves putting an order into his work which is conspicuously absent in the printed Chronology. In the eighteenth century Newton’s outstanding critics, the Jesuit Father Souciet, the French Academician Freret, and the rejected disciple William Whiston, performed this service for polemi¬ cal purposes in their voluminous attacks on Newton’s chronology. But it would be pointless to imitate their demolition of his system, even though their diatribes display extraordinary rational acumen and much learning. Since we enjoy the advantage of having New¬ ton’s manuscripts, we can make an attempt to penetrate the work¬ ings of this amazing intelligence as it wandered about in the thickets of ancient history. The confutation of the system is assumed. Newton’s argument can be roughly divided into three parts. First there is a trenchant critique of the ancient chronologists, par¬ ticularly the Alexandrians, who are upbraided for their erroneous calculations and their ignorance of fact. Then there are proofs based upon astronomy which fix a number of dates as certain — the heart of the system, for here his scientific reputation was at stake: if his physical theories were true they should be as effective in identifying past astronomical events as they were in predicting them for the future. Finally, the whole chronology of ancient kingdoms is recast through a synthesis of the literary evidence garnered from poets, dramatists, compilers, genealogists, historians, theologians, and above 48

A CHRISTIAN CHRONOLOGIST all from what Newton extolled as the oldest document of mankind, the Scriptures. Throughout, Biblical chronology remained the touch¬ stone, incontrovertible, by which all heathen chronologies were tested. Literary evidence was used also to develop an argument based upon “nature,” by which in this context Newton meant a statistical summary of average human experience, as when he writes in one place that forty-five years to a generation is “much too long for the course of nature.”22 The condition of the manuscripts makes it impossible to de¬ termine which of three or four procedures he embarked upon first. Did astronomical dating introduce or follow literary evidence? In all probability the various investigations were conducted more or less simultaneously and stretched over decades. If erudite studies were a form of relaxation from his scientific researches, he had frequent recourse to them and he continually reverted to them throughout his long life. Together the various types of evidence constituted a remarkable body of mutually corroborating proofs: there was negative argument, the rebuttal of rival chronologies; positive literary argument abounding in etymological inventions and euhemerist interpretations of myth; and at least three different types of positive astronomical argument. The reasoning is as power¬ ful as in his scientific works, and the scholarship is painstaking and accurate. All that is missing is a measure of skepticism about the absolute factual validity of the literary remains from antiquity. The faith of a precisianist Puritan in the unimpeachable truth of the Bible was carried over — on selected occasions at least — to profane classical texts, and when this happened Newton treated mere liter¬ ary tradition as empirical scientific reality. The truths of the Bibli¬ cal revelation, of astronomical science, and of heathen literature were assimilated to one another. The underlying preconceptions of Newton’s chronological method were not unique with him; they were common among con¬ temporaries. The fatal defects in his system are not hard to find in the light of modern textual criticism — it would be supererogatory to dwell upon them — but for all its flaws the Newtonian reconstruc¬ tion of chronology has a grandeur of its own. Built upon shifting verbal sands and doomed to collapse, it is a magnificent rationalist delusion. 49

CHAPTER III The False Chronologists Routed

I

N the Chronology Newton’s general view of history is enveloped by clouds of dry-as-dust narrative of events in the ancient kingdoms of Egypt, Phoenicia, Assyria, Babylonia, Persia, Greece, and Rome. To a casual peruser of the ponderous book, Newton appears to be stringing together random historical facts which remained stored in his prodigious memory after decades of assiduous reading in Greek and Latin poets and historians and in the Church Fathers, with their citations from lost Egyptian, Baby¬ lonian, Persian, and Phoenician histories and their extensive frag¬ ments of Byzantine compilers. In the Observations upon the Proph¬ ecies the historical data are augmented by information drawn from the historical and prophetic books of the Old Testament, the Apocrypha, and the New Testament, supplemented by commen¬ taries from the rabbis of the Talmud, the Church Fathers, and even the heterodox seventeenth-century founders of the higher criticism. The only significant piece of archaeological evidence cited by New¬ ton is that of the Parian marble in the Earl of Arundel’s collection, which John Selden had first translated and which Humphrey Prideaux, Newton’s contemporary, had republished. But in spite of the rather promiscuous manner in which Newton juxtaposed facts from sources of diverse periods, he by no means bestowed equal worth upon his historical informants. By the stand¬ ards of late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century historiog¬ raphy Newton was a critical historian who appraised his materials. In fact, as a preliminary or a complement to the elaboration of his new system of chronology it was incumbent upon him to discredit the old. The Short Chronicle and the final Chronology both disparage the ancient chronologists. The unpublished papers in the New 50

THE FALSE CHRONOLOGISTS ROUTED College collection are interspersed with so many virulent attacks against the historians and genealogists of antiquity who had laid the foundation for the chronologies of the moderns that it is possible to abstract from Newton’s writings a fairly consistent canon of his¬ torical criticism and to illustrate it with examples from his evalua¬ tions of historical sources. Newton did not, of course, abide by his own rules; when possessed by the spirit of his system he was not averse to resorting to “poetical fancies” for evidence, a practice he would ordinarily condemn in others. He drew upon satirical, even licentious, passages in writers such as Lucian for historical examples with the same dead seriousness (the man did not have a trace of humor) with which he quoted a Church Father. Ovid’s description of early Rome in the Fasti was for him of equal weight with Diony¬ sius of Halicarnassus’ Roman Antiquities. Yet despite flagrant lapses his analysis of historical sources is often quite refined. He even uses a comparative method, as when he lines up contradictory evidence on Egyptian dynasties in a table before he makes a final decision.1 Not content with merely pointing out the errors and falsifications of his predecessors, he made inquiry into the causes of their mistakes and into the motives behind the deceptions they perpetrated. In his fashion Newton too had a historical Methodus. When in a mood of critical awareness, Newton respected only two types of literary testimony: accounts by historians contempo¬ rary with the events they described — Herodotus and Thucydides, for example — facts about which they were presumed to have direct and immediate knowledge; and summaries by historians who had access to records and monuments of earlier times from which they copied their information. When Newton quotes from historians who actually saw inscriptions on monuments or knew those who saw them he makes a point of it. “And Strabo, an eye-witness, tells us . . . ”;2 “And Tacitus tells us, from an inscription seen at Thebes by Caesar Germanicus . . .”;3 “And Abydenus, who had his history from the ancient monuments of the Chaldeans, writes”;4 “Josephus relates out of the Tyrian records . . .”5 He was extremely wary of reports of mere “traditions,” because historians who used them had not themselves examined the evidence. This explains why he fa¬ vored Herodotus over Manetho: “At that time Artaxerxes Ochus carried away all the records of the Egyptians & Manetho about 80 51

ISAAC NEWTON, HISTORIAN years after wrote his history of the kings of Egypt, wch has since been altered by Africanus. And therefore I have relied more on the account wch Herodotus received from the records themselves kept in the Temples of Egypt & recited to him by the priests an hundred years before those records were carried away by Ochus.”6 So stringent a criterion of historical criticism wiped out all the ancient chronologies, based as they were on “reasoning and conjecture,” 7 not empirical facts. Such chronologies were in Newton’s mind akin to metaphysical systems, and he denounced them with the zeal of a prophet destroying idols. Though he never openly entered the lists against the great chronological worthies of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (there is no frontal assault on either Scaliger or Petau, or Marsham, Ussher, or Dodwell) or challenged contemporaries who, following in their footsteps, were publishing synchronisms of world history, he was really aiming his volleys against them even when he appeared to be attacking the ancients. Newton preferred to go back to the fons et origo of modern errors, and before he was through hardly a single important, generally accepted date of Gentile history prior to Darius was left unassailed. Among the historians and chronologists of each of the ancient empires Newton had his favorite betes noires, and his choices were often perceptive: for Egypt the priest Manetho, who had flourished in the reign of Ptolemy Philadelphus (285-247 b.c. ) and had compiled a long list of Egyptian dynasties in Greek; for Babylonia the Chaldean priests like Berosus who had paraded the antiquity of their false annals; for Greece the Keeper of the Alexandrian Library, Eratosthenes (c. 275-194 b.c.), and his fol¬ lower Apollodorus. Thus Newton took a radical though somewhat indirect approach: he undermined the validity of the ancient chro¬ nologists whom all the moderns had copied. There were many ways of refuting the lies of the ancients: proving that the chronologists had lived long after the events they reported and were in no position to know the facts; demonstrating that the art of writing, astronomy, and the calendar, upon all of which accurate chronology depended, were relatively late inven¬ tions among mankind — which immediately wiped out the possi¬ bility of true reckoning much before 1100 b.c., when alphabetic writing was supposed to have been invented, the starting-point for 52

THE FALSE CHRONOLOG1STS ROUTED Newton’s own Abstract of Chronology; showing that certain chronologists and historians were prejudiced or had fallen into vulgar errors about human nature. Newton used all of these techniques to polemize with his ancient rivals on their own terms. In reserve he kept the big cannon which delivered the deadliest shots: proof that the ancient chronologists were in contradiction both to Scrip¬ tures and to the new astronomy. The argument that writing was a comparatively recent acquisi¬ tion should itself have sufficed to destroy the more fantastic Egyptian and Near Eastern chronologies. “And while the world was but thinly peopled & letters were not yet in use an exact account of particular kingdoms is not to be expected for want of sufficient records.” 8 Since, as we shall see, Newton traced the invention of writing to the Ishmaelites inhabiting the Red Sea area about the time of Moses, and the first diffusion of the art among the Gentiles to the time of David about the eleventh century b.c., no certain historical dates were possible before this period. Newton is obviously contesting the reports in Pliny’s Natural History that Eastern his¬ torians believed the alphabet to be tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands, of years old.9 That merely oral reports of historical events could not be trans¬ mitted with any degree of accuracy for more than about a century was one of Newton’s fundamental assumptions, which appeared and reappeared in the manuscripts in a wide variety of forms. “We find by daily experience that the memory of such things as are not committed to writing, wears out in three or four generations.” 10 “Chronologers make the kingdoms of Sicyon & Germany above 1000 years older than the first use of letters in the reign of David.” 11 “Could the history of Athens be preserved for 500 years together without the use of letters?” 12 “Before the use of letters, the names and actions of men could scarce be remembered above eighty or an hundred years after their deaths & therefore I allow no history of things done in Europe above 80 years before Cadmus brought letters into Greece; no history of things done in Germany before the rise of the Roman Empire.” 13 “And some have made the Antiqui¬ ties of Sicyon, Aegypt, Chaldaea, Assyria, & Germany above a thousand years older then the use of the first letter.”14 Earlier epochs were what he called the “dark ages,” and national histories 53

ISAAC NEWTON, HISTORIAN of what had occurred during these nebulous times were prima facie false. This skepticism about the validity of any historical account which purported to cover a period substantially prior to the invention of alphabetic writing became so axiomatic with Newton that it led to the most peculiar inferences; for example, if actions are “remem¬ bered” it is proof that they occurred not long before the crucial date of the discovery of writing, which separates history from non¬ history. “Dionysius wrote ye history of Bacchus & the Amazons, the Argonautic expedition & the things done at Troy, that is he wrote the history of the Greeks beginning with the expedition of Bacchus & the Amazons, proceeding to the expedition of ye Argonauts. . . . And therefore this Bacchus flourished in the times next before ye Argonautic expedition & was contemporary to Sesostris. Had he been much older his actions would not have been remembered for want of ye use of letters.” 15 Even the chronology of nations fortunate enough to have once possessed written annals of their early history was usually suspect, because most records of remote epochs had been destroyed in the course of the numerous wars in which peoples engaged. “What were the genuine records of Egypt, Chaldaea, & Persia before the Assyrians invaded them is unknown. Herodotus, Megasthenes, Berosus & Manetho were the oldest historians of the Greeks Persians Chaldaeans & Egyptians & what they say of those nations before the beginning of the Olympiads is confused & obscure.” 16 Newton was especially doubtful about chronological traditions which professed to date events anterior to major conflagrations. If the report of the accidental burning of his own manuscripts be true, fire would have appeared to him a cause of widespread destruction of ancient records. Early Roman chronology was wiped out when the records were burned during the invasion of the Celts. Sometimes Newton peremptorily eliminated the possibility of any early Roman history. “But the Romans having no historian during the first 400 years of their city I forbear to meddle further with their original antiquity.” 17 The pretensions of the Chinese to great antiquity, which the Jesuit missionaries were spreading about Europe, were not plausible be¬ cause, Newton had learned from the writings of Pere Philippe Couplet, in the reign of Xi Hoan ti (sic) all the scholarly works of 54

THE FALSE CHRONOLOGISTS ROUTED previous generations had been put to the torch at the Emperor’s command.18 The errors of the Hellenistic chronologers Eratosthenes and Apollodorus, the major felons in corrupting world chronology (“Eratosthenes wrote about an hundred years after the death of Alexander the great. He was followed by Apollodorus & these two have been followed ever since by Chronologers”),19 were inspired by wrong reasoning rather than by national pride, and Newton pinpointed their mistakes. They had taken the undated lists of kings in ancient records and traditions and had bestowed upon each reign a conventional value in terms of years. “They began to set down the generations, reigns & successions in numbers of years & by putting reigns & successions equipollent to generations and three generations to an hundred or 120 years (as appears by their chro¬ nology) they have made the antiquities of Greece three or four hundred years older then the truth. And this was the original of the technical Chronology.” 20 Their reasoning was, however, con¬ trary to nature. With an array of statistical data covering kingships in all times and places — the elaborate tables of computations are among the New College manuscripts — Newton arrived at the irref¬ utable conclusion that, on the average, kings did not reign more than twenty years.21 The count of three generations to a century was appropriate enough for estimating normal human life ex¬ perience, he conceded, but kings did not enjoy this good fortune, for they were subject to assassination, tumults, and violence, and brothers and uncles succeeded as well as sons, leading to shorter reigns. Whatever the causes, the mathematically abstracted facts of experience had to control, and once Newton’s law of the dura¬ tion of the average royal reign was accepted, any Greek chronology based on the Eratosthenes formula had to be reduced by a ratio of at least seven to four. He had computed the total reigns of the seventeen Spartan kings from the return of the Heraclidae to Ther¬ mopylae to be 622 years, “which is after the rate of 36^2 years to a reign,” 22 a flagrant error which pushed back into antiquity the date for the Heraclidae, for Hercules, and for all the events with which the name of Hercules was associated, not least among them the Argonautic expedition. “Apollodorus wrote his chronology about 200 years after the death of Alexander & Diodorus his history about 55

ISAAC NEWTON, HISTORIAN 60 years after that & yet in all this time Chronologers could frame nothing certain about the times before the Trojan war, nothing more certain about the times between that war & the Olympiads then by computing from the kings of the Lacedemonians that is from their numbers by making a reasonable allowance for the length of so many reigns.” 23 Similarly the traditional chronology of the early kings of Rome “can scarce be reconciled to the course of nature: for I do not meet with any instance in all history, since chronology was certain, wherein seven kings, most of whom were slain, reigned 244 years in continual succession.” 24 Other sources of Greek history were equally faulty. Of what validity were the dates of early Greek history incised on the Parian marble when it had been composed sixty years after the death of Alexander, and its authors had moreover falsely measured the reigns of kings as equipollent to generations? 25 As for the reckoning of the Olympiads, the first sixty or seventy of them were summarily dis¬ posed of by Newton because they had been framed long after the events described. Moreover, the Parian marble, itself a tardy pro¬ duction, had not even mentioned the Olympiads. With a wave of the pen Newton dismissed any genealogists or historians who com¬ posed verse, since poetry was by definition untrue. Pherecydes Atheniensis, who wrote prose in the reign of Darius Hystaspis, was the first European genealogus whom Newton respected. What is, however, so baffling about Newton’s abuse of the Greek chronologists and historians is that despite his contempt for their dates he is willing to accept the genealogical tables of Greek mythology as chains of human generations with all the authority of real history. He drew up mammoth lists of gods and heroes as he would the genealogy of royal houses, and he never quarreled much with reports of succession in any Greek source, poetic or historical;26 fixated on the problem of dating the personages, at no time did he raise the prior question of their very existence. Newton’s euhemerism prevailed over his historical skepticism. As with many men of over¬ powering genius, two characters, a critical doubter and a true believer, lived together in the same mind. In the manuscripts Newton remarked upon another vice of those whom he had dubbed the artificial chronologists: “The Europeans have also raised their originals by making collateral kings successive 56

THE FALSE CHRONOLOGISTS ROUTED & sometimes by dividing one king into two.”27 Similarly, while drawing up their dynastic lists, priests like Manetho had a penchant for reporting the same reign twice under different names — “they doubled the persons of men” — and thus they inflated the duration of ancient kingdoms. When Newton, following Josephus and the seventeenth-century chronologist John Marsham, identified the Egyptian king Sesostris as the Biblical Sesac in another form, he was “undoubling” the royal personages and lowering the antiquity of Egypt. “It is further to be observed that the kings are often set down in a wrong order & their names corrupted & repeated again and again & intertwined with the names of other great men & women who were only the relations of kings or their viceroys or secretaries of state.”28 Another priestly trick was the stretching out into successive dynasties for the whole of Egypt of contemporaneous local kings whose domains never extended beyond a single city, “whereby Egypt was made one Monarchy older than ye world.” 29 “Which makes it probable that a great part of Manethos kings reigned in several parts before the days of Ammon & Sesac when Egypt was divided into several small kingdoms & that the Priests of Egypt out of the Records of their several cities collected the kings of all these kingdoms into one continual succession to make the ages of their gods look ancient.” 30 Newton’s verdict was peremp¬ tory. “The Dynasties of Eratosthenes & Manetho seem too confused to be reduced into good order.”31 In a like manner “Ctesias has distorted ye history by making it almost 300 years older then it was & giving the feigned names to ye kings of ye Medes & commander of the Babylonians who overthrew that city for he feigned names at pleasure & made all things too ancient.”32 Manetho’s list of dynasties and their kings is still used by Egyp¬ tologists as the conventional framework for Egyptian history, though his dating has been completely revamped by modern archaeology. In the late seventeenth century, passages from Manetho quoted by Josephus in his polemic against Apion and by the Fathers Julius Africanus and Eusebius in their commentaries on Josephus were a major source of information on Egyptian antiquities, along with Herodotus, Hecataeus, Strabo, Chaeremon, and Plutarch. In New¬ ton’s eyes Manetho was one of the chief fabricators. “Concerning the Dynasties of Manetho it may be observed that there is nothing in

57

ISAAC NEWTON, HISTORIAN them which appears as old as Moses.” 33 And in this instance New¬ ton even adopted from Josephus Manetho’s motivation: “Manetho out of ill-will to ye Jews seems to have feigned some things.” Stories told to Herodotus by earlier Egyptian priests — about the age of the Temple of Vulcan, for example — he repudiated on the grounds of commonsense experience. “By consequence that this Temple stood eleven thousand years before the kings of Egypt began to build the Porticos thereof. Whereas I never yet heard of any temple that stood two thousand years.” 34 There is one important ancient chronological source, the Kanon basileion or Canon of Ptolemy, listing all the kings from the era Nabonassar beginning in 747 b.c. and the eras of Philippus, Cyrus, and Augustus, which Newton seems to neglect; he refers to it a few times but never treats it critically.35 This unwonted forbearance on Newton’s part is perhaps to be explained by the fact that his animus was directed primarily against those chronologists who had cor¬ rupted the history of the “earliest times”; the Canon escaped be¬ cause it was relatively late and was acceptable for the chronology of the kings of Babylon. Above any other ancient literary source Newton valued the histories of the Old Testament. “For writing was in use among the Israelites in the days of Moses & perhaps some ages before wch consideration alone is sufficient to give a reputation to the sacred history much above the histories of Manetho, Berossus, Ctesias, Herodotus, Megasthenes, Diodorus, Sanconiatho, or any other heathen historians.” Repeatedly Newton asserted that the Scrip¬ tures “are by far the oldest records now extant.”36 On numerous occasions he stressed that the chief motive behind his revision of Gentile chronology was to bring it into harmony with the Biblical evidence. Did it “tally with sacred history”? was always his first question.37 The accepted chronology of ancient kingdoms, which contradicted these histories, had to be false. The essential technical superiority of Hebrew over Greek early history lay in the fact that in the time before the Persian Empire the Greeks counted only by generations of kings, “& it is not to be expected that their records alone can furnish us with any exacter sort of recconing,” while the Hebrews always had a “chronology by yeare.”38 However, Newton’s deep reverence for Biblical history 58

THE FALSE CHRONOLOGISTS ROUTED did not derive from the fact that it was divine revelation. He was wont to make a rather sharp distinction between the books of prophecy proper, which were revealed, and the histories, which were composed. The prophetic persons of the compilers of the historical works, men like Moses, Samuel, and Ezra, lent them authority, but the writings ascribed to them were, Newton believed, drawn from still older records and books, now lost, to which they had had access. Newton departed from the more orthodox belief that every letter in the Bible was inspired, and he allowed himself to rove over the perilous seas of Biblical criticism, adopting ideas from contempo¬ raries such as the Catholic Richard Simon and the Huguenot Jean Le Clerc, whose works were in his library, though using the tools of exegesis and criticism with complete independence — venturing con¬ jectures about the authorship of various books in the Biblical canon and about the time of their composition with a freedom which would have outraged his high ecclesiastical friends if they had ever seen his manuscripts. Qua histories, the Biblical chronicles were human documents, and he treated them as such. Toward the end of the Chronology he even allowed himself to “adjust” slightly the record of events in Ezra and Nehemiah. One version of his supposi¬ tions about the authorship of various books of the Old Testament was published posthumously in 1733 as the first chapter (“Introduc¬ tion concerning the Compilers of the Books of the Old Testament”) — rather out of place — of the Observations upon the Prophecies. Similar passages in the New College manuscripts are equally daring flights of “higher criticism”: Where the Pentateuch ends the book of Joshua begins and where this book ends the book of Judges begins. These three books are one con¬ tinued history from the creation down to the death of Sampson and therefore were written by one and the same author after the death of Sampson the last of the Judges. They were compiled out ancient records one of which was the book of Joshua (Jos. 10.13)for this book was in be¬ ing at the death of Saul, 1 Sam 1.18. In the book of the Judges several things are said to be done when there was no king in Israel (Judg. 17.6 & 18.1 & 19.1 & 21.25) & therefore this book was composed after the be¬ ginning of the reign of Saul. When it was written the Jebusite dwelt in Jerusalem (Judg. 1.21) & therefore it was written before the eighth year of David’s reign. And since it contains the history of Israel down to the end of the reign of the Judges it seems to have been written on occasion of the change of the government & by consequence by Samuel in the days 59

ISAAC NEWTON, HISTORIAN of Saul. For at that time he wrote the book of Ruth as an introduction to the history of David, & is reputed the author of the first book of Samuel. . . . They judge well therefore who ascribe to Samuel the books of Joshuah, Judges, and Ruth. The Books of Samuel & Kings are one continuous history of Israel down from the days of Samuel to the Babylonian captivity. The Books of Kings & Chronicles are of things contemporary & end together with the Babylonian captivity & cite one another & therefore were written at once by one & the same author. . . . The book of Ezra was originally a part of the book of Chronicles and has been divided. . . . Out of the Acts of the Kings written from time to time by Samuel & the Prophets he [Ezra] composed the books of Samuel & the kings of Israel & Judah & the Chronicles of the kings of Judah & the chronicles of the kings of Israel. And in doing this he joyned those Acts together in due order. . . . But the originalls out of which these books were extracted, are lost. Samuel wrote before Cadmus brought Letters into Europe & Ezra wrote before Herodotus & these authors extracted their histories out Records written long before their own days & therefore the histories composed by them are by far the oldest as well as the most authentic being originally written by Moses & the prophets.39 Newton was a virtual “Hobbist” in his contention that the exist¬ ing text of the Pentateuch was written by Samuel rather than Moses; despite this deviation, however, his purpose was not to denigrate the worth of Biblical history but rather to demonstrate its marked superiority over any other historical records from an¬ tiquity. The Hebrew books were preserved with relative accuracy from the time of their composition because, beginning with Jehosaphat, they were read regularly in synagogues on the Sabbath. The excellence of the records of the Jews lay in the fact that they were the most easily controlled; the history of the documents was the best proof of their veracity. Newton does not rely as much upon their inspiration — even though prophets like Samuel and Ezra wrote them — as upon the uninterrupted chain of their transmis¬ sion. “The Records of the Jews have above all others escaped the shipwreck of time.” 40 The histories of the Jews had also been subject to mutilation when the temple was profaned and books of laws were destroyed. “The Israelites fell into great troubles several times & every time their worship was interrupted & their Antiquities scattered.”41 But in comparison with the Gentiles they were fortunate. Only the

60

THE FALSE CHRONOLOGISTS ROUTED intervention of a beneficent God could explain the unique fate of Jewish histories. “They have been frequently in danger but by Providence have escaped. . . .”42 Moses had originally written a history of the Creation, a book of the generations of Adam, the book of the law. “But all these have been long since lost except what has been transcribed out of them in the Pentateuch now extant. When the Philistines took the Ark the book of the law was lost out of it: ffor when the Ark was brought into the Temple of Solomon there was nothing in it but the two tables of stone.” For this critical reason inter alia Newton was obliged to hazard the heterodox assignment to Samuel of the canonical version of the early books of the Bible. Even the Old Testament texts as drafted by Samuel and Ezra had not been maintained absolutely intact throughout the ages. They too were subject to errors introduced by scribes and to the infiltration of what were originally marginal notes into the body of the writings. Thus the Massoretic version that the Jews finally fixed upon was not completely free from corruption, though nothing could now be done about its purification. In the Observations upon the Prophecies Newton wrote, “After the Roman captivity, the Jews for preserving their traditions, put them in writing in their Talmud; and for preserving their scriptures, agreed upon an Edition, and pointed it [that is, added the Massoretic points, the vowels], and counted the letters of every sort in every book: and by preserving only this Edition, the antienter various lections, except what can be dis¬ covered by means of the Septuagint Version are now lost; and such marginal notes, or other corruptions, as by the errors of the tran¬ scribers, before this Edition was made, had crept into the text are now scarce to be corrected.”43 Again the inference to be drawn from all this criticism was not how spoiled the histories of the Jews were but, a fortiori, how infinitely vitiated must be the works of any other people which did not enjoy the care bestowed upon Biblical texts and the protection of a divine Providence. Compared to the histories of the Jews, the annals of other nations were highly suspect because they had all suffered from the devastations of war. Newton described the evil fortune of these Gentile records in a manner which, for him at least, is almost emotive. “The eastern nations kept annals of their publick acts very early, instances of which we have

61

ISAAC NEWTON, HISTORIAN in the Annals of Tyre mentioned by Josephus & in the Acts of the Assyrians & Babylonian Empires mentioned by Ezra eh. 4. But those ancient records by means of various warrs & revolutions have been long since lost. The Egyptians have been conquered successively by the Ethiopians, Assyrians Babylonians & Persians, & all their Records at length carried away by Cambyses. The Assyrians conquered the nations round about & were conquered by the Medes & Babylonians & the Babylonians by the Medes & they by the Persians & they by the Greeks & Saracens. The Tyrians were conquered by the Baby¬ lonians, Persians & Greeks & their annals coming into the hands of the Greeks were translated into ye Greek language but both the translation & Originals are lost. The annals of Carthage fell into the hand of the Romans but are lost.”44 As for the New Testament text, Newton was more aware of downright falsification in its canon than of error. A large part of Newton’s activity which has usually been labeled “theological” was really devoted to a criticism and a comparative study of scores of New Testament texts (based on polyglot Bibles and manuscripts), especially those verses which had Trinitarian implications. In the two letters to Jean Le Clerc published in the eighteenth century and in a “Third Letter” included in the recently published third volume of his Correspondence Newton devoted himself to exposing the pious frauds which the Athanasians and later Catholic editors of the apostles had introduced into the Gospels. There are manu¬ script passages in which Newton’s suspicion of the existing text of the New Testament grows so strong that he prefers the witness of the Old — particularly with respect to prophecies about the coming of Christ: “And since Christ set on foot the Christian religion by explaining to his Apostles the prophecies concerning himself in Moses ... & sending them to teach his interpretations to others, if any question at any time arise concerning his interpretations we are to beware of Philosophy & vain deceipt & oppositions of science falsly so called & to have recourse to the Old Testament & compare the places explained with the explanations thereof.” 45 Newton’s reading of the Bible illustrated in the fragments and in the Chronology requires some comment. In his last years a copy of the Bible, eyewitnesses report, was always before him.46 At the end of Huggins’ catalogue there appears an agreement that New-

62

THE FALSE CHRONOLOGISTS ROUTED ton’s annotated 1660 edition of the Bible, described as “Dirty” in the sales contract, should not be included in the transfer of his library. Bibles in many languages, traditional Biblical commen¬ taries, and Biblical criticism formed one of the important categories in his collection.47 The Newtonian method of interpretation was the traditional rabbinic one — of course patristic too, for the Fathers derived from the rabbis — but it was not in disharmony with the prevalent scientific spirit. The common rule of Talmudic interpreta¬ tion that the Torah does not use words to excess, that each affirmation is the most parsimonious and exact form of expression, and that every verbal emphasis must have a specific meaning which excludes peripheral connotations, is the exegetical law which Newton ob¬ served in commenting upon the Biblical histories. Newton also looked with favor upon the Phoenician historians, especially when he contrasted them with the Greeks. Such frag¬ ments of their annals as had been preserved in Josephus or the Church Fathers were treated by Newton as authentic contemporary records, almost, though not quite, on a par with the histories in the Bible. “The Phoenician historians were very ancient & consulted the ancienter records of their country as is manifest by what is here cited out of them & by what Josephus cites of Menander & therefore they deserve much more to be credited then the Chronologers of Greece who were neither ancient nor had ancient annals to consult, nor agree with one another.” In the end Newton reduced the ancient historical sources which were in any way reliable to a mere handful: “These [Biblical histories] are the oldest historical books now extant & the only books well with the Chronological canon of Ptolomy & the books of Tobit, Judith, Herodotus, Thucydides, the Annals of Tyre & Carthage, & what has been taken from ancient monuments & records by Diodorus, Strabo, Pausanias, Josephus, & a few others, can give us light into ye history & chronology of the first ages down to the reign of Darius king of Persia.” 48 When Newton dealt with other literary documents from antiquity his criteria of historical criticism often became so rigid and his standards so lofty that he bordered on Pyrrhonism, an attitude not uncommon in English and French learned circles toward the end of the seventeenth century. But such extreme skepticism, though it appears from time to time, was not really Newton’s way. He saved himself from this posi-

63

ISAAC NEWTON, HISTORIAN tion by accepting the history and chronology of the Bible through the books of Ezra and Nehemiah and then continuing the record with the astronomical evidence as “stated by Eclipses of the O & D mentioned by Thucydides & Ptolemy.”49 Moreover, the very in¬ adequacies of the historical literature and the paucity of the ancient records served to increase the worth of his new method of astronom¬ ical dating. He was leveling ground to build anew. “The best way to come to any certainty therefore is to begin with the later times when history & Chronology is certain & reason upwards, as high as we can proceed by good arguments.”50 This certainty Newton achieved with his “System.”

64

CHAPTER IV A Demonstration of Astronomical Dating

T

HE astronomical proofs of Newton’s revision of chronology center upon the determination of three ancient dates, among which the precise timing of the Argonautic expedition is the crucial one. It occupied Newton’s interest for at least the last thirty or forty years of his life. The other astronomical proofs concerned the year of King Amenophis’ death and the period when Hesiod flourished. The establishment of King Amenophis’ reign is adequately treated in the Chronology, and the manuscripts merely present variant forms of the same argument. Newton’s astronomical elaboration upon a verse in Hesiod describing the star Arcturus is virtually incomprehensible as it stands in the published Chronology, and the manuscripts have failed to clarify it further. Here Newton nodded. Only his dating of the Argonauts is worthy of investigation in depth with the aid of the New College manuscripts, though even in this instance it is not possible to establish the historical sequence of the various elements in his demonstration without resorting to conjecture. No doubt Newton operated in this area of knowledge as he did in mathematics and in physics: he arrived at his conclu¬ sions intuitively, as William Whiston observed, and only later re¬ luctantly devised the proofs. The astronomical dating of the Argonautic expedition was founded upon the insight that an accurately measured precession of the equinoxes could serve as the key to scientific chronology. To apply his principle to the specific event Newton became in¬ volved in a knotty chain of textual exegesis: interpretation of a description of the equinoctial and solstitial colures imputed to Eudoxus, the Greek astronomer of the fourth century b.c., preserved

65

ISAAC NEWTON, HISTORIAN in a fragment by Hipparchus of the second century b.c.; the trans¬ lation of this fragment into the language of contemporary starcatalogues; analysis of what Hipparchus knew about the precession, as reported in Ptolemy; euhemeristic rendering of the names of the personages and artifacts drawn as constellations on the “primitive sphere” as described by Aratus; commentary on passages in the Introduction to the Phaenomena of Aratus ascribed to Achilles Tatius, probably of the third century after Christ, describing the location of the colures among various ancient astronomers; and finally a literary quest for the actual name of the inventor of the “primitive sphere” around the time of the Argonauts, a search in which Newton’s prodigious memory and vast antiquarian knowledge were given free play. Like an alchemist he transmuted these stray bits of evidence into a scientific reading of the location of the fixed stars, which in turn allowed him to determine astronomically the date of the Argonautic expedition. In one New College manuscript Newton commented on the relative value for chronology of astronomical and literary proof. He there seems to regard the purely literary sources for comparative history as an opportunity to refine the conclusions reached by his astronomical calculations: “[Astronomical] arguments hitherto used overthrow the Chronology of the ancient Greeks & bring us near the truth. If they determine the times within 10, 20 or perhaps 30 years of the truth tis all we designed by them. It remains now that we come still nearer the truth by another sort of Arguments. And that is by comparing the actions of the Greeks with ye actions of the Oriental nations. ...” 1 In the last analysis there is little doubt that Newton gave greater credence to astronomical proofs, inadequate as the recorded observations were, than to literary evidence standing alone. “The surest arguments for determining things past are those taken from Astronomy,” he wrote in a New College manuscript.2 “The description of the colures set down by Hipparchus is but coarse & the places of the fixt stars were but coarsely observed by the ancients, but yet they suffice for determining the colures without erring above a degree in their Longitude. . . .”3 Once Newton found the record of eclipses applicable, as in later Persian history, he felt himself on secure ground. “The years of Cambyses & Darius Hystaspis are fully determined by three eclipses

66

ASTRONOMICAL DATING observed at Babylon & recorded by Ptolemy.” Peloponnesian War dates were equally certain. “These things are so well determined by Eclipses & Olympic games & other records of good credit & so far agreed upon by chronologers that I do not think it material to entertain any dispute about them.” 4 But it was the rarity of such direct observations which necessitated the introduction of his new method of astronomical dating based on the precession. In Book III, proposition xxxix, problem xx of the Principia Newton computed and explained theoretically the precise magni¬ tude of the annual precession of the solstitial and equinoctial colures: 50" 00'" 12 IV, “the amount of which agrees with the phe¬ nomena; for the precession of the equinoxes, by astronomical obser¬ vations, is about 50" yearly.” 5 An early New College manuscript summarized the findings of the various modern astronomers who had arrived at approximately the same results: “Now recconing with astronomers that the Equinox moves backwards about 50". Tycho Kepler & Bullialdus reccon 51", Hevelius 50" 52"', Ricciolus in his Almagest 50" 00'" & afterwards in his Astronomia reformata 50" 40'". Vindelinus Petavius & some later astronomers (in a round number) 50" per annum or one degree in 72 years.” 6 Thus there was nothing novel about the fact of the precession and its magnitude by the time Newton embarked upon his chronological studies. Moreover, the antecedent modern chronologists Joseph Scaliger and Denis Petau had used astronomy in their revision of the calendar and the systems of dating. The idea of fixing the position of a planet at a known past date was also relatively common. The Polish as¬ tronomer Hevelius, for example, noted in his Prodromus Astronomiae the exact position of the sun over Eden on the day of Creation;7 he had also figured out its position in the meridian of Danzig during Thales’ eclipse.8 Astronomical dating of natural phenomena like comets, eclipses, and major physical disasters described or men¬ tioned in ancient literature was widely practiced both in England and on the Continent. William Whiston even attempted to date the comet which had caused the Flood. In 1691 Newton’s friend Ed¬ mund Halley inserted a paper in the Philosophical Transactions which made use of astronomical dating to help establish the time and place of Caesar’s landing in Britain: “an instance of the great Use of Astronomical Computation for fixing and ascertaining the

67

ISAAC NEWTON, HISTORIAN Times of memorable Actions, when omitted or not duly delivered by the Historian.” 9 But to apply the idea of the precession to chronology with Newton’s daring and persistence was revolutionary. The style of the man — adapting scientific data that are already known to a new field — is the same in the chronology as in the physics. Newton had a way of staking all upon a single idea. The voluminous literary proofs which clog up the Chronology and the manuscripts appear as mere divertisements, after the main performance, whatever the sequence of invention may have been. The literary evidence is gen¬ erally related to a central astronomical argument based on the pre¬ cession; fundamentally its role is corroborative. With equinoctial precession as an instrument any event in the past could be dated with certainty, provided that an ancient record could be found indicating the position of the sun at time of equinox relative to the fixed stars. Prediction of heavenly phenomena had of course been practiced since early Greek times. The aim of the Chronology was the establishment of a relationship between the observed movement of the earth with respect to the fixed stars and ancient political events, so that the past might be “predicted” backward, so to speak. No doubt a climate of opinion in which astrological conceptions and prognostications were common was a favorable ambiance. After Riccioli in the fifth book of his Almagestum Novum had dated past eclipses with precision, he added a list of important human events for which they had served as “warnings,” 10 an admixture of scientific astronomy and astrology, but a practice which anticipated the basic concept of the Newtonian revision of chronology. While Newton did not often cross the barrier which separated him from the occult, he lived in a spiritual atmosphere which made the quest for corre¬ spondences between tilings in the heavens and events on earth a passionate activity. The inspiration for Newton’s invention did not, however, cause him to abandon scientific method in illustrating the correspondences, and in this sense his procedures are sharply dis¬ tinguished from Riccioli’s use of astronomical dating. One analogy between Newton’s method and contemporary astrology deserves further consideration. A manuscript by Henri de Boulainvilliers, dated 1711, Histoire du mouvement de Vapogee du soleil, ou pratique abregee des regies d’Astrologie pour juger des

68

b.

Map of the southern celestial hemisphere, from Hevelius’ Prodromus astronomiae (1690), used in Newton’s system of astronomical dating

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