Clio among the Muses: Essays on History and the Humanities

5. History and Biography

88 > 89 give, unless supplemented by the lives of the humble. But while the great can speak for themselves, or by the tongues of their admirers, the humble are apt to live inarticular and die unheard.”2 The “microhistory” is a popular modern form of biography that gives voice to the ordinary people. While the origin of these studies lies in Europe, European historians writing about European people and events on the margins of society (for example, Menocchio), the term has gained a somewhat different connotation among American historians. It has become synonymous with the biography of ordinary men and women. The best known of these, and the model for the genre, is Laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s The Midwife’s Tale, a brilliant and moving depiction of the life of a rural Maine midwife. Ulrich’s literary skill transformed a slender and terse diary of midwife, mother, and businesswoman Martha Ballard of Hallowell, Maine, into a source that enables us to imagine the entire range of women’s activities in early modern New England. We feel the cold of the winters’ nights and the rough textures of homespun. What had been overlooked by historians for its terseness, Ulrich turned into a marvelous source, though, “One might wish for more detail, for more open expressions of opinion, fuller accounts of medical remedies or obstetrical complications, more candor in describing physicians or judges, and less circumspection in recording scandal, yet for all its reticence , Martha’s diary is an unparalleled document in early American history. It is powerful in part because it is so difficult to use, so unyielding in its dailiness.”3 Greatness in Biography Ballard was a remarkable women in her time and Ulrich’s account is a remarkable achievement, but what attracts most readers to biography (unlike what attracts many modern historians to microhistories of ordinary people) is what elevates human action above the ordinary. Greatness is not quite the same as common fame (and infamy). Greatness inspires us. Infamy disgusts us. But such distinctions are not as important to the 90 > 91 celebrity author, raconteur, and pundit. “The charm of his style and the breadth of his vision of a past which had already become classical in his own day . . . won him admiring readers from his contemporaries to the present.”6 Plutarch’s judgments were often severe. As he wrote of Julius Caesar, the greatest figure in the Roman Republic after he had driven his rivals from Rome and amassed almost all power in his own hands: Caesar was born to do great things, and had a passion after honor, and the many noble exploits he had done did not now serve as an inducement to him to sit still and reap the fruit of his past labours, but were incentives and encouragements to go on, and raised in him ideas of still greater actions, and a desire of new glory, as if the present were all spent. It was in fact a sort of emulous struggle with himself, as it had been with another, how he might outdo his past actions by his future. Not content with conquest of Gaul and Egypt, he eyed Germany and Thrace, and beyond. There was no limit to his desire for conquest and fame.7 Plutarch’s Parallel Lives of famous ancient Greeks and Romans was an exploration of the quality of greatness. By comparing lives, he sought to isolate the trait. Caesar was great, but corrupt and venal. Merely possessing power did not ensure true greatness, a quality that eluded Caesar in Plutarch’s judgment. Instead, true greatness was elevation of spirit, as Plutarch implied when he compared the modest but intensely serious Athenian orator Demosthenes with the boastful and jokingly eloquent Cicero of Rome. Both men opposed tyrants, Demosthenes denouncing Philip of Macedon and Cicero attacking Mark Anthony. Both men were banished and ultimately paid for their courage with their lives. For Plutarch, Demosthenes was the greater man because of his “gravity and magnificence of mind,” compared with Cicero’s tendency to “admire and relish” his own abilities. To Plutarch, true greatness required nobility of spirit.8 92 > 93 superabundance of stout-heartedness, [he] gave Europe new confidence in herself, more than doubled the area of Christianity, enlarged indefinitely the scope for human thought and speculation, and led the way to those fields of freedom which, planted with great seed, have now sprung up to the fructification...