A Brill Calendar: January 25

Meyer and Anthropology

Few dedicated soldiers, officers and generals in the army of Clio, the Muse of History, have become universally known celebrities through entering Her ranks.

Equivalent stature & fame associated with Dante and Shakespeare, with Bach and Mozart, Michelangelo and Leonardo, Rembrandt and Velazquez, Newton and Einstein is denied them throughout the ages.

Clio’s legion is of a different brand. Gibbon, Michelet, Mommsen, Macaulay, Burckhardt and Huizinga – each of them good for large print-runs and countless reprints during their life-times and several ensuing decades and devoured by ‘well-educated laymen’ – are classified in a new millennium rather as authors of unhurried and superb non-fictional prose than as scholarly giants. Even comparable members of this Gideon Band ended up largely forgotten; except by some historiographers of historiography. So it is moot to commemorate on January 25 the German historian Eduard Meyer, born that calendar day of 1855 in Hamburg.

When he became history himself, in Berlin on August 31 1930, newspaper obituaries duly praised an eminent scholar of Antiquity, one of the same calibre as the great Mommsen, along the way mentioning Meyer’s march through the Academic pastures of Leipzig, Breslau, Halle and finally Berlin, whilst praising his massive ‘Geschichte des Altertums’ (5 Vols., 1884 – 1902). Meyer’s ‘Altertum’ is predominantly Greek; and his ‘Meisterstück’ remains a stranger in increasingly Anglophone scholarly cultures.

That is regrettable; also because of the far-seeing general introduction to that monumental structure, separately published in 1903: as ‘Elemente der Anthropologie’. Later generations came to say ‘sociology’ where Meyer wrote ‘Anthropologie’; a rather endearing indication of a nascent cultural awareness.