The first chapter of Émile Monnier’s History of Libanius, which we regret to say seems never to have been completed beyond the first volume.
Anyone who has glanced at a history of the fourth century knows the name of Libanius. There is no more celebrated name in that great century. All witnesses, those of his own time as well as of the following age, attest to the immense fame of that man of letters who, in the course of sixty years, by the extraordinary circumstances of his life, by the brilliance of his talents, by his innumerable writings, and by his disasters and misfortunes, riveted the attention of his contemporaries, and died having received the homage of the most powerful and illustrious figures—statesmen, generals, bishops, and emperors.
His life is a curious subject of study for those who read history as moralists, as well as for those who look only for entertainment. Few dramas are more fertile in twists and turns, but few dramas unfold with more necessity or inevitability. Everything follows from one single principle: character. And the very uniformity of that character creates the series of contradictions and inconsistencies that mark this singular life.
His writings, like his acts, are a tissue of anomalies and contradictions; but, again like his acts, they derive from a principal passion that is the source of all these diversities. Seen from afar and as a whole, they give us the impression of a prodigious development of strength and will. More than a hundred speeches of all sorts—panegyrics, funeral orations, exhortations, remonstrances, apologies, accusations, satires, declamations1—a correspondence in excess of five hundred2 letters, and not without lacunas; about thirty various compositions whose titles are found in the works that remain to us, and of which some must have been considerable. Such a heap of works argues a fertility and activity of mind of which few men have been capable. Considered in themselves, these writings reveal a consummate art, an extent of knowledge, a vigorous genius, and miseries that our imagination can hardly conceive—miseries of mind, miseries of heart, a hundred times worse than the infirmities and physical sufferings that made that eighty-year existence an intolerable torture.
He does not breathe alone in his writings: his whole age lives with him. Nowhere else do we get a closer view of the interests and passions that animated men of those times. Nowhere else do we penetrate deeper into the profundities of that tormented society pushed to revolutions by a universal malaise, which culpable weaknesses, incurable illusions, and extravagant dreams, mixed up with generous aspirations, relentlessly led to the brink of the abyss. There are uncovered the secret plots that undermined, over the course of more than a century, the throne of the Christian princes, and the threads of that famous conspiracy that prepared for and perhaps brought on the advent of the restorer of paganism. There above all is pictured, with an abundance and precision of details of which history has never taken account, the physiognomy of that ephemeral reign, dominated by good intentions, and drawn along by the passions it aroused and the necessities it misunderstood, into irreparable faults. There, in short, we discover in their sad nakedness all the wounds of a social order that a long sequence of ages had built up piece by piece, and that was being painfully dismantled in the midst of tortures and sufferings of all sorts: despotism and instability of power, corruption and rapacity in administration, marketing of justice, venality of offices, impotence of laws, and, underneath it all, misery and oppression of the people, invasion of property, desolation of the cities, depletion of the councils, degeneration of letters, and cynicism in morality. This is our background; and in the foreground, certain great souls, certain noble characters, and certain traits of heroism or virtue, and here and there, like a memory of the grandeur and the beauty of ancient times, the image of Rome and of Athens attracting the young swarms of the Orient across the seas.
This life and these writings demanded more than a simple study. We have attempted to present in a connected narrative everything that is most important in the life, and everything that could be interesting to erudition and history in the writings; and it is this work, the fruit of patient and attentive research, that we present today to the friends of literature.