Books
Much of the humour, charm and enthusiastic optimism mentioned in his many obituaries still comes across from the friendly, lucid style of his two most famous books, whose 'point of view', according to his Preface to The Grandeur that was Rome, 'is that of humanity and the progress of civilisation'. The books were ground-breaking and successful partly because of their popular as well as scholarly approach and partly because they included what were then newly sumptuous photographic illustrations.
Stobart writes in his Preface: 'The pictures are an integral part of my scheme. It is not possible with Rome, as it was with Greece, to let pictures and statues take the place of wars and treaties. Wars and treaties are an essential part of the Grandeur of Rome...the pictures are chosen so that the reader's eye may be able to gather its own impression of the Roman genius.'
He disagrees with Gibbon's pessimistic view of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, pointing out that 'The mere notion of empire continuing to decline and fall for five centuries is ridiculous' and remarking that 'this is one of the cases which prove that History is made not so much by heroes or natural forces as by historians', since 'if all the Roman historians had perished and only the inscriptions remained we should have a very different picture of the Roman Empire, a picture much brighter and, I think, much more faithful to truth.' He admires the Romans for their law, discipline, engineering and especially their sanitation, but it is clear that he prefers the Greeks for their art, philosophy, mathematics and literature.
Read more about this topic: J. C. Stobart
Famous quotes containing the word books:
“Writing long books is a laborious and impoverishing act of foolishness: expanding in five hundred pages an idea that could be perfectly explained in a few minutes. A better procedure is to pretend that those books already exist and to offer a summary, a commentary.”
—Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986)
“There are books so alive that you’re always afraid that while you weren’t reading, the book has gone and changed, has shifted like a river; while you went on living, it went on living too, and like a river moved on and moved away. No one has stepped twice into the same river. But did anyone ever step twice into the same book?”
—Marina Tsvetaeva (1892–1941)
“When I am dead, I hope it may be said:
‘His sins were scarlet, but his books were read.’”
—Hilaire Belloc (1870–1953)