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:
“A friend of mine spoke of books that are dedicated like this: “To my wife, by whose helpful criticism ...” and so on. He said the dedication should really read: “To my wife. If it had not been for her continual criticism and persistent nagging doubt as to my ability, this book would have appeared in Harper’s instead of The Hardware Age.””
—Brenda Ueland (1891–1985)
“If my books had been any worse, I should not have been invited to Hollywood, and ... if they had been any better, I should not have come.”
—Raymond Chandler (1888–1959)
“All ... forms of consensus about “great” books and “perennial” problems, once stabilized, tend to deteriorate eventually into something philistine. The real life of the mind is always at the frontiers of “what is already known.” Those great books don’t only need custodians and transmitters. To stay alive, they also need adversaries. The most interesting ideas are heresies.”
—Susan Sontag (b. 1933)