i.
A few days ago, I finished reading The Age of Napoleon by Will Durant and Ariel Durant, the final entry in their 11-volume Story of Civilization series. It took me just shy of a quarter century to get through the books. Combined, they are the best history books I have ever read.
It was through Isaac Asimov’s autobiography that I first discovered Will Durant, sometime in 1995. In In Memory Yet Green, Asimov wrote about how in the summer of 1945 he was about to leave the house for a meeting with his draft board:
I was reading a copy of Will Durant’s Caesar and Christ, the third volume of his history of civilization and Gertrude was ironing some clothes. The radio stopped its regular programming for an emergency bulletin: The United States had dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima.
Asimov added a footnote to this passage about Durant’s series:
I read each volume as it came out. After I had read the first one and heard he was planning a multivolume history–five volumes was the original plan–I felt worried. I knew he was in his forties and I carefully noted in my diary that I hoped he would live long enough to complete the set. He did.
(I’ve had similar worries about Robert A. Caro, hoping he will live long enough to finish the final volume of his biography of Lyndon Johnson.)
I read the books slightly out of order:
- The Life of Greece (1/16/2000)
- Our Oriental Heritage (2/3/2008)
- Caesar and Christ (8/7/2010)
- Caesar and Christ (12/27/2014)
- The Age of Faith (6/22/2018)
- The Renaissance (1/4/2019)
- The Reformation (5/23/2020)
- The Age of Reason Begins: The Story of Civilization, Vol 7 (10/3/2020)
- The Age of Louis XIV (5/17/2022)
- The Age of Voltaire (5/22/2022)
- Rousseau and Revolution (3/9/2024)
- The Age of Napoleon (3/16/2024)
I was certain I’d read Our Oriental Heritage first, and was surprised to see it second on the list. I dug into some old diaries to affirm my memory, and sure enough, I was right–sort of. On May 4, 1999, I wrote:
Finished Fact and Fancy this morning and started right in on Will Durant’s Our Oriental Heritage, the first volume of his “Story of Civilization.” The book is 440,000 words long… it will take me about 21 days to finish the book…
So why is Life of Greece first on the list? It turns out, I never finished that initial attempt to read Our Oriental Heritage and I don’t count a book on my list if I don’t finish it. I didn’t finish it because shortly after I started it, I began taking flying lessons and I set most of my reading aside for a time to focus on flying airplanes.
As I read the last lines of Napoleon, I tried and failed to remember when and how I first obtained the books. Back to the diary I went, and found that I bought my first Durant books on April 10, 1999:
Late in the afternoon I drove over to the Iliad Bookshop where I bought 3 used volumes of Will Durant’s “Story of Civilization” series for just under $20. The volumes I got were The Life of Greece (Vol II); The Age of Faith (Vol IV); and The Renaissance (Vol VII)
When did I get Our Oriental Heritage? It had to have been before May 4, 1999. Some more digging and, much to my surprise, I found the following on April 19, 1999:
Grandpa called tonight–he said he had a surprise for me–and then proceeded to tell me he picked up Vols, I, III, and VI of Will Durant’s “The Story of Civilization” series for me at a used bookshop in Nyack.
Between May 4, 1999 and the day I finished the final volume of the series, 9,063 days elapsed, or 24 years, 9 months and 28 days. The series tops off around 13,000 pages, which puts it somewhere between 2.5 and 3 million words. That’s a lot of reading. In fact, it turns out there were years in which the total amount I read was less than 13,000 pages, as the chart below indicates (the red dashed line shows 13,000 pages).
I never read more than two of the volumes in a single year, reading one in 2000, 2008, 2010, 2014, 2018 and 2019. I read two volumes in 2020, 2022 and 2024. Of the 11 volumes, I’ve read two of them twice: The Life of Greece and Caesar and Christ.
ii.
As Asimov mentioned, the Durants’ original plan was for five books. The scope increased with each successive volume until their tenth, Rousseau and Revolution, published in 1967, in which they concluded with the following envoi:
This is the concluding volume of that Story of Civilization to which we devoted ourselves in 1929, and which has been the daily chore and solace of our lives ever since[Ellipsis] We shall not sin at such length again; but if we manage to elude the Reaper for another year or two we hope to offer a summarizing essay on “The Lessons of History”.
True to their word, they did write The Lessons of History, published in 1968 (which I read in 2019, and of which I have a signed copy). Then Rousseau and Revolution won the Pulitzer for General Nonfiction, and I imagine that, coupled with what must have seemed like boredom to the globe-trotting Durants, decided them to head back to the typewriter for one more volume, The Age of Napoleon, published in 1975.
I can’t read a magnum opus like this without wanting to know more about the people who spent a lifetime working on such a project. This happened to me when I read Dumas Malone’s 6-volume biography of Thomas Jefferson; I followed it up with a biography of Dumas Malone, Long Journey with Mr. Jefferson by William C. Hyland, Jr. And when I finished everything that Robert A. Caro has written thus far, I followed it up with his book Working .
It was, therefore, natural for me to read Will & Ariel Durant’s A Dual Autobiography several years ago. Not only was it an interesting read, but it gave fascinating insights into how such a massive effort was made in times long before computing. Ariel Durant described some of the research process:
It took me some time to realize how important a role was played in a book by the organization of the material, and how the same contents less wisely arranged might have led to repetition, confusion, and failure. ==The mere organization (as distinct from gathering) of the material was the most back-breaking part of the total operation==. Will undertook the initial part. As he explained it to me, he divided the book into chapters, generally following geographical order (Near East, India, China, Japan), and within each region, mediating between chronological sequence and topical unity (economics, government, religion, language, literature, philosophy, etc.). Then he marked with a Roman numeral each of the approximately thirty thousand slips that had been gathered for Volume I, according to the chapter to which it belonged…
[Will Durant] prepared and typed, for each chapter in turn, an outline consisting of several hundred headings, consecutively numbered with Arabic numerals. Then he presented to the family and his other aides the slips that he had assigned to Chapter I, together with the chapter outline; and our task was to read each slip and to number it according to the heading under which we judged it belonged. We estimate an average chapter of Story used some fifteen hundred slips, or about thirty thousand per volume; our attic rooms are bulging with the boxes of used slips.
Of those “slips” that Ariel Durant describes, she has said the following:
Usually we read about five hundred volumes for each of our books. I don’t mean to say that we read these books aloud to each other, but we do read them at approximately the same time, discuss them, and make notes. The hundreds of cards in this file are some of the notes relating to Volume 10.
And that is only a part. We have a thousand notes in the typewritten form in galley sheets. Every note we take from our readings includes the name of the book, the author, and the page from which it was taken. The scissored slips are placed exactly where they belong in the detailed outline of our chapter.
This seems a remarkably similar precursor to Ryan Holiday’s notecard system, which just goes to show that history is constantly repeating itself, one of the many lessons that is made clear by the Story of Civilization.
The Durants began researching the books in 1929 and they finally finished in 1975–a forty-six year span of enormous work. That they were able to do this project at all is due to another book Will Durant wrote before The Story of Civilization. He wrote The Story of Philosophy in the 1920s and it was bestseller that helped put him and Simon & Schuster on the map, and allowed the Durants the financial freedom to pursue their research for Story around the world.
iii.
Any history of the scope that the Durants present will be marred with errors and omissions. Like any diligent, self-aware researchers, the Durants acknowledgedf these imperfections. In writing about prehistoric India in Our Oriental Heritage, he said:
Recent researches have marred this comforting picture–as future researches will change the perspective of these pages.
About half of Our Oriental Heritage was dedicated to the history of Indian, Japanese, and Chinese civilizations. I wished for more. I read somewhere that the Durants had planned editions on North and South American native civilizations as well, but the existing scope exceeded the time that life and energy provided them. In my imagination, I wonder at the volumes they might have produced on Aztec or Mayan civilization, or the native cultures and civilizations that predated European arrival into the new world. These Durant-authored volumes are left to my imagination.
They wrote about what most interested them and it was a fortunate coincidence that many of their interested and mine overlapped. I forgive their errors and omissions as the result of an enormous amount of work and research performed not my an army but by two mortal adults and a handful of helpers. I have to feel this way. In my own work, I recognize the scope of the work I do (writing code, managing projects) inevitably leaves gaps, bugs, and room for improvement.
iv.
What makes these books the best histories I’ve ever read? I think it is a combination of three things: scope, continuity, and the writing.
From the beginning, Durant attempted to write an “integral” history. As he wrote in the preface to the first volume:
I have long felt that our usual method of writing history in separate longitudinal sections–economic history, political history, religious history, the history of philosophy, the history of literature, the history of science, the history of music, the history of art–does injustice to the unity of human life; that history should be written collaterally as well as lineally, synthetically as well as analytically; and that the ideal historiography would seek to portray in each period the total complex of a nation’s culture, institutions, adventures and ways.
Fortune prepared me for this method. I attended a humanities magnet high school in Los Angeles in which our core classes were constructed in a similarly integral way, with courses on philosophy, literature, social institutions, and art history, tied together against a similar backdrop in time. The scope of Durants volumes is vast and varied and because of it, I learned more about subjects that I never imagined I’d be interested in, and yet found them all fascinating. Despite the length of the volumes, there wasn’t a dull moment. And the integral method made clear the contemporaneousness of the history, science, art, music, religion, philosophy. Each discipline feeds each other in an intricate web that isn’t always obvious in longitudinal sections.
The volumes also provided continuity in a way that I had not previously experienced reading or studying history. It is a continuity that creeps up on your as you make your way through the pages. We begin with the shadowy prehistoric times without individuals, but rather individual remains of anonymous ancestors in the days before civilization and by the end of the 11th volume, we are dealing with detailed biographies of historic figures (Napoleon, Tallyrand, Thomas Jefferson) who are not many generations removed from ourselves. And yet, after the first 100 introductory pages of the first volume, there was never a sudden jump, never a rapid leap forward in time. Things moved smoothly from past-to-present. That continuity provided a unique insight into human history for me. It was as if I watched as people in the ancient Sumerian city of Ur tapped their successive generation shoulder, and that generation tapped the next and soon we were in Egypt, and Babylonia, and so on down to Louis XVI and Samuel Johnson. This continuity gave me a perspective of history that I hadn’t had before, and I’m not sure such a perspective is possible without the scope the Durants achieved in these volumes. There is a kinship that forms with those dead thousands of years, as when an ancient Sumerian tablet reads, “the city, where the tumult of man is.”
Continuity highlights repetition. Consider Edmund Burke writing on democracy in the ancient world, and in the modern:
Democracy in Athens and Rome brought no cure for the evils of government, for it soon became dictatorship through the ability of demagogues to win admiration from gullible majorities.
Finally, there is the writing, the voice, the erudite guide that carries you through thousands of years of human triumph and misery. Durant has an elegant, old-world style in which his premises come at the end of a paragraph rather than the beginning, often with witty charm, as when he writes of the toilers of Babylonia:
Part of the country was still wild and dangerous; snakes wandered in the thick grass, and the kings of Babylonia and Assyria made it their royal sport to hunt in hand-to-hand conflict the lions that prowled in the woods, posed placidly for the artists, but fled timidly at the nearer approach of men. Civilization is an occasional and temporary interruption of the jungle. [Emphasis mine.]
That voice sets the tone of the entire series. The Durants come across as true companions, and I think Durant knew this. In the last words of the penultimate volume in the series, Durant wrote:
We thank the reader who has been with us these many years for part or all of the long journey. We have ever been mindful of his presence. Now we take our leave and bid him farewell.
I was overcome by a strange set of emotions upon finishing the final volume. Here I’d walked with Roman emperors and Japanese peasants. I’d seen battles fought in the desert, and averted by the random passing of the moon across the face of the sun. I’d spent hours with the greatest thinkers, artists, creators, and inventors. I’d lived thousands of lifetimes in the pages of these books, and now they were all over. It was a bittersweet conclusion. I was reminded of a verse (quoted in Rousseau and Revolution) by Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock. In the margins, I jotted: “An apt epitaph to the Durants’ adventure.”
Lo, I have reached my goal! The stirring thought
Thrills through my spirit. Thine all powerful arm,
My Lord, my God, alone hath guided me
By more than one dark grave, ere I might reach
That distant goal! Thou, Lord, hast healed me still,
Hast shed fresh courage o’re my sinking heart,
Which held with death its near companionship;
And if I gazed on terrors, their dark shapes
Soon disappeared, for thou protectedst me!
Swiftly they vanished.–Savior, I have sung
Thy covenant of Mercy. I have trod
My fearful path! My hope has been in Thee!
In the end, the Durants’ volumes reinforced a truth my mother told me when I was five or six years old: books can take you anywhere.
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