Aging & Wisdom Quote by John Lothrop Motley

“In the tenth century the old Batavian and later Roman forms have faded away” is Motley doing what 19th-century nationalist historians did best: turning a messy, multilingual, post-imperial Europe into a clean narrative of shedding skins. The line reads like archaeology, but it’s really politics by other means. “Forms” is the key word. He’s not just tracking institutions; he’s describing a people’s supposed maturation, the moment when inherited templates stop structuring daily life and a new, more “native” order becomes possible.

Batavians, in Roman historiography, were the convenient proto-Dutch: brave, marshy, semi-mythic. By pairing “old Batavian” with “later Roman,” Motley collapses centuries into a relay race of identities, then announces their disappearance right when the medieval Low Countries begin to look culturally legible: localized lordship, Christianization as infrastructure, urban nodes starting to matter. The tenth century becomes a narrative hinge, a historical permission slip for Dutch distinctiveness.

The subtext is teleological. “Faded away” is soft-focus inevitability, not the language of conflict, coercion, or uneven survival. It naturalizes rupture, as if Roman law, Latin literacy, and imperial memory simply dissolved like fog. That rhetorical gentleness matters: it clears the stage for the Netherlands to emerge without the awkwardness of being a Roman afterlife. Motley, writing for an Anglophone audience fascinated by liberal nation-states, wants origins that feel organic, not patched together.