The other people in the room

Every famous historical moment has two kinds of people in it. There are the ones we know by name, and there are the ones who held the door open, lit the candles, took the dictation, brought in the wine. The history book picks one or two faces out of any room. The room had more people in it.

Cicero had a secretary

Cicero wrote almost nothing down himself. He spoke, and someone wrote it for him. That someone was a slave named Tiro, who invented the notae Tironianae, a shorthand system, so he could keep up with his master's speech. Tiro outlived Cicero, was freed, and wrote a biography of his old master that is now lost. He also gathered, edited, and published the letters we now read as Cicero's correspondence with Atticus.

Cicero spoke. Tiro wrote down what he said. We know Cicero.

Vermeer's milkmaid

Vermeer's The Milkmaid, painted around 1660, is one of the most carefully observed domestic scenes in European art. The model was almost certainly a servant in or near the painter's household. We do not know her name. We do not know how often she sat for him, or what she thought of the bread on the table she was painted with. She is present in the canvas. He is famous.

The painting is the inversion of the usual problem. Usually we have the name and lose the face. Here we have the face and lose the name. Both are kinds of loss.

The history book picks one name from every room. The room had more people in it.

The scaffolding under the Sistine Chapel

When Michelangelo painted the Sistine Chapel ceiling between 1508 and 1512, he was not alone. He had assistants who ground the pigments, mixed the plaster, climbed the scaffolding with him, and held the lamps when he worked through the evening. Vatican payment records survive for some of these men: Francesco Granacci, Jacopo l'Indaco, Giuliano Bugiardini. Most popular accounts skip them. The story is "Michelangelo painted the Sistine Chapel," not "a workshop of around six men painted the Sistine Chapel under Michelangelo's direction." Both sentences are true.

The cardinals who paid the bills also belong in that room. So do the priests who said Mass in the chapel during the four years of work, looking up at the half-finished image of God.

Tolstoy's quiet argument

Late in War and Peace, in the historiographical chapters at the back that most readers skip, Tolstoy makes the same point at a vaster scale. Napoleon did not command the invasion of Russia. The invasion of Russia was the cumulative motion of more than 600,000 men, each acting on private weather: hunger, fear, loyalty to a particular friend, hatred of a particular sergeant. To say "Napoleon invaded Russia" is a shorthand we use because it is hard to write a sentence with 600,000 subjects.

Tolstoy spends pages on this and is regularly skipped. The shorthand is too useful.

Counting

Attending to the margin is not sentimental. It is more accurate. The historian who notices that Cicero had a writer, that the milkmaid had a name we have lost, that the Sistine Chapel had a workshop, is not adding feel-good footnotes. They are correcting a count.

The room had more people in it. To attend to the margin is to remember that the room is the unit, not the speaker in the centre.