A Companion to Ancient History

Andrew Erskine

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781118581537
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

This Companion provides a comprehensive introduction to key topics in the study of ancient history.

• Examines the forms of evidence, problems, approaches, and major themes in the study of ancient history
• Comprises more than 40 essays, written by leading international scholars
• Moves beyond the primary focus on Greece and Rome with coverage of the various cultures within the ancient Mediterranean
• Draws on the latest research in the field
• Provides an essential resource for any student of ancient history

CHAPTER ONE

Personal Perspectives

The worlds of Ancient Greece and Rome may be long ago, but ancient history itself is an ongoing process, discovering, interpreting and reinterpreting the past. In the study of ancient history the present is never far away. The chapters in this Companion show ancient historians and their colleagues at work, but by way of introduction I have asked several scholars to reflect on their experience of ancient history and what it means for them.

Why I Study Ancient History, and Why I Suppose it Matters

Josiah Ober, Professor of Classics and Political Science, Stanford University

I have always been fascinated by politics – not parties or elections, but the play of power, legitimacy, and justice. Politics, in this extended sense, is at once a practical issue, an interpretative problem, and a moral concern: understanding any given political system or regime requires describing how it actually works, explaining why it works that way, and offering defensible reasons for why it ought to be otherwise (if in fact it ought). When I was young, I found I had a simple intuitive sense of how power worked in small groups, and discovered that it was possible to make some sense of social behavior by a rough-and-ready calculus of costs, benefits, and ideological legitimacy. Yet I lacked anything like a satisfactory vocabulary for parsing my intuitions about interpersonal politics. I could not begin to answer the descriptive, analytical, and normative questions that I might have asked had I been able to frame them in the first place.

When I arrived at university, more or less by accident, in 1971 I sought out courses that I imagined might help to me to make sense of my intuitions: sociology, anthropology, and so on. But only history held my dilettante’s attention. The ancient world – and especially the world of the classical Greek poleis – seemed to offer the raw materials for understanding politics. Not surprisingly, reading Thucydides was a revelation. I realized, as have so many others, that Thucydides’ narrative of the events of the Peloponnesian war was the product of a profoundly powerful intelligence working at the descriptive and analytical sides of the power and legitimacy equation. Thucydides showed me that it was possible to conjoin the study of internal (intra-polis) and external (foreign policy) power relations; to ground political choice in a plausible conception of human nature; that relations between social classes were inherently political; and that thinking about power outside history made no sense. It was only later that I realized Thucydides also had much to say about morally defensible norms of interpersonal behavior and the possibility for justice in what appears to be an anarchic world of inter-state relations.

So I was hooked. Yet when doing my graduate training in the late 1970s I knew enough to see that I would not be able to work out my own Thucydidean explanation, or for that matter to do original work on Thucydides, until I knew a lot more about the concrete realities of Greek history. So I spent a long time studying Greek warfare. By the mid-1980s I felt ready to take on bigger political questions, including (over the next two decades) political sociology, ideology and discourse, revolution, expertise and dissent, social identity, moral authority, and collective action. Each of these emerged clearly in the context of democratic Athens, and so Athens became my case study: a model political system whose changes and continuities over two centuries allowed me to explore diverse aspects of the set of political issues that remained my abiding concern.

When I moved to Princeton in 1990, I saw more clearly than ever that the academic field of classical studies was a perfect environment for the work that interested me, because it demands no sharp distinction between various aspects of history (military, economic, social, cultural, intellectual), or between history, literature, and philosophy. Those undeterred by the disapproval of the few who feel that ancient history must only be pursued for its own sake are free to bring in contemporary work on sociology, anthropology, psychology, political theory, and so on. Although this was not always so, the field (publishers of scholarly books and journals, readers, many reviewers) is now remarkably liberal in its acceptance of methodological experimentation. This liberalism rightly carries a requirement that innovators manifest a respect for evidence, reasonable clarity in expression, and honesty in laying out premises and framing arguments. Ancient history is currently a very good field for someone who plans to devote a life to the study of politics and political change.

Ancient history matters to me because it seems to offer insight into questions that ought to matter to anyone living in a complex society, and especially to every citizen in a democracy. These questions have inseparable descriptive, analytical, and normative aspects: historians cannot avoid bringing together the question of what happened, with why it happened, and how what happened ought to be evaluated. That evaluation inevitably means moral judgment of some kind. Historians are necessarily concerned with description. But there is limited value in describing the past accurately without being able to explain it. And there is little value in explaining something without the capacity to judge its value. The difference between history and moral philosophy is, perhaps, that the historian is likely to see limited value in moral judgments that require historical outcomes no human community has ever, or ever could provide.

Capacities and trade-offs really matter. For a student of democracy, for example, it matters whether democracy is capable of generating its values through participatory practice: Can liberty as absence of domination be sustained by liberty as right of entry? Can equality of opportunity support fair distribution? Will dignity as recognition support the integrity of the individual or the minority community? It matters whether or not social justice is achievable at a cost low enough that democratic communities can compete with undemocratic rivals. It matters if democratic institutions and civic education can sustain democratic discourse and culture while promoting economic growth. Deciding if politics (like medicine) demands a highly specialized expertise, or if political craftsmanship can be attained by ordinary men and women, matters a lot. Those kinds of questions can only be answered by linking political description with analysis and moral reasoning, and by assessing historical processes of change and continuity over time.

It is, I think, easy to get politics badly wrong by approaching the question of politics too narrowly or ahistorically. Basic errors include severing the issue of power from that of legitimacy and legitimacy from justice; ignoring class distinction by imagining politics as an intra-elite game; focusing too narrowly on discourse, or critique, or beliefs; or institutions, or decision-process, or personalities; or chance, or environmental factors, or technological change; or social structure, or agency; or change, or stability. Ancient history offers special benefits to the student of politics seeking to avoid the errors encouraged by narrowness and ahistoricism because it is at once expansive and limited: Its sweep is huge in respect to time and space, but its scale, in terms of relevant facts that can be securely established, is small when compared with modernity. Achieving the level of expertise necessary to bring the manifold aspects of politics into play, even over a lifetime of scholarly activity, is impossible if there is too much to know – which is one reason the study of modernity is so fragmented by discipline. By contrast, antiquity allows me to dream of a sort of “unified political field theory,” in which power, legitimacy, and justice could be grasped as a whole.

Achieving that dream may prove impossible. Yet even approaching it represents progress in understanding how communities impede or sustain human lives that go well. So, at the end of the day, my reason for thinking ancient history is worth doing is ethical. Any historian who denies that the fundamental ethical question of “what it is for a human life to go well” lies within the realm of historia must answer to the Father of History. Herodotus may have got the facts wrong in his tale of Solon’s reply to Croesus’s query about who had lived the happiest life. Yet Herodotus’s clear conviction that ethics, politics, and history belong together is, I should say, dead right.

Why Ancient History?

Peter Derow, formerly Hody Fellow and Tutor in Ancient History, Wadham College, Oxford

I think there is one very particular reason, and that is its relevance, by which I mean the way in which the study of ancient history can (and should) contribute to our understanding of the world around us and enhance our awareness of much that is going on in it. I think in the first instance, of course, of Polybius, who wrote of the expansion of Roman dominion in the Mediterranean world, of what was effectively the establishment of a single power in a world where before there had been a number of centers of power. He was aware of the importance of this process, which was the theme of his work:

Is there any human being so low-minded or lazy as not to want to understand how, and being overcome by what sort of state in the space of not even 53 years, almost the whole world fell under a single dominion, that of the Romans – something which is not found to have happened before – and is anyone so little disposed to spectacles or to learning as to consider anything more important than this knowledge? (1.1.5–6)

He did not stop there. Concerned as he was with the elucidation of this process, he reckoned that the elucidation of its effects, on both ruled and rulers, was at least as important:

… and to the aforementioned actions one must add both an account of the policy of those in control – what it was after this and how they exercised their universal control, and also an account of the number and variety of the responses and opinions of the rest to and about the rulers. And beyond this one must also tell of the inclinations and pursuits which prevailed and took hold among the individual peoples in their private lives and in their public affairs, for it is evident that it will be clear from these things to those now living whether the dominion of the Romans is turning out to be something to be shunned or, rather, to be embraced, and to those of future generations whether their rule should be judged to have been worthy of praise and emulation or deserving of censure. (3.4.6–7)

The relevance of what was going on in Polybius’s world to what is going on in that of today is inescapable, and there is, I think, no doubt that other analogous processes have unfolded in the course of human history. The important thing is always to ask about them, “How and why?” Explanation requires understanding, and it is explanation that Polybius defined as the primary task of the historian. Explanation, and the pursuit of the understanding on which it must be based, should be the aim of all of us. This dual undertaking is certainly what doing ancient history is all about. And doing ancient history is all about evidence. The range of evidence – literary, documentary, archaeological, and more – is wide. The quantity is substantial, but it is not, of course, limitless. For some areas of inquiry it is relatively, sometimes decidedly, limited, and this can have the advantage of making ancient history particularly accessible. And the nature of the evidence is another advantage. Whether one is dealing with an historian, a document or a material artifact, one is always dealing with a form of human utterance, a representation, and these utterances, these representations are always in need of interpretation and of all kinds of contextualization before they can be knitted into the story the ancient historian wants to tell. The ancient historian must accordingly develop self-awareness and the capacity for self-contextualization. If Plato was right to say that it is improper for a human being to live a life which is unexamined, and if one may extend the purview of his remark from the confines of the individual life to include concern for the world in which that life is lived, then the study of ancient history is available as a most appropriate form of human endeavor.

Polybius and his world are profoundly relevant to the world of today, but it will have become clear that the real relevance of ancient history is to be found in the fact that it is about people and the breadth of human experience. It is an aspect of this, to my mind an absolutely crucial one, to which Thucydides attributed the importance of his work:

But as many as wish to see with clarity the things which have happened, and the similar and analogous things which are going, according to the human condition, to happen sometime again – it will be enough for them to judge this work to be useful. (1.22.4)

History does not repeat itself, but people are people, and ancient history involves the study, within a chronological microcosm, of people’s responses to circumstances, both political (at local and global levels) and other. It is a deeply humane kind of study, and, given the nature and range both of the evidence it uses and of the intellectual engagement and activity it requires, it is also fun.

A Roman Historian Reflects

Andrea Giardina, Professor, Istituto Italiano di Scienze Umane

Fortunately, no cultured person today deigns to find in ancient Rome a simple mirror of reality. We can recognize, of course, that this mistaken perception of resemblance did not always have negative consequences: it has sustained intellectual curiosity, stimulated research, and favored the preservation of documents and monuments. Even in the political realm, it has at times provided authority and even some good ideas to both medieval and modern proponents of reform and change. All of this is indisputable. We must recognize, however, that much more often, the Roman mirror, in addition to dissolving into a sea of rhetoric and worthless bibliography, has fuelled passions of conquest, imperialistic tendencies and tyrannies.

In truth, the mirror fantasy today has an unconscious echo in the rhetoric of roots. In Europe this has recently provoked lively debates with reference to the text of the European Constitution. There has been much discussion about adjectives (Christian roots or Judeo-Christian roots, etc.) without consideration of the fact that the noun is much more venomous than all of its possible modifiers. The idea of the root is, in fact, a racist metaphor, and it will remain such, notwithstanding the good intentions and candor of those who use it: “Race is likened to a tree; it does not change. The roots of the race are always the same. There are the branches of the tree, there is the foliage. And this is all.” (George Mosse). Even if we succeeded in confining its resonance to a purely humanistic domain, we would end by establishing its danger: constructing a hierarchy of historic objects, separating the green limbs from the dry, removing creative value from failed or spent experiences: this in fact suggests a sort of historiographic eugenics. But everyone should recognize that the past does not acquire greater value only if it is capable of demonstrating traces of our lifeblood.

The most suggestive remedy was the attribution to our ancestors of a certain exotic or foreign character. When the Jacobins put on the clothes of Brutus and posed as imitators of the ancient defenders of the republics and of liberty, the “ideologue” Volney responded with a brilliant taunt: “I am always struck by the analogy that I detect daily between the savages of North America and the ancient peoples, so highly lauded, of Greece and Italy.” Today, after psychoanalysis and anthropology have taught us the advantages of detached vision, we are particularly aware of the cultural influences in the exotic perspective (obviously with the condition that we do not fall into exoticism). Still, this does not succeed in satisfying us completely. Nothing can explain this dissatisfaction better than the Latin language. When we read religio, respublica, familia, imperium, libertas, and so many other fundamental terms of the society, institutions and politics of Rome, we read words that reoccur almost identically in the principal languages of Europe and the Western world. That vocabulary, so similar to ours, truly seems to encapsulate our “roots,” and it transmits to us at first glance a reassuring sense of identity. But if, just as archaeologists working in the soil, we proceed to the substrata of these words, we immediately become aware of the successive and numerous changes that have occurred over the centuries and we perceive that at the base of this excavation we are in a world that has strong elements of foreignness. The religio of the Romans is not exactly the religion of the English, the religion of the French, the Religion of the Germans, the religione of the Italians, and the religión of the Spanish, and the same can be said for many other essential terms. The appeal of the relationship with the Romans is in this diversity both oscillating and dramatic: discovering the alien in the similar is a beautiful adventure of both intelligence and sensibility.

Moderns have often looked for, and sometimes found, in the ancient world a lost harmony: harmony of form, of comportment, of poetry, of stories and of scenery. This research has looked more at the Greek world, the cradle of classicism, than the Roman world. In the case of Rome, it has concentrated on civic virtues: for centuries the readers of Livy and Plutarch have learned to recognize in the Romans (up to the crisis of the republic) the most authentic cultivators of discipline, capable of examples of extreme self-denial for the benefit of their country and the collective interest. Today all this provokes little enthusiasm, even if the old theme, already ancient, of “the virtue of the Romans” would merit serious sociological attention and would be useful as a way of explaining, at least in part, the success of Rome. The more fascinating element in Roman history is, however, a harmony of another kind, one which appears to us retrospectively, if we isolate a series of contradictions arranged in equilibrium, of contrasting yet at the same time complementary colors which embody the principal aspects of Rome from the highest levels of the empire to the microcosm of the family.

Rome was in fact a “foreign” city, a city that took its origins from a lost and prestigious world, the city of Troy destroyed by the Greeks, and did not have at its core the idea of consanguinity: in the rich ideological repertoire of domination and Roman ‘diplomacy’ the concept of lineage was in fact the most ephemeral and marginal. But this sense of being foreign associated itself, quite naturally, with an extraordinarily broad extension of the right of citizenship that could not be found in equal measure in any other ancient (and perhaps even modern) empire. Rome had a very deep sense of its own honor and an ostentatious perception of its own superiority, but declared with pride that it had as ancestors men who were bastards, ethnically promiscuous, socially dangerous (the myth of Romulus’s asylum) or even downright servile in origin. Rome...

Table of contents

• Cover
• BLACKWELL COMPANIONS TO THE ANCIENT WORLD
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Dedication
• Figures
• Maps
• Notes on Contributors
• Preface
• Abbreviations, Reference Works
• Abbreviations and Glossary, Ancient Authors
• Timeline
• CHAPTER ONE: Personal Perspectives
• PART I: Evidence
• PART II: Problems and Approaches
• PART III: People and Places
• PART IV: Encountering the Divine
• PART V: Living and Dying
• PART VI: Economy
• PART VII: Politics and Power
• PART VIII: Repercussions
• Bibliography
• Index