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Charting the Past

Boundaries

The basic goal of classical studies is the reconstruction of entire worlds, in all their different aspects. That may seem a slightly odd way of putting it - surely the focus of the discipline is on the recovery of a single world, that of classical Greece and Rome? But one of the main insights of centuries of research in this field has been that there are always different perspectives, different points of focus and different time frames; any single perspective, ancient or modern, is always going to be partial and misleading, whatever its aspirations to completeness - and most scholars, at any one time, are working on more detailed bits of the picture rather than attempting a grand overview. There are fundamental disagreements even about whether we can or should talk in general terms about 'classical antiquity', or draw a clear distinction between Greece and Rome, or break the subject down into even smaller components. Different approaches make more or less sense for different topics: economic historians are more likely to talk about 'the ancient economy' because it appears, especially when compared to later periods, to be fairly homogeneous, while cultural historians tend to emphasize the significant differences between Greece, Rome and other ancient societies. This isn't a universal practice: there are also plenty of economic historians who see significant variation over space and time and so would be wary of generalizing about 'the ancient economy', while some cultural historians trace common themes and ideas - the idea of the Monster and the monstrous in myth and literature, for example - across centuries of classical culture. These differences and arguments are central to the discipline. Of course, classics is all about the accumulation of knowledge and understanding, but it's also about the confrontation of and negotiation between different perceptions and perspectives. It's about the different aspects of life in the ancient world and its continuing legacy, and the different ways we have of studying and interpreting them.

Academic disciplines have always tended to draw boundaries and establish definitions in order to mark off 'their' territory and defend it against other disciplines. Classics today takes a different approach, which one could say reflects its subject matter: antiquity was not a world where fixed, impermeable boundaries played a significant role, and even the frontiers of the later Roman Empire, which we tend to think of in terms of Hadrian's Wall or some other fiercely guarded fortification, were more like zones of contact and supervised movement. People, goods and ideas were constantly on the move, with only intermittent concern for political boundaries - which changed dramatically over the centuries. We can take a snapshot of this world at any given point, and divide it up between different states or cultural groups, and even draw some sort of line between 'the classical world' and everything else - but we know that's an artificial exercise, and that things will rapidly change once history is set in motion again. In the same way, we can look at the current activity of people working in the field of classical studies (many of whom wouldn't necessarily call themselves classicists); we could map their chosen research focus onto axes of geography and chronology, and identify clear hotspots in certain regions at certain times - a definite preference for Greece and Italy, a clear drift towards the fifth to fourth centuries BCE in the former case and the second century BCE to the fourth century CE in the latter. But such a map of activity is not the same as saying that these are the set boundaries of the discipline in any essential sense; they reflect a variety of factors, including the availability of different sorts of evidence, traditions of research and external pressures like student demand and public interest. Classics no longer seeks to define itself in terms of an exclusive right to interpret a limited, supposedly superior body of material; it aspires rather to be an open discipline, a meeting point for different perspectives - an agora, the central space of a Greek city, where people met for trade, politics and friendship, rather than a fortified acropolis.

Above all, this is because classicists have an ever clearer sense of how their chosen worlds fit into a wider universe, and how trying to study them in isolation is always a hopeless (or dangerously misleading) enterprise. Take geography. There is certainly a substantial focus on the world of the Mediterranean, partly because of the special importance of Greece and Rome in the tradition of classical studies, partly because - from certain perspectives - the Mediterranean itself and its environment are important, shaping the development of societies around its shores and in drawing them together into a single connected space. It's occasionally suggested that classics (or at any rate the more historical elements) might be renamed 'Ancient Mediterranean Studies' for this reason. But classicists regularly look further east, not only because of specific events (the Persian invasion of Greece at one end of ancient history, the incursions of Eurasian tribes into the Roman Empire at the other), but also because of the constant flow of goods and ideas backwards and forwards, from near eastern influences on early Greek culture or later Roman religion, to the spread of Greek culture through Persia and beyond. This is often interpreted in terms of contacts between 'the Mediterranean world' (as our primary focus) and exterior forces; but it's equally possible, and increasingly productive, to switch perspectives, and see the Mediterranean as the western extremity of Eurasia - the Med as the far end of complex transcontinental trade networks rather than at the centre of things, or the Greek polis (the independent 'city state') not as a unique European invention but as one version of a near eastern phenomenon. We are increasingly conscious of how far our traditional perspective was shaped by the ideas of the Greeks themselves, who insisted - in the face of substantial evidence - that every non-Greek was slavish and uncivilized, a mere babbler ('barbarian'). In a similar manner, when northern Europe comes into the picture with the expansion of cultural exchange and Roman conquest, we have learnt to think in terms of what the 'natives' got out of the adoption of 'Roman culture' - and how far they contributed to the development of the idea of what it was to be Roman - rather than seeing everything from the Roman perspective as the dissemination of true civilization to savages.

Classics certainly has a tendency to focus on some regions more than others: Greece and Italy, above all (and, when it comes to the Roman period, a remarkable degree of attention paid to the rather marginal province of Britain, for obvious historical reasons). But even this isn't entirely simple. Where is 'Greece'? Round the Aegean Sea, including the coast of Turkey; in colonies all around the Mediterranean and Black Sea, across in Iran and Afghanistan after the dramatic conquests of Alexandria, and in Argentina and Malibu once we start considering later receptions and the movement of objects. 'Rome', meanwhile, comes to encompass most of Europe - and then, as the archetypal image of imperial power, to conquer regions that were never part of its actual empire (think of the Roman-style triumphal arches to be found in places like Berlin and New York). Other cultures within the same geographical space have, traditionally, been studied in terms of their relations to one or other of these two, often in the role of enemies (the Carthaginians, most obviously, but also the Celts); but they are increasingly studied in their own right, or as part of wider systems of international relations, trade or ecology. It's undeniably true that many classicists should get out more and remember that Rome wasn't just Rome or even Italy, that they're investigating a world where the idea of 'Rome' and 'Roman' was constantly being negotiated and reinvented, rather than a fixed point around which one can construct an academic enterprise. But the traditional idea of the exceptional nature of certain regions of the Mediterranean, the idea that only they are really worth studying, is increasingly recognized as a problematic illusion or ideological assertion. The Mediterranean offers a centre of gravity to the discipline, so to speak, not a geographical boundary.

The same is true of chronology. When was Rome? The Roman Empire never ended; it had (and has) a continuing life in many of the underlying structures and cultures of Europe, and an enduring influence as the archetypal empire - there isn't an obvious end point to studying it. Of course, we can again discern a certain pattern in the amount of attention paid to different periods: the Greek city state (especially, if not solely, Athens and Sparta), the Roman Republic and Empire, followed by late antiquity (admittedly with a continuing tendency to assume that the fall of Rome in the West in the fifth century CE marks the end of our interest, rather than the ongoing Roman Empire in the east), and the Hellenistic Kingdoms (not just the ever-popular Alexander). But again these are patterns...