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Speaking up for Latin and Greek

Mary Beard
Changes in the Roman Empire: Essays in the Ordinary by Ramsay MacMullen
Princeton, 399 pp, $35.00, December 1990, ISBN 0 691 03601 2
Twenty-five years ago M.I. Finley made a plea in the TLS for unfreezing the Classics. The
discipline of ancient history, he argued, was in crisis: submerged in the stultifying traditions
of old-fashioned Classical philology, cut off from dialogue with proper history, political
science and sociology, it was no longer part of any wider cultural debate. Finley believed that
ancient history (at least in Britain) had lost its claim to be considered serious history. It
simply failed to broach important matters of broad human concern. It didnt even try to
reflect the historians own seriousness and his values. It had no commitment, no point of
view.
This article was one of a series of attempts by Finley to analyse the ills of his own discipline.
Right up to his last book Ancient History: Evidence and Models, which was published in
1985, he was engaged in prising apart the comfortable, narrow-minded, unreflective
assumptions that lay behind much ancient-historical practice. On what possible grounds, he
asked, could his colleagues treat a biography by Plutarch (writing in the second century CE)
as a primary source for the career of Pericles who lived more than five hundred years
earlier? How could they trust any ancient account of Romes foundation in the eighth century
BCE when it could easily and conclusively be demonstrated that no written source could be
traced back before 300 BCE?
The answer lay in the blind faith that modern scholars place in anything written in Latin and
Greek. Unlike Finley himself, most ancient historians had been originally trained as
Classicists, with long years of study devoted to Classical languages and literature. They
emerged from this process overawed by the authority of the great Classical texts, predisposed
to treat as fact whatever fiction the ancient authors offered. Worse than that, they allowed the
canon of literary texts to set the agenda for the modern discipline of ancient history
parading it as a virtue that the Classical authors should speak for themselves. The result was
that ancient history had a lot to say about generals, emperors and battles; precious little
about proper historical topics, about structure, slavery and economics.
If Finley were here to reflect on the practice of ancient history in the Nineties, he would
probably be disappointed at the impact of his critique. The great tradition of Classical
philology is peculiarly adept at incorporating its enemies. So today in most school and
university courses (there are some honourable exceptions) the inheritance of Finley is
represented by a few questions on slavery and trade which appear at the end of the exam
paper after the regular run of old chestnuts on the strategy of the Archidamian War, or the
foreign policy of the Emperor Claudius. Finleys sting, in other words, has been drawn by a
casual genuflection in the direction of a few socio-economic topics. Meanwhile specialist
Classical journals continue to produce articles of just the kind of narrowness that first
provoked Finleys attack. Did Galba visit Britain in AD 43?, The Illyrian Atintani, the
Epirotic Atintanes and the Roman Protectorate, Pliny HN 7, 57 and the Marriage of Tiberius
Gracchus are among recent offerings in respectable, mainstream British periodicals titles
that could entice only the most masochistic, even of the professionals. Nor has the
presentation of ancient history in the press or on television changed very much. There have
been some valiant attempts, such as Channel 4s Greek Fire, but articles of the Twenty things
you did not know about Hannibals elephants variety are still more common than any
discussion of Finleys important matters of broad human concern: imperialism, censorship,
exploitation, democracy. It is the Mastermind view of the ancient world, the fascination with
curious trivia, that still dominates.
In some ways, however, Finleys attack on the practice of ancient history now seems
misplaced, or at least strikingly dated. He had started out with a healthy scepticism about the
reliability of Classical sources and a healthy mistrust of many ancient historians when
confronted with any texts in Latin and Greek. But in his later work this scepticism turned into
an almost ludicrous rejection of the literary tradition. So by 1985, in the final chapter of
Ancient History, he could claim that the very idea that sources written in Greek or Latin
occupy a privileged status ... is unwarranted and constitutes a major stumbling-block to any
proper historical analysis. No doubt his target here was the apparent naivety of some of his
colleagues those, for example, who failed to understand that Dio Cassiuss History of Rome
(written in the middle of the third century CE) was an inadequate and unsatisfactory guide to
the reign of the Emperor Augustus, 250 years before. But he failed to take the step beyond
that essentially positivist objection to state explicitly what he must have recognised: that any
modern analysis of the nature of Roman imperial society has to be founded on just these
unsatisfactory accounts; that, in fact, there is a very important kind of history to be written
using the flagrant fictions of Roman lite writers, their miscognitions, their wilful, partisan
misrepresentations to themselves of earlier periods of their society, of their heroes and their
villains.
Finley was himself a highly sophisticated reader of ancient texts despite his paraded
rejection of the privileged position of Latin and Greek literature. But he always flinched at the
idea that the practice of ancient history is, and must be, essentially a practice of reading. By
that I do not mean that it should be a naive fact-searching or narrowly philological reading;
nor do I mean that it should be the reading of a restricted literary canon in isolation without
the essential concomitants of archaeology, numismatics, art history, epigraphy, anthropology,
hermeneutics, sociology and all the other disciplines that Finley rightly regarded as
indispensable. Ancient history is reading in its very widest sense, but it must remain centred
on the vast quantity of literary and non-literary written material that survives from the
Classical world, and which serves to distinguish that world so sharply from neighbouring
prehistory.
At the same time as Finley was framing his most strident protests against the dominance of
Classical philology over Classical history, Classical philology itself was starting to undergo a
major epistemological revolution. That revolution is far from complete; nor is it universal.
The study of Classical literature still attracts more than its fair share of under-theorised
practical criticism and clever, but ultimately inconsequential studies of variant manuscript
readings and scribal errors. There has been, nevertheless, a growing tendency for specialists
in the literature of the ancient world to offer a reading of Classical texts informed by the
seriousness and commitment that Finley demanded informed not only by modern literary
theory but also by the debates and conflicts of feminism, psychoanalysis and contemporary
cultural politics. Literary studies in this sense cannot be seen as the enemy of history; if
anything, they are part and parcel of the same subject.
Simon Goldhills Reading Greek Tragedy, for example, published in 1986, is a book born out
of the tradition of the new Classical philology. It does not claim to be a work of history, but
by showing how Athenian drama acted as a privileged arena for defining and negotiating
gender relations, cultural change, the nature of Athenian tradition, conflicts of political power
and so forth, Goldhill puts Greek tragedy at the centre of the historical stage. According to his
analysis, these plays are not simply quarries from which the determined ancient historian
might now dig out pieces of evidence for particular political events as with the well-known
use of Aeschyluss Eumenides to throw light on the otherwise ill-documented democratic
reforms of Ephialtes in 462 BCE. For Goldhill, Athenian tragedy and the broad cultural
questions that it negotiates are an integral part of the political and social processes of Athens
as a city-state. As such, tragedy just as much as the structure of loan transactions, or the
details of voting procedures in the assembly is Athenian history.
These changes in the wider practice of the Classics and of Classical philology make Finleys
underlying aim to liberate ancient history, and to find it an intellectual home with proper
history, seem outdated. Finley was, in any case, always guilty of a little deception here. He
wrote as if the kind of wide-ranging, committed articles that are found in Past and Present
were typical of modern history in general, when, in fact, as he well knew, most historical
journals include numerous pedantic pieces which are just as narrow in their focus as the
worst specimens of Classical history. He also strategically failed to mention, when he
eulogised the intellectual range of the modern discipline, the chauvinist privilege accorded to
specifically British history within many university departments compared to which the
traditions of the Classical discipline seem admirably broad. However it appeared to Finley ten
or twenty years ago, the fact that ancient history has its institutional home within the wider
discipline of Classics now seems less a pressing problem than a positive benefit.
Ramsay MacMullen, professor of history and Classics at Yale, is one of the leading figures of
the generation of ancient historians after Finley (who was 16 years his senior). The author of
numerous monographs on aspects of Roman imperial history (ranging from paganism and
Christianity to the crisis of the third century CE and the corruption of late Roman imperial
administration), MacMullen has now collected together in Changes in the Roman Empire
about a third (24 in all) of his short papers. It is a display of dazzling breadth, including
pieces on womens power in Rome, the social organisation of the Roman legion, bureaucratic
language in late Roman documents, the art and ceremony of the fourth century CE and much
more. I want to concentrate, though, on the first three articles in the volume (two previously
published in 1980 and 1989, one specially written) which are grouped together under the
heading Historical Method. His reflections here on the state of his subject show all the
uncertainties that you might expect of a senior scholar watching a discipline in a state of flux.
Several of MacMullens complaints about the practice of ancient history are identical with
those of Finley who is, quite extraordinarily, never referred to in these chapters.
MacMullens paper History in Classics (1989) is a version, as its title suggests, of the old
Finley-style attack on the dominance of Classical philology. If anything, MacMullen is more
extreme. He pillories the whole institutional framework of ancient history for the way it
delegates the training of its specialists to a completely separate discipline: no one, he argues,
would entrust trainee physicists to a political scientist, or anthropologists to an economist, so
what possible grounds are there for enlisting Classical philologists as the sole educators and
guardians of those who are to become ancient historians? Like Finley, he sees the answer in
the priority still given to mastery of the Latin and Greek languages, and in the prevailing
belief that the choice of specialising in historical aspects of the ancient world can only be
offered after the student has become fluent in the ancient languages and their literature. For
most ancient historians, he suggests, the initial attraction of their discipline comes from an
enjoyment of the great historical texts of the ancient world, from Herodotus or Plutarch. I
like it, he imagines them saying. Ill try my own hand at it.
This is all even more palpably absurd than Finleys version of the argument. It is certainly
true that an intelligent reading of Classical literature can stimulate an interest in ancient
history, in its broadest sense. The very opacity of Classical texts, the paradox that they remain
so insistently strange and foreign while at the same time being such a reassuringly familiar
part of our own cultural traditions, ought to provoke the readers curiosity about the nature of
the society that produced them. But this is quite different from some woolly desire to emulate
the ancient authors themselves, to become a new Thucydides. MacMullens heroes in this
chapter are, needless to say, those historians who have turned away from the Classical literary
tradition to draw on Roman law-codes, inscriptions, coins and on comparative anthropology.
Some of the work that he cites for approval is important and innovative; some of it represents
what I would call the best type of reading for, after all, Roman law is as much a text as
Tacitus. But it is wilful blindness to current discussions in other areas of the Classics to imply
that it is only in these (to use MacMullens term) extra-philological subjects that good
history can emerge.
MacMullens opinions are not simply, though, a revised version of Finleys. Some of his
interests make very clear the decade and a half that separates them. Finley, for example, was
not particularly concerned with the language of history. He was, when he chose to be, a
winning rhetorician, but he did not regard style, rhetoric and the criteria of plausibility
(rather than of truth) as central issues in historical method. MacMullen, by contrast, reflects a
contemporary sense that good history-writing must be seductive: it is about persuading,
amusing, teasing and enticing. More scholars, he argues, should have the courage to
recognise that a lot of ancient history has been quite simply dull, and that boring writing
(however worthy, however true) will never persuade.
That kind of straight talking to the often puritanical and unseductive discipline of ancient
history can only be a good thing, but MacMullen offers widely contradictory views when he
considers, at various points, how ancient history can best persuade and convince its readers.
The first chapter, for example, includes a plea for more Annales school history within the
ancient discipline, by which he appears to mean more assemblages and analysis of social-
historical data more demography, statistics and tabulation. This culminates with an
extraordinary eulogy of the bar-chart (or linear-graphic presentation), with praise for its
vividness and the striking quality of visual argument. However one reacts to this
enthusiasm for counting and graphs, it is unsettling to find in the next chapter, Roman Elite
Motivation reprinted from Past and Present (1980), an apparently diametrically-opposed
position. Turning to careful attempts to estimate the proportion of Roman citizens engaged as
serving soldiers in Romes imperial expansion, MacMullen concludes that these calculations
add up only to the glaringly obvious conclusion that the Romans exerted themselves in war
very greatly. They made a big effort. And, of course, we knew that already from Roman
literature. Even Macaulay knew that, he sneers, when he wrote The Lays of Ancient Rome.
To be sure, there is good and bad use of statistics. Some calculations are worth doing, others
are not. Maybe MacMullen means no more than that, but throughout these methodological
chapters there is a lurking sense that good practice in ancient history is increasingly difficult
to pin down, and that even a man of MacMullens distinction is far from certain about the
direction in which the subject is going. Even when he sounds the same old cries as Finley, we
get a sneaking sense that the subject has moved on, and that those cries no longer have the
same resonance. It is a reasonable prediction that in another decade and a half ancient
history will be celebrating its integration in the new kind of Classical philology not feeling
that it needs to make apologies for its Classical status.
Vol. 13 No. 9 9 May 1991 Mary Beard Speaking up for Latin and Greek
pages 18-19 | 2654 words
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