Sphinx

And so farewell!* To Göteborg (and its unbelievable range of amazing imperial stouts, above all), to the European Social Science History Conference for another two years, and, slightly abruptly, to my role as one of the co-chairs of the Antiquity network of said conference. I think I’ve been doing that role for about ten years – the fact that it involves only short bursts of activity every other year, rather than anything more sustained, means I keep forgetting. On the one hand, it isn’t a huge task and it does offer the chance to try to gather ancient economic and social historians together to exchange ideas and, occasionally, remind historians of other periods that we exist, plus an excuse for visiting some great European cities; on the other hand, I can imagine that from the outside it might look a bit like an attempt at hanging onto a position of power and influence, gate-keeping and extending patronage etc. Which it never has been, but that still meant it was starting to feel like time to pass things on to someone else. It’s just been a bit quick, from an informal chat with a potential successor one day to realising next evening that this was my last time co-organising our bit of the conference. The dogs bark; the cavalcade moves on.

I don’t know if anyone has actually attempted it, but if not it could be an interesting research project to analyse the ESSHC as a microcosm of trends in historical studies over the last twenty years. There is some obvious inertia, insofar as the structure of (mostly thematic) ‘networks’ with their allocations of sessions was pretty well set at the beginning – though changes in the size of allocation from one conference to the next may reflect the number and quality of submissions in different areas rather than just the hustling capabilities of the network chairs. Within different networks one might spot trends, as upcoming researchers seize their opportunity – I can’t say I can see any obvious shifts in ancient studies, but certainly there have been some significant ground-breaking panels over the years, giving a sense of new directions in research.

Conversely, when I started attending the conference, my go-to alternative when there weren’t any antiquity sessions – the other bit of the programme I would scrutinise carefully – was the Theory network, which had thought-provoking discussions of different aspects of historiography, methodology and history of scholarship, with a definite postmodernist slant. These days, there’s little sign of anything like that; there are still Theory sessions, but nothing to tempt me to forego sight-seeing during antiquity-free time slots. I’m sure the debates are signifucant for those engaged with them, but as an outsider I don’t get much of a sense of identity or urgency, of the sorts of issues that demand attention from all other branches of historical study. It’s all a little sad.

I seem to have spent a lot of my time lately in somewhat bleak contemplation of my professional career at half three in the morning – which is to say, as a proportion of my waking hours it’s pretty small, but it does have an out-sized effect on the rest of the day. I suspect this has a lot to do with my still-broken foot, and associated feelings of frustration, uselessness, age and physical decline, and the fact that I have to spend so much time waiting around for buses or limping up and down the endless hills that constitute the Exeter campus means I am even further behind with all the things I’m supposed to have done. There’s nothing like availing oneself of the mobility assistance at Heathrow Airport on the way out to Göteborg, entailing long periods of being left in a corner with occasional bursts of being trollied around like a sack of potatoes, to promote feelings of doubt and erosion of self-image.

One of the things that occurred to me in the small hours one morning was that, idiosyncratic as many of my career choices might appear – my list of publications should probably come with its own epitaph, ‘It seemed like a good idea at the time’ – they are perhaps all too obviously reflections of my graduate experience. Economic and social history, and historiograhy; strident assertion of the primacy of social-science methods over fuzzy inductivism; miscellaneous bits of Theory, especially Weber and Marx; a tendency to obsess about concepts and terminology rather than worrying much about evidence: could I be any more Cambridge?

And then I started to wonder whether this was actually true – not that I am not a random amalgam of those things, because that’s obviously true, but that their lineage might not be quite so obvious to most people. Not so much ‘Cambridge ancient history’ as ‘Cambridge ancient history in the late 80s and early 90s’. At the time, it seemed natural and immutable: we were following in the footsteps of a (frankly terrifying) lineage, Osborne and Rathbone and Morris and Woolf and Alcock and Edwards and von Reden and Hall and all, taught by Cartledge and Garnsey and Hopkins and Snodgrass, looking back to Finley and Jones. How could I not then end up dedicating a chunk of my time over more than a decade to a conference focused on social-scientific approaches to history?

It wasn’t/isn’t just about subject matter and research topics; it’s not even necessarily about the adoption of specific methodologies or theories. It’s more an attitude: of alertness, to concepts, assumptions, forms of analysis, rhetoric – one’s own at least as much as anyone else’s – and of a kind of playfulness, wanting to ask questions more than to offer answers and, if you have to choose, to be interesting rather than necessarily right. And from the outside, I imagine it also looked like a particular sort of arrogance, a sense of being (or aspiring to be) clever in a distinctive manner, not necessarily superior in everything, but certainly superior in the things that really mattered, namely quality of argument and theoretical sophistication. All of which was carefully inculcated through the annual Loxbridge meeting – yes, children, once upon a time the Annual Meeting of Postgraduate Ancient Historians was limited to students from London, Oxford and Cambridge – where we were deployed as proxy forces in the intellectual struggles of our teachers against Those Boring Oxford Empiricists.

It was, shall we say, a special time, at least within this very small and self-obsessed world. It was brought powerfully back to life just last week on Mastodon, when the sociologist Kieran Healy commented on the recent (excellent) essay by Carlos Noreña on the work of Paul Veyne that he (Healy) had bought the translation of Bread and Circuses when it appeared, and had been dismayed to find that substantial sections of the original – the theoretical sections – had not been included on the grounds that English-speaking audiences would have no interest in them. Been there, had that reaction – and glibly concluded that it was bound to happen if you asked someone from Oxford to take charge of such a project. (Note: I have absolutely no idea whose decision it was to abridge the book, but in 1992 the culprit seemed all too obvious).

And now? Not so much. Economic and social history, let alone cultural or gender history, are no longer pitted against traditional political history, but are all seen as different facets of the same enterprise; material and textual approaches are no longer bitter rivals but happy bedfellows; making use of ‘theory’ or adopting ideas from the social sciences are no longer radical gestures and/or the devil’s work, but just the sort of thing one does when pragmatically appropriate, even at Oxford. Indeed, the idea that there is a distinctive ‘Oxford’ approach to ancient history, whether or not defined in terms of how ‘theory’ might be evaluated, seems passé – likewise the notion of a distinctive ‘Cambridge’ approach.

It’s not that there is no controversy, but it seems to have shifted almost entirely into the realm of the public: the wider cultural/political significance of classical antiquity, and how one should respond to this, especially but not only in relation to current ‘culture war’ issues. The debate is less about how one interprets ancient history, and more about how far one orientates the study towards contemporary issues; it’s about the attitude of the researcher more than the implications of their research. Perhaps because the gap between actual academic knowledge of classical antiquity and the assumptions about it within non-academic discourse is so enormous, the two can lead more or less separate lives. We put our energy into arguing about how far it matters that, say, popular conceptions of Roman imperialism or demographic changes in late antiquity are tendentious and problematic, where once we would spend a lot more time arguing about how to understand imperialism or demographic change. It’s not that the contemporary politics of antiquity are not important – but they aren’t the only thing we should be arguing about.

One could argue that the relative absence of controversy in most areas of ancient history – and the absence of clear identities or distinctive methodological positions associated with particular universities – is a positive development, as the discipline has matured and accepted the relevance of a range of approaches rather than dogmatically insisting on a kind of (locally-defined) scholarly purity. It’s a sign of the declining power of the Doktorvater (the patriarchal overtones seem especially relevant in this context) in defining the research of his graduate students, determining their topic and approach; grad students have far more freedom to shape their own studies rather than having to conform to the principles of a ‘school’ in order to survive the experience.

And there is the obvious flattening-out effect of globalisation and the Internet; quite simply, we know much more of what is going on everywhere else, rather than – as in my day – relying on journal reviews (the example that comes to mind is Dominic Rathbone’s reviews in JRS of the monumental multi-volume projects by Italian Marxists in the 1970s and 80s), or indeed on occasional conferences and the ‘Loxbridge’ event to learn how they do things differently elsewhere. Researchers move university and country more often, taking their assumptions with them but also blending them with what they encounter elsewhere. The most powerful ‘networks’ – above all, the networks of Anglophone scholars – become ever more dominant, because they are now more accessible and better able to exert influence beyond their locality., not least in making their assumptions a default.

In terms of conventional globalisation theory, then, we have reflection and reflexivity; as researchers we are now influenced by, and conscious of, ancient history as an amorphous ‘global’ discipline (which conceals the continuing existence of hierarchy and power dynamics), and likely to adopt many of its assumptions, terminology and agenda in order to get to participate. Trying to restore a sense of local academic identity, resisting such homogenisation, is obviously regressive and parochial (and completely pointless) – and would tend to have the effect of reinstating problematic academic hierarchies, forcing students to conform to their supervisors’ prejudices and reducing their prospects in a globalised academic job market.

In retrospect, the Oxford-Cambridge rivalry of my postgraduate years was basically a spat between two local traditions of cheese-making, each convinced that theirs is the only true cheese and their tastes the only reliable arbiter of what makes for a good cheese – and that’s what they trained people to produce. They have now both been exposed to global tastes and the power of the market, and have actually also done a bit of constructive knowledge exchange, learning from one another. Clearly it’s no more than a sign of my indoctrination as an artisan in one specific tradition, before the Internet, that I do feel that something has been lost – that ancient history these days offers a wide choice of cheddar and US-style IPA, but is lacking in Pont l’Évêque and Berliner Weiße.

If I have to think of myself as an outmoded product of antiquated academic practice, it is going to be as a strong, smelly, not-to-everyone’s-but-appreciated-by-a-few-connoisseurs sort of outmoded product…

*Yes, I did start writing this a fortnight ago. It’s been one of those fortnights.