Greek civilisation and slavery

This chapter examines whether Greek civilization was based on slavery. The silence of classicists on the subject is not surprising. The discussion here is limited to Anglo-American scholarship, in an attempt to achieve a manageable focus, though a great deal of the last half-century's work on ancient Greek slavery has been written in French and German. Slavery may cover very different types of unfreedom, such as the chattel slave system of Athens and the helotage that was the predominant form of servitude practised by Sparta. Whether slaves, especially chattel slaves, are to be seen principally as living property or as socially dead outsiders evokes further levels of definition, which are also contested.

Recolonising Egypt

Egypt as a historical subject has never lacked attention in the field of international political history but it is also almost uniquely fruitful as a source of evidence for little narratives and as a historiographical battlefield. This chapter tries to describe and explain, from an explicitly classical perspective, aspects of the relationship between some ancient and some modem perceptions of Egypt and the role which ‘history in’ and ‘history of’ the classical world has played and continues to play in shaping those perceptions.

The ‘long’ late antiquity: a late twentieth-century model

The last generation has seen an ‘explosion’ in the study of late antiquity. Whether people call it ‘the later Roman empire’ or ‘late antiquity’, the term now in much more common use in English. Handbooks are rapidly appearing to help their teachers meet this demand and they too express the current understanding of what is to be included. This chapter argues that a particular model for the study of this period has come to have a strong influence on students and scholars alike, and it asks how and why this is so, and what implications there are for the future study of the subject. Andrea Giardina has called this a particularly Anglo-centric phenomenon.

Discovery, autopsy and progress: Diocletian’s jigsaw puzzles

It is commonplace that historical enquiry evolves as successive generations ask different questions, in a complex interplay between, on the one hand, the intellectual traditions in which individual historians have grown up, the different traditions that they discover, and the world as a whole in which they move; on the other hand, an ever greater body of knowledge and a wider range of historical tools. This chapter explores, by way of the particular example of the edicts of the Emperor Diocletian on maximum prices and on the coinage, the story of the discovery and study of their texts. It examines the impact on historical enquiry both of chance discoveries and of deliberate autopsy.

Ciceronian correspondences: making a book out of letters

This chapter exemplifies the complexities of the surviving evidence, looking at the literary works of Cicero. The Letters of Cicero are one of the most extraordinary survivals from the ancient world, and a correspondence that ranks with the great letter collections of all time, from Abelard to Virginia Woolf. This chapter is an experiment in reading those Letters in a radically old-fashioned way. It poses a question: what difference does the order in which one chooses to read it make to our literary, cultural and historical understanding of the collection? It suggests that there is a strong cultural logic in the order of the letters preserved in the manuscripts. It also examines traditional books and Letters to Atticus and to Friends.

The use of images: visual history and ancient history

This chapter explores the visual aspect, a territory shared with archaeology and art history. The Greek and Roman world poured an astonishing amount of its surplus into expensive monuments and elaborate public images, and their study is naturally an important part of classical archaeology. Unlike many other archaeologies, this subject studies a world extremely well documented by abundant and diverse literary and textual evidence, and it is thus part of the wider classics project. The discussion explores some of the great gains made by recent work in this area and some of the remaining deficiencies. Gains have resulted from application of historically based questions, while deficiencies arise from the still largely untheorised nature of this subject's research and discourse.

Rhetoric in mid-antiquity

The book's concluding study presents the rhetorical education of the fourth century ad, not as the end but as only midway in the literary culture of Hellas, between Homer and the Byzantine emperor Manuel Palaeologus. The first section of this chapter examines the rhetoric from Homer to Byzantium, from the Iliad to Emperor Manuel II. The second section considers mid-antiquity's pivotal significance, when the Roman empire of Manuel — Greek, Christian and detached from Rome — began to take root. The third section examines a lengthy passage from the scholia to Demosthenes' speech On the False Embassy. The lecturer deploys, in what may seem obsessive detail, the formidably elaborate apparatus of contemporary rhetorical theory. The fourth section notes that his contemporaries and successors saw Menander primarily as a specialist in the kind of minute analysis of forensic and deliberative oratory.

Indifference readings: Plato and the Stoa on Socratic ethics

In trying to understand Plato, this chapter suggests that Plato himself may be used as a guide to reading Plato, and that such a guide does indeed lead to a philosophical destination of which the analytic tradition might approve. A comparison of two short and markedly different passages, one from the Meno and the other from the Euthydemus shows us that the difference may be one between a Socratic view (the Meno), and its Platonic replacement in the Euthydemus. This account, however, seems not to meet the present case: in particular because both the two passages are significantly indeterminate. The indeterminacy of the Meno, this chapter argues, is teased out by the Euthydemus; it is this feature that should encourage one to see the latter as a ‘reading’ of the former.

Another look at Virgil’s Ganymede

The twentieth century was marked by an accelerating intensity of critical attention to Virgil, triggered initially by a revaluation of the merits of Latin literature in comparison to its Greek models. This chapter takes a short passage of the Aeneid, what might appear little more than a vignette, and offers a reading both intensive in its detailed teasing out of the text, and extensive in the networks of allusion and meaning in which this passage is caught. It draws on some of the reader-response approaches which developed in the later part of that century. Michael Putnam's interpretation lays emphasis on elements that are suppressed in this description of the Ganymede story: Jupiter's erotic delight in his human prey, and the triumphant elevation of the boy to immortality on Olympus.

Roman history and the ideological vacuum

For the twentieth century, the political history of Athens was essentially ideological, involving great issues of freedom and tyranny, while that of the Roman Republic was merely a struggle for power, with no significant ideological content. But why should that be? The Romans were perfectly familiar with the concepts and terminology of Greek political philosophy and used them to describe their own politics, as Cicero explains in writing in 56 bc. Not surprisingly. Greek authors who dealt with Roman politics used the concepts of democracy and oligarchy, the rule of the many or the rule of the best, without any sense that it was an inappropriate idiom.