History of the Historical Study of the Ancient World

In the eighteenth century, Europe began to dominate the globe. Asking themselves why this was, European intellectuals came up with a radical new theory: European superiority came not from Christianity, but from a cultural tradition that began in ancient Greece. The Greeks invented freedom and rationality; Rome then spread these gifts across Europe. This was why only Europe had a Scientific Revolution and an Enlightenment; and why Europe was now colonizing the other continents. Anyone who wanted to understand the world had to begin with the history, literature, and art of Greece and Rome.

For 200 years this premise made close reading of Thucydides, Tacitus, and other texts meaningful and important. Greek and Roman history were institutionalized in European and American schools and universities. But as the World Wars, decolonization, and the rise of Asian economic power shook confidence in Euro-American superiority, the value of careful study of Greek and Roman history seemed less obvious. Since the 1960s many people have concluded that these fields are irrelevant; and in the 1980s some multicultural critics even called them Eurocentric charter myths.

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