Three Approaches to Ancient History (cont.)
- How much does it matter? Any claim about historical significance is implicitly comparative: significant relative to what? Asking just how unusual Greek and Roman developments were requires that we look at other societies, and sometimes these comparisons show that pairing Greece and Rome between c. 700 BC and AD 500 obscures more than it reveals. Some of the processes at work make most sense when we study them
in Egypt, Persia, or Carthage as well; or when we look at a longer time span, going back into prehistory or forward into the Middle Ages; or when we put the ancient Mediterranean into the larger set of all pre-industrial societies. Most of the time, the answers to these questions show that assuming a priori that ancient history is self-evidently important or that it is irrelevant are equally wrong.
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