ANCIENT HISTORY AT STANFORD
What is
ancient history?
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.
At Stanford, we believe that the
intellectual upheavals of recent decades have renewed the most fundamental
question: what is the significance of the
ancient Mediterranean in world history? Answering this, we think, should be
ancient historians’ main task. As we see it, the question implies three
sub-questions, interlinked but calling for different approaches and methods:
(a) What exactly happened in the ancient
Mediterranean world? Much remains obscure, even in the best-trodden fields
of political history; and we have barely scratched the surface of questions
about economics, society, and culture. We need to continue developing
traditional philological skills, and to combine them with new evidence from
material culture, new methods from the social sciences and humanities, and new
interests.
(b) 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.
(c) How have we interpreted it? Reinterpreting the ancient Mediterranean
forces us to ask why so many fine scholars, across 200 years, so often came to
different conclusions. The only way to answer this is through self-critical
intellectual history, understanding the evidence available to earlier scholars,
their ideological and intellectual formation, and the audiences and
institutions they worked within. Only then can we understand where the
questions that ancient historians ask came from, why some are still valuable,
and why others should change.
Answering our core question
about the significance of the ancient Mediterranean for world history will
inevitably be a collaborative effort over many years. Most research and
teaching will address sub-question (a), but its importance depends on thinking
about questions (b) and (c), and engaging with scholars in other fields. We
suggest that ancient history is not a distinct discipline: it is an area of
research that can contribute to many different disciplines, from literary
criticism to economics. Ancient history at Stanford is based in the Classics
department, but the ancient historians play leading roles in the Social Science
History Institute and Archaeology Center. They collaborate also regularly with
colleagues in the departments of Anthropological Sciences, Cultural and Social
Anthropology, Economics, History, Philosophy, Political Science, and Sociology,
the Schools of Earth Sciences and Law, and the Hoover Institution. A broad
range of research and teaching goes on at Stanford, but we are particularly
strong in ancient economic and social history and social science methods.
Ancient history is changing
faster than at any time since the late nineteenth century, when modern research
universities took shape. We have found that asking new questions, using new
methods, and proposing new answers energize the field. At Stanford the numbers
of undergraduates taking ancient history classes and of graduate students,
postdoctoral fellows, and faculty focusing on this field have grown rapidly
since the mid-90s. Only US history survey courses draw more students than the ancient
history surveys.
The
graduate program in ancient history
Our primary goals are to help
students learn how to ask good new questions, and to teach them the skills they
will need to answer them. As the types of questions ancient historians ask multiply,
so too do the methods they might use. Graduate programs therefore walk a fine
line between leaving students without the skills they need to do serious work
and burdening them with so many requirements that they take many years to
finish their coursework.
In a newly designed program, we
try to resolve this by focusing on four issues:
(i) Seminars.
These classes address major debates in ancient history and related fields. The
readings focus on recent contributions, and students make presentations and
write research papers. The classes emphasize the formation of questions and how
historians argue. The goal is to help students learn how to identify and frame
good questions. All students also take History 304, “Approaches to History,”
the History department’s introductory graduate course.
(ii) Sources
proseminars. These come in two types. (1) A two-year survey of
classical literature, focusing on Greek and Latin material in alternate years.
(2) All ancient historians need to know how to use non-literary sources. We
offer four classes on inscriptions, coins, papyri, and archaeology. At least
one class is offered each year, on a four-year rotation. Students choose the
two types of non-literary source that are most useful for their research. In
both categories of source proseminars, the goals are to become familiar with
the material and with the central problems in its interpretation.
(iii) Skills
classes. Ancient historians draw on a wider range of skills than ever
before. Some require advanced training in Greek or Latin syntax, semantics and
style; others need further ancient languages, like Egyptian or Hebrew; others
still need techniques drawn from fields like archaeology, demography, papyrology
and palaeography, or literary theory. Each student chooses the 3 skills classes
that will contribute most to his or her research, drawn from any department at
Stanford or the other universities in the Bay Area. Some students may choose to
enlarge their skill set by taking a Ph.D. Minor in a related department, if
funding is available.
(iv) Narrative
history. The basics of chronology and narrative political history
remain fundamental to all serious research. All graduate students will take
advanced surveys of Egyptian, Greek, and Roman history, unless they place out
of these classes in a diagnostic exam at the beginning of their first year, and
will serve as Teaching Assistants in the undergraduate surveys of ancient
history.
These classes provide the foundations
for writing a dissertation, a monograph-length original contribution to
research in ancient history. The dissertation is the most important part of
graduate school, and qualifies the student as a professional ancient historian.
Dissertations normally serve as the basis for a first book or for a series of
major articles. (The current Stanford Bulletin provides a full
description of the requirements for the Ph.D. in Ancient History.)
Stanford’s ancient history
program is small and highly selective. Students work closely with faculty in a
very dynamic intellectual environment, with constant interactions with the
larger Classics program, the History department, the Archaeology Center, and
other groups at Stanford. There are weekly research workshops featuring papers
from visiting speakers and Stanford faculty, postdoctoral fellows, and advanced
graduate students. Every student admitted receives a five-year funding package
covering tuition and stipend. Sixth-year funding may also be available.
Expected time-to-degree is five to six years. The program has generous funding
to support travel to conferences, study in the Mediterranean, and
archaeological fieldwork.
©
2003 Ian Morris, Joe Manning and Walter Scheidel