Introduction

There are many good reasons why literature should be central to the practice of ancient history. Texts provide a huge bulk of ancient evidence, all but inexhaustible to the individual reader. What is more, much of this material can be read pretty much complete, in good-quality modern editions that have the additional benefit of being electronically searchable. A good range of translations, commentaries, and other interpretative media are available. Dates and contexts can often be determined with relative precision.

These are not benefits to be taken lightly. Anyone who has ever worked on the material remains of antiquity - papyri, inscriptions, artifacts, coins, sites, architecture - may well look enviously upon the lot of literary scholars. Material culture is liable to be damaged by time, and problems of context loom large: even if a precise record exists of where a given item was discovered, serious questions still arise as to how it got there. Does a coin found in an unidentified building make it a treasury? Or was it dropped there by accident? How do we know whether an inscription was located in a given place by the original commissioner, or by a medieval farmer in need of a plinth for his pig trough? Such issues do not arise in the same way for literary texts. It would of course be instructive to know more than we do about the circumstances of production, performance and circulation of individual works, but the meaning of literary texts is not conditioned by their material form and context to the same extent.

There are, however, many other equally good reasons for historians to treat literary texts with suspicion. Because education was a select privilege in antiquity, the vast majority of our literary texts represent the outlook of elite males alone. Literature always embodies a set of values: it constructs an imaginary world (even if, as in historiography, that world is based upon reality) where certain character types predominate, and particular actions have particular consequences. To accept literary texts as

A Companion to Ancient History Edited by Andrew Erskine © 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. ISBN: 978-1-405-13150-6

Guides to historical reality usually involves subscribing to these core values. There was, for sure, a time when many scholars of ancient history could subscribe, minor adjustments notwithstanding, to most of the (elite, male) values: and so Thucydides’ and Plato’s view of classical Athens’ decline into mob rule, for example, might be accepted as broadly accurate. Those days are gone; narrative history is now held in deep suspicion, precisely because we are so aware that narratives are partial and self-invested.

Nevertheless, because of the sheer weighting of our evidence, dealing with literary texts is an inevitability. What is more, historians, I shall argue, stand to gain much from engaging with the issues of interpretation raised by literary texts - just as, conversely, it behooves literary students to locate their texts in a historical landscape. The stand-off between “literary” readings of texts, focusing upon aesthetic and formal aspects (allusion, narratology, and so forth), and “historicism” (emphasizing points of contact with a text’s contemporary world) is unproductive. In conclusion to this chapter, I shall point to what I hope to be a more constructive form of historicism.