Introduction

The term structure is used in many academic and non-academic contexts, yet it is rarely conceptualized. Social scientists collect and analyze structural data; a starship’s hull has a structural integrity, as have atoms, high-rise buildings and rituals; epics such as the Odyssey or The Lord of the Rings follow a narrative superstructure; many ethnic groups are exposed to structural violence; linguistic approaches towards language include attempts to explore its logical structure, while structuralism in anthropology, as pioneered by Claude Levi-Strauss, investigates the modes by which meaning is produced within a culture. The common implication underlying these examples is that something - material elements, a political organization, an academic discipline - consists of multiple parts that relate to each other, their structure being both the multiplicity of parts and their mutual relation. This meaning is already inherent in the Latin word structura, from which the modern term derives.

Historians have a difficult relation with structure. Ever since Herodotus of Halicarnassus presented his historias apodeixis (“Display of Inquiry,” though “Histories” is the more common translation), historians have sought to uncover the past. History, as a discipline, investigates systematically collected sources rather than deterministic structural forces. The study of the latter was extremely popular in the 1960s and 1970s, when the followers of structuralism claimed to offer a “scientific” approach to history through the meticulous calculation of, for instance, unemployment rates, GNPs and poverty lines. The refinement of sociologically inspired methodologies and anthropological concepts added to the discovery of structural patterns which are specific to human society. This approach was tremendously fruitful and continues to be influential, but it also faces criticism. The main objection is that structuralism, while rightly emphasizing the longue duree of historical processes (Braudel 1972), overstretches the concept of synchronicity. It oftentimes leaves too little space for diachronic change and development through time (cf. Renfrew/Cherry 1986: 18).

Although more recent trends in history writing emphasize various and at times competing concepts, it is fair to assert that the notion of culture, and the way it is transmitted and transformed, is at the core of today’s research. Current approaches, which are greatly inspired by the cultural studies turn, include a renewed interest in the processes and practices of generating, perpetuating and communicating power (political, religious, sexual, etc.). At the same time, human agency - that is, the capacity of individuals to shape the process of history - has regained its deserved scholarly attention.

But processes such as the communication of power require a viable structure. Human action is embedded in a set of norms, patterns and sentiments that give meaning to that action and “structure” it. This set embraces both the horizontal distribution of structures as well as vertical patterns of hierarchy. Niklas Luhmann’s auvre on system theory (cf. Luhmann 1995) is built on the assumption that those features are shared by bureaucracies, chains of command, or family bonds alike. Hence, when social scientists and scholars in the humanities speak of political or social structures, they refer to entities, institutions, and/or groups as they exist in definite relation to each other, and to their horizontal and vertical interaction within their respective systems. The dense network of this interaction constitutes a landscape that prefigures human action and contextualizes its behavior. Despite the historian’s concern with process and change, history is therefore inexorably driven by structure.

Yet structures are never static. They have their own history. Take the unfolding of political institutions or, in the economic domain, the interaction between trade and cultural transmission. Even though this interaction is shaped by patterns of continuity, it is susceptible to human action and oftentimes moments of contingency that punctuate episodes of structural change. In the Aegean, always a highway for the exchange of ideas and goods, the structures of trade and cultural communication changed so dramatically towards the end of the Bronze Age that it is virtually impossible to forge a structural account that covers the time span of any two generations. Similarly, a static approach to the Roman republic has become increasingly difficult. Current research on the interaction between the senatorial elite and the populus Romanus stresses the exposure of this relation to constant change and adaptation. While the formal arrangement of politics, that is the organization of magistracies and assemblies, in principle remained the same throughout the republic, modern scholarship detects a great fluidity and in some periods even a dramatically accelerated change in the actual mechanics of republican government. It has been argued that when the republic fell, this was due to a perpetuated crisis, in fact a “crisis without alternative” (C. Meier 1982), which implies a structural deficit of Roman politics that would not allow for adaptability - and hence had to be replaced in an act of revolution (see section 3 below). This view has been challenged by Erich Gruen, who forcefully denied the necessity of such a development: “Civil war caused the fall of the republic - not vice versa” (Gruen 1974: 504). What caused the fall of the Roman republic, then, a structural deficit of politics, a series of more or less contingent wars, or the human agency of men like Sulla, Pompey, and Caesar? It is the historian’s task to disclose the underlying structural principles of human action. At the same time, the historian must present an account that is open enough to reflect the dynamics of continuity and change. History writing juggles process, structure, and event.