The real strength of Rostovtzeff’s work was his sense that the ancient economy had to be treated within the context of ancient social relations. It took a scholar with the vast intellectual range of A. H. M. Jones to understand the true power of Rostovtzeff’s analysis and attempt a creative reformation of his understanding of the ancient economy as a tool for analyzing the institutional structures of social control (A. H. M. Jones 1952: 359; Crook 1971: 426).
Jones himself was something of an outsider, though more out of choice than training or background. A product of New College, Oxford, whose brilliance won him immediate election to All Souls after he took his degree in 1926, Jones did not hold a regular academic appointment in England until 1939 (he had taught in Cairo from 1929 to 1934). That appointment, at Wadham College, Oxford, did not survive the outbreak of war (Crook 1971: 426-9). Jones returned to teaching in 1946, this time as Professor of Ancient History at University College, London, and then, from 1951 until his death in 1970 as Professor of Ancient History at Cambridge. In the mid-sixties, he was joined at Cambridge by another scholar who was also somewhat eccentric in his career choices: Peter Brunt.
Peter Brunt, who succeeded Syme as Camden Professor of Ancient History at Oxford in 1971, was unlike his predecessor in that he had an affection for Hugh Last, and a strong interest in the history of ideas as well as the structures of Roman society. Like Syme, however, Brunt was something of an outsider, the son of a Methodist minister and a scholarship student at Oriel College, Oxford. Indeed, it was discomfort with the prevailing trend of Roman history at Oxford in the fifties and sixties that caused him to resign his tutorial fellowship in ancient history at Oriel to take up the position of bursar at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge. Armed with a sympathy for members of the lower class, and a powerful analytic capacity whose resources he readily deployed to demolish the fanciful constructions of others while offering potent alternatives of his own, his work spanned Classical Greek, republican Roman, and imperial history. It was a span very similar to that of Jones, whom he greatly admired. For, although Jones may be primarily remembered for his monumental study of the institutional history of the later Roman Empire, his studies of the Greek city and various aspects of the economy were markedly different in tone and direction from Syme’s, and resonated with Brunt’s concern for the lower classes of republican Italy.
Brunt differed from both Jones and Syme in his belief that the history of ideas could be written independently of the people who had those ideas - that there were traditions of Stoic thought, for instance, that could shape the way that people explained the world around them, and motivated their actions (not surprisingly, perhaps, Brunt had been, in his youth, a much better student of philosophy than many ancient historians). The interests of Jones and Brunt melded with the interests of Moses Finley (more below) to suggest a middle ground between Syme’s style of analysis and Rostovtzeff’s. In a series of brilliant articles Brunt began to ask just how the government managed. What did procurators really do? What did senators do? And, in his great work on Roman population of 1971, Brunt offered an empirical look at the issue of Roman demography. While the demographic aspects of this book now seem dated in light of the application of modern demographic methods to the ancient evidence pioneered by Bruce Frier, and now championed by a new generation of scholars, the originality of Brunt’s questions at the time that he asked them cannot be underestimated (Bagnall and Frier 1994; Frier 1982). Demography had previously been the province of Karl Julius Beloch, a genius who was kept from an appointment in his native land by Mommsen, and Arnold Toynbee, who had brilliantly, if improbably, argued that the destruction of Italy under Hannibal led inexorably to the fall of the Roman Republic even as Brunt was writing Italian Manpower (Momigliano 1966b [1994]: 104; A. J. Toynbee 1965). Unlike either of his predecessors, Brunt used the study of census returns as the basis for studying how Roman society extended across Italy and into the provinces.
Moses Finley was, like Brunt, a man whose contributions to ancient history range far beyond the Roman imperial period. His intellectual precocity is evident from the fact that he took a degree in psychology at Syracuse University at the age of fifteen (Whittaker 1996: 460). Moving on to Columbia, where he took an MA in public law, he met his future wife, a classicist, and enrolled in the PhD program in ancient history (Whittaker 1996: 461). At the time that he finished his graduate work, Jews were not readily welcomed in the East Coast establishment that dominated American academe in the first part of the century. The consequence was that he obtained a position at Rutgers in 1946 rather than at a major research university, and that he was left unprotected when the scourge of McCarthyism struck (Whittaker 1996: 462-4). In the wake of his genuinely heroic resistance to McCarthyism, which cost him his job at Rutgers, he moved into the little more welcoming environment of the British university. The move was possible thanks to the intervention of the brilliant Greek historian, Tony Andrewes, a product of Winchester and New College, who lived up to his liberal ideals (and was, at the same time, supporting the career of another brilliant
Jewish scholar, the epigraphist David Lewis). Indeed, Finley finished second to Lewis for the studentship (as tutorial fellowships are termed there) at Christ Church in 1955, the same year that he was elected to a lectureship at Cambridge, conjoined, two years later, with a fellowship at Jesus College.
Finley arrived in England with a mind unfettered by the constraints of the British curriculum. He had initially been trained in the study of modern, and then ancient, law at Columbia, and his first book had been on Greek boundary stones. But he had rapidly moved beyond his training, aided by conversations with others at Columbia, and made his reputation with a brilliant study of the economic attitudes evident in the Homeric poems. He was a natural comparative historian. His greatest contribution to the subject was not his use of the work of Karl Polanyi to study the ancient economy; it was rather his ability to inspire others to take equally innovative approaches. In terms of the study of the ancient economy, the chapters that David Mattingly and Dennis Kehoe have contributed to this volume show how the evidence does not sustain the strict ‘‘primitivist’’ line advocated by Finley, who essentially theorized A. H. M. Jones’ observation that wealth was held in land, or the ‘‘modernist’’ approach suggested by Rostovtzeff’s overt comparisons with the modern world. Mattingly argues from the archaeological evidence for the movement of goods that the economy of the Roman Empire was extraordinary by the standards of the pre-modern world in terms of the links that it forged between regions, a view that largely supports Rostovtzeff’s arguments, while conceding that the attitudes towards the accumulation of capital were far different from those of early modern Europe. Kehoe’s chapter traces the conservative attitudes of landholders who saw their investments in land as preserving social status, and prevented the Roman economy from developing to its full potential.
Despite criticisms that may be leveled at their conclusions, the work of Syme, Finley, and Rostovtzeff retains the interest of current practitioners because of their ability to achieve the seamless unity of different styles of scholarship. In Rostovtzeff’s case, his lasting contribution to scholarship was his insistence on studying material culture alongside the evidence of texts of all sorts (Rives, this volume). By the time he arrived at Wisconsin, having been turned down in his application for the Camden chair of Ancient History in Oxford, Rostovtzeff was already at work on the Zenon archive, had written on Roman art, and made his reputation as an original scholar in a study of the late Roman colonate. His last years before retirement from Yale, where he greeted at least one new student with the statement that she needed to know epigraphy and he would teach her, were spent directing the excavation of Dura Europus (Potter 2001: 320).
World History
