A century and a half after The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Freud began Civilization and Its Discontents with a vision like that vouchsafed to Gibbon as he sat ‘‘amidst the ruins of the Capitol,’’ listening to vespers being sung in the church of Santa Maria in Ara Coeli or, as he calls it in his Memoirs, ‘‘the temple of Jupiter’’ (Gibbon 1907: 160):
Now let us, by a flight of imagination, suppose that Rome is not a human habitation but a psychical entity with a similarly long and copious past - an entity, that is to say, in which nothing that has once come into existence will have passed away and all the earlier phases of development continue to exist alongside the latest ones. This would mean that in Rome the palaces of the Caesars and the Septizonium of Septimius Severus would still be rising to their old heights on the Palatine... [and] the same piece of ground would be supporting the church of Santa Maria sopra Minerva and the ancient temple over which it was built. (Freud 1930: 7)
Freud and Gibbon are as one in their response to Rome as a city perfect in ‘‘the art of growing old by playing on all its pasts’’ (Certeau 1984: 91). Both play on our archaeological awareness that the City of the Popes was no longer the City of the Caesars. As the survival of structures from earlier periods licenses the psychological analogy, so the disappearance of others guarantees that it will be abandoned. Cities do not endure like the individual psyche. Classical archaeology is a science of ruins and remains taken for monuments and documents, data for the construction of narratives of continuity that reconcile our collective experience in the present with our conviction of belonging to a species with a ‘‘long and copious past.’’
Foucault acknowledged the power of ‘‘archaeology’’ when he used the term to unsettle the very idea of a continuous narrative of ‘‘humanity’’ (Foucault 1972: 7-10).
A Companion to Late Antiquity. Edited by Philip Rousseau © 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. ISBN: 978-1-405-11980-1
Historical research had lately turned away from ‘‘the general model of a consciousness that acquires, progresses, and remembers,’’ to concentrate instead either on longterm interactions between human beings and their environments or on local patterns of thought and behavior. There had been a shift from transcribing ‘‘documents’’ for the sake of a narrative to describing ‘‘monuments’’ in order to make a map. The ‘‘notion of discontinuity,’’ once regarded as an obstacle to historical synthesis, had ‘‘become one of the basic elements of historical analysis.’’
In recalling a past time ‘‘when archaeology... aspired to the condition of history,’’ Foucault looked back toward Gibbon. The modern science of archaeology grew out of an older study of‘‘antiquities’’ (Momigliano 1966b: 1-39; 1990: 54-79). Ancient Graeco-Roman thought distinguished between ‘‘history’’ as the chronological narration of public (political, military) events and ‘‘antiquities’’ as the systematic treatment of particular aspects of culture (language and literature, religion, social customs). The clarity of the distinction and the option of purposefully combining the two modes of inquiry were lost sight of in the Middle Ages, to be grasped again in the Renaissance as part of a general discovery of‘‘Antiquity’’ (Jacks 1993). Later, in response to an Enlightenment ideal of‘‘philosophic history,’’ antiquarian research was exploited for large-scale narrative history, and modern historiography was born (Momigliano 1966b: 40-55; but see Phillips 1996).
Judged after the event, Renaissance antiquarianism missed its rendezvous with history writ large (Cochrane 1981: 423-44). Instead, it shaped forms of historical consciousness that found expression in narratives of long-term discontinuity This chapter will suggest how an archaeological perception of the cultural specificity of a remote age made possible the initial discernment of a unity approximating to ‘‘Late Antiquity.’’ To appreciate the difference that made, we must first reenter a world in which there was no science for turning memorials of the past into ‘‘documents’’ or ‘‘monuments’’ in the modern sense.
World History
