Whatever the explanation for the convergence discussed in the last section, it does not seem to result from any change in the organization of the subject. Ancient historians virtually never have the opportunity to form a university department on their own. There are two normal structures in Britain and the USA: in one, ancient history is part of History; in the other, it is part of Classics. This second model is predominant and becoming ever more so. Its undoubted strength is that it associates closely those working on all aspects of the Greco-Roman world, historians, philologists, literary or textual critics, philosophers and archaeologists, all of whom have much to profit from close association. Its limitations are, first, that it divides the practitioners of all these specializations from those who share their own discipline; secondly, that it tends to exclude aspects of the study of the ancient world that do not concern the activities of Greeks or Romans, most obviously the history of the ancient world before the first millennium, but also the cultures of the peoples living outside the boundaries of the Roman empire. The recently developing emphasis on reception studies, however valuable in itself, must exaggerate these tendencies, since it is concerned mostly with those aspects of the ancient world that have been celebrated through the centuries and far less with those that depend heavily on recent discoveries and decipherments. It provides yet another reason for excluding the historical study of the early civilizations.
Whatever the merits and demerits of these two structures, or of a single department covering all aspects of the study of the ancient world, it is quite clear that the institutional separation between historians of antiquity and those of later periods has increased rather than diminished, and hence that the convergence of themes cannot be explained by such organizational factors. In fact, looking to continental Europe, since there are various different traditions in different countries, sometimes associating ancient history with archaeology, sometimes with philology, sometimes associating all branches of the ancient world together, it would be impossible to make the same analysis of the trend, but the trend seems to be widespread all the same.
Whether the trend is altogether a healthy one is a subject of some concern. It has certainly led to much research on topics that were previously ignored or only covered in antiquarian dictionaries, and it has forced the rethinking of important areas of ancient life where ideas were fixed or scarcely detectable at all. It is continuing exactly the tradition of widening boundaries that has been so characteristic of the subject in the last century. So, for instance, the concept of identity has provided a starting point for rethinking the character of ancient societies and people’s sense of themselves within those societies; on this theme, work of great importance has been produced in recent years, even though “identity” itself, some would argue, is a slippery conception to exploit. There may be an element of fashion in the choice of research topics, but that is not in itself necessarily a disadvantage; it has the effect of playing a searchlight across a particular topic, so that seminars in many universities simultaneously work on the same topic. The disadvantage is that more traditional research areas have become less appealing: the core understanding of any period must surely rest, as it always has in the past, on evolving ideas about the politics, economy, and society of a given region; new results need to be integrated into wider narratives and the narratives themselves rethought in the light of the new research context. Otherwise there is a risk of a gulf developing between out-of-date general histories and the radical revisions of specific topics.
World History
