Certainly no one in Athens or Rome thought of themselves as members of a class or a status group; historians making use of these terms tend to argue that such groups have an objective existence, regardless of whether their members realize it, and that it is necessary to look beyond the surface appearance of society to understand what is “really” going on. This is the claim of all social-scientific theories, that they reveal underlying structures and processes, on the basis of a general understanding of the ways that societies and economies work. The reason why many historians, especially those working in more traditional fields like political history, are frequently suspicious of the use of “theory” in ancient history is precisely because it is felt to be too general, disregarding the specifics of the evidence and its ancient context (Morley 2004).
All historians, even the most apparently untheoretical, make use of generalizations: in their use of concepts like “emperor,” “democracy,” or “city,” and in the assumptions about “human nature” that underpin their interpretations of, for example, why the Spartans and Athenians fought one another or why Constantine converted to Christianity. Social-scientific history is distinguished in the first place by its aim, namely to study individual institutions or events as a means of drawing more general conclusions about the antiquity (and even, perhaps, about other human societies), rather than as an end in itself (cf. Morris 2002). Secondly, it tends to be explicit about the way that it makes use of generalizations: identifying them and their origins, offering arguments to justify their use, and discussing whether and how far they do illuminate classical antiquity. It offers a particular sort of knowledge about the past; sometimes lacking the sort of vivid detail and eye for the particular that “brings the past to life,” but claiming to provide an understanding of why things were as they were, rather than just a description of them.
A classic example is the study of the ancient city. It is widely agreed that classical civilization was “urban,” despite the fact that the vast majority of the population lived in the countryside; not only were Greece and Rome highly urbanized, but the city was the center of political, social, cultural, and intellectual life. Cities are the place of origin of much of our evidence for antiquity; the question is what we should seek to do with this mass of information. With the exception of Athens and Rome - Pompeii is of course archaeologically rich, but there are very few literary sources - we lack the evidence to write a proper history of any individual city, and it is arguable how much it would tell us even if we could (Finley 1981a). Historians have tended instead to generalize about “the ancient city,” and to draw on all the available material to discuss and analyze the nature of “ancient urbanism” - the basic structures of demography, society, economics and food supply, the cultural idea of the city, and so forth. Individual cities are understood in terms of this more general framework of knowledge and ideas.
This immediately raises the question of the appropriate level of generalization; does it make more sense to talk of “the Greek city” and “the Roman city” than to subsume them under a broader category? Conversely, are there useful things that can be said about “the premodern city” that might help in interpreting the ancient evidence? Within a single society, individual cities differ from one another in important ways; at the same time, one can argue that the concentration of a number of people into a relatively small space, along with the concentration of wealth and power, creates conditions that are common to cities of all sizes and all historical periods. Too narrow and specific a focus may make the study less useful; too broad a generalization - for example, the idea, drawn largely from studies of modern American cities, that “city air is liberating” and that urbanism automatically promotes social mobility - may be either implausible or unhelpfully vague, or both.
One approach to the study of ancient urbanism which illustrates both its advantages and potential problems is the “consumer city” model, developed by M. I. Finley (1981a) on the basis of work by earlier historians and sociologists like Weber. Finley’s interest was in defining the essential characteristics of the ancient city compared with those of other periods, above all the late medieval city. Following Weber’s methodology, he devised the “ideal type” of the “consumer city”: a model, a mental construct, so to speak an idealized version of a particular sort of city (contrasted with the model of the “producer city”) which could then be compared with historical reality. The aim of such a model is to simplify a complex reality, to identify the basic characteristics shared by all ancient cities; it does not imply that all ancient cities will exactly match the model. For Finley, what distinguished the ancient city from its medieval counterpart was its relationship with the surrounding countryside: it was primarily a collector of rents and taxes rather than a center of manufacture engaged in trade with rural producers; it was primarily a political rather than an economic institution, and this explained why ancient cities, in contrast to medieval ones, did not have a dynamic role in promoting economic growth and development. This was an important refinement of the much broader theory, found in many general accounts of urbanism, that cities will always have a dynamic effect on the economies of their hinterlands (cf. Morley 1996).
There are plenty of grounds on which the “consumer city” model could be attacked. It draws attention away from the significant differences between cities in different periods of classical antiquity and it can focus too much on what the ancient city was not, rather than saying anything positive about what it was like. The contrast between the ancient and the medieval city can be overdone - they had a great deal in common, compared with modern industrial cities - and the argument conceals a leap of logic: the fact that the ancient and medieval cities had different relationships with the countryside, and the fact that the medieval economy developed (eventually) into industrialized capitalism while antiquity did not, are not necessarily connected. However, what most historians sought to argue in response to Finley was that the ancient city was not a consumer, identifying examples of urban textile production, milling complexes, market activity, and so forth. This misses the point; models cannot be proved or disproved in this way, since they don’t claim to be images of reality but simplified, abstracted versions of it. They can only be judged more or less persuasive and useful; historians today discuss the consumer city less frequently than before, not because it has been shown to be wrong but because conceptualizing ancient cities in this way is no longer felt to generate interesting research questions (cf. Parkins 1997).
The same can be said of all kinds of general theories and concepts. Economic theory, the subject of so much controversy in ancient economic history, offers a drastically simplified model of reality; it highlights the interaction of certain key variables - supply and demand, at the simplest level - by ignoring, for the purposes of the model, all the other variables (individual irrationality, imperfect information, the costs of transactions, and so forth). The theory does not tell you how things are, let alone how they must be, even in the modern world; it offers one way of understanding what is going on. It is perfectly possible to describe the ancient world in terms of economic theory, without thereby making it modern, in the same way that we can call Athens a “city” without assuming that it was like London. The question is always whether this is plausible - whether the generalization is too broad, or the number of simplifying assumptions required simply too great - and whether it then offers a persuasive, productive interpretation of the available evidence.
World History
