Whether as a result of the activities of these powerful figures or not, there seems to have been an unmistakable change in recent years in the driving agenda of ancient
History. There has been a relative decline in such traditional preoccupations as political, constitutional, and diplomatic history, but also in more recently developed areas, once quite dominant, such as the history of the ancient economy; these are not of course being totally neglected, but the balance has shifted unmistakably towards the study of gender, of religion, of ethnicity and identity, and, currently, of the emotions. It might be said to be a shift away from the history of states and groups and towards the experience of the individual, or at least of the individual in relation to the group.
The place of religion in the study of the Greco-Roman world is a fair indicator of the direction of change in question. In the first half of the twentieth century it was commonly treated as a marginal area of life, of interest only to those with eccentric, even antiquarian tastes. Survey volumes included it, but normally as a separate chapter, frequently the last one. It was assumed to have little influence on the activities of the city’s elites, and none at all on political life. The effect of this set of assumptions was to create, at least for key periods such as fourth-century Athens or late republican Rome, a secular world, highly sympathetic at least to those looking in the context of their own time for the progressive decline in the influence of religion, which they expected as the inevitable consequence of the Enlightenment. The second half of the twentieth century saw arguments put forward that this vision of a world free of religion was based on a highly selective reading of the evidence about the ancient world and on a failure to grasp how profoundly the religious life of pagan societies differed from the models that modern scholars had sought, almost unthinkingly, to impose on it. The result has been to open up areas of debate that once seemed arid and unprofitable to re-examination. But it is hardly a coincidence that the same period of the twentieth century has seen the resurgence of religious commitment and conflict in many parts of the world, while the expectation that religion would disappear in a more rational, secular world has receded as a result.
It might be tempting to connect the shift with the collapse of Marxism, on the basis that both advocates and opponents of Marxism focused on issues of political, economic, and social evolution and that this great debate gave a sense of direction to historical research on all periods, which has now evaporated. All history has to be rethought in the light of 1989. At the same time, some areas that fifty years ago seemed straightforward and inspiring points of contact between ancient and modern political experience have become far more problematic: for instance, Greek democracy and even the Roman republic were once viewed as inspiring models of how power could be effectively disseminated to wider sections of the community. Athenian direct democracy was even proposed for practical use, if not so much in the government of modern states, then at least of factories and universities. Today, although the idea of direct democracy is again a talking-point, we tend to see ancient systems as flawed examples of effective democratic practice, and concentrate rather on the means by which women, non-citizens and slaves were excluded from any share in power than on the remarkable fact that peasant farmers were ever given power and that their power was sustained over considerable periods of time. Once again, modern concerns can be seen as having a direct influence on the themes of debate.
The fact is, however, that while Marxism certainly, as we have seen, influenced the work of individual ancient historians and had a marked effect on the study of slavery and slave-revolts, especially in Communist Europe, it never became a dominant model or the focal point of conflict in the study of ancient history, in the way it did in so many other periods and subjects. Partly, this is undoubtedly due to the bad fit between class-based evolutionary models and the character of ancient social structures, especially ancient slavery; partly, to the conservative tendencies of many ancient historians, not least in the period after the Second World War. However that may be, it is hard to argue that the shift in agenda was caused by the collapse of a theory that was never well established in the first place.
One very remarkable aspect of what has happened during the last twenty-five years is that the trends affecting ancient history seem now to reflect those in other historical periods of European and American History in a way that was surely not the case in the first half of the twentieth century. One extreme example would be economic history, which became a major issue in ancient history for some years in the 1970s, when modern economic history was also at its height, with the introduction of separate economic history departments in many universities; the 1980s and 1990s have seen a gradual decline of interest in ancient economic history, just as the subject declined (at least temporarily) for modern periods as well. Much the same could be said of political history. At the same time, new themes of interest have arisen across all periods - women’s history, the history of the human body, the history of emotion. Sometimes, these ideas can be traced back to the work of particular thinkers who are widely read, widely reviewed and have influence over the historiography of all periods - Claude Levi-Strauss or Michel Foucault. But it is reasonable to detect not just interdisciplinary influence but mutual contact between the study of different historical periods.
World History
