The notion of ‘‘interdisciplinary approaches’’ necessarily presupposes that of disciplines. In order to discuss interdisciplinary approaches to the Roman Empire, therefore, we must first consider what we mean in this context by ‘‘disciplines’’ and what characterizes the particular ‘‘discipline’’ to which the study of the Roman Empire belongs. These questions are more difficult than they might seem at first glance. A good case could be made that the study of the Roman Empire does not constitute a discipline at all, but instead draws on a range of disciplines which individual scholars combine in various ways and to various degrees. Nevertheless, it is probably true that most people would regard the study of the Roman Empire as a part of ‘‘Roman history.’’ It is furthermore true that the discipline of Roman history, together with ancient Greek history, has a distinctive genealogy that has endowed it with a distinctive character. The historical study of the Greek and Roman worlds developed out of classical philology, the study of the Greek and Latin languages and literatures, and has traditionally been based largely on Greek and Latin literary sources, especially the works of ancient historians. As a result, as Peter Garnsey suggests, it has also tended to reflect the interests and orientations of the upper-class men who produced these texts. Where their interests lay is made quite clear by Tacitus: the activities of the economic and political elite, politics and war above all. Such topics have traditionally been the focus of Roman history, and I will suggest in my conclusion that in certain important respects they continue to be.
Over the last century or so, however, and especially over the last 30 years, scholars have become increasingly dissatisfied with the limitations that this traditional model of the discipline imposes on the study of the Roman Empire. As Garnsey also indicates, there are matters of fundamental importance that simply do not receive much attention in the literary sources. If Tacitus can dismiss as trivial (albeit with calculated effect) such matters as political trials and court intrigue, we may guess how he would have regarded the suggestion that a historian should write at length about issues of food production and distribution, particularly among rural peasants; surely, neither he nor any other Greek or Roman historian would have considered this a serious topic. There is in fact a whole range of important issues on which the literary sources are either totally silent or at best provide only incidental data. Historians interested in these issues must therefore make use of other types of evidence and employ other methodologies, and they often look to other disciplines for ideas. Similarly, a familiarity with other disciplines can in itself lead to an awareness of issues and problems other than those that emerge from the literary sources. In this respect, then, we might reasonably regard as interdisciplinary any approach that, by drawing ideas or techniques from other disciplines, seeks to move beyond the interests and orientations of the standard literary sources.
This brings us to the second of the questions with which I began: how do we define these other disciplines on which a Roman historian might draw? One way is to define them by the type of material on which they focus; so for example, the disciplines of epigraphy, papyrology, numismatics, and archaeology that have already been discussed in the previous chapters of this section. Although non-specialists might be tempted to see these simply as different fields within the general discipline of Roman history, there are two reasons why it is useful for the purposes of this chapter to regard them as distinct. Firstly, they require specialized knowledge and expertise that many Roman historians simply do not possess; archaeology above all, with its numerous and highly technical sub-disciplines, constitutes a broad field of its own, with distinctive orientations, controversies, and sets of methodologies. Secondly, as I have already suggested, the study of different types of evidence has led scholars to address concerns and develop analyses that go beyond those of the literary texts; as we shall see, these disciplines have played a crucial role in broadening and enriching the study of the Roman Empire.
A second way to define other disciplines is in terms of their characteristic orientations, questions, and methodologies. These are the things that tend to distinguish the major academic disciplines within the social sciences and humanities, for example, sociology, anthropology, geography, history, literature, and art history. Researchers in these disciplines have established areas of investigation and developed analytical tools very different from those that have traditionally defined Roman history; by drawing on them, Roman historians have been able to escape the dominance of the literary sources and to illuminate aspects of the Roman Empire that their authors either ignored or assumed as ‘‘natural.’’ The influence of the social sciences and what is loosely called ‘‘critical theory’’ has been especially important, and it is perhaps this in particular that most people would think of in connection with the term ‘‘interdisciplinary.’’
Lastly, we can define disciplines in terms of cultural or linguistic traditions. Hence the study of the Roman Empire is generally a separate discipline from the study of other cultural areas, such as northern Europe or Persia. There are practical reasons for this separation, since the study of different regions and cultural traditions generally requires different sets of skills. The study of northern Europe, for example, depends largely on the techniques of prehistoric archaeology; historians of Persia, in contrast, have to master a different set of languages than historians of the Roman Empire. Yet the fact remains that these different cultural areas were contemporaneous and contiguous with the Roman Empire, and in some cases overlapped it: the empire incorporated many cultural areas with their own languages and traditions, and had significant interactions with surrounding regions. To study these overlaps and interactions necessarily requires an interdisciplinary approach. In this connection we may note in particular two disciplines that, again for genealogical reasons, are surprisingly separate from Roman history: Judaism and Christianity in the imperial period have tended to be studied on their own terms. Work that attempts to bridge this divide may also be regarded as interdisciplinary.
These then are some of the different ways that one might define ‘‘interdisciplinary approaches’’ to the study of the Roman Empire. In what follows, I offer a highly selective and idiosyncratic discussion of each of these in turn, and close by returning briefly to the problem of identifying the discipline itself.
World History
