Although Bowersock has spent most of his career in the United States, the influences that helped him develop his interests, those of Momigliano, Brown, Robert, and Syme, were European. It is yet another sign of the fact that the subject as practiced in the English-speaking world has been shaped in British universities, albeit often by professors from abroad. The failure of the United States to produce a similar ferment derives from a number of factors. One was the abiding influence of Tenney Frank, the most significant American-trained historian of the first half of the twentieth century. Although known these days as the editor of the multi-volume An Economic Survey of Ancient Rome (1936-40), Frank was primarily interested in the history of the Roman Republic. This interest was shared by his two great pupils, Lily Ross Taylor and Bob Broughton, both at Bryn Mawr College, until Broughton’s departure for the University of North Carolina in the mid-sixties (Potter 2001: 317-21). A separate tradition would soon afterwards begin to take shape at Berkeley, where Erich Gruen, an iconoclastic student of Harvard’s Mason Hammond, inspired a generation of students to share his interests in both Republican and Hellenistic history.
Concentration on the republic was a natural development of the North American undergraduate curriculum, in which authors from the ‘‘central period’’ of Latin literature were the primary fare. Unlike European universities, where ancient historians worked within their own faculties, most ancient historians in the United States worked in departments of classics. What is more, even though most history departments had an ancient historian (sometimes two) on their faculties, the linguistic demands of the subject made the training of graduate students largely the business of classics departments. Before the 1980s, when classics departments discovered that teaching classics in translation could save them from budget cuts, many ancient historians in these departments did not teach ancient history except in courses on ancient authors, while those who taught in history departments were constrained by the need to offer survey courses for history concentrators. When historians of either stripe sought to teach upper level courses, those courses needed to suit the curricular demands of classics departments. Even in the mid-eighties the view that Roman history ended with the death of Nero was not considered a joke in at least one major American classics department. The result was that when American universities wanted to hire historians of the Roman Empire, they had to turn to foreign universities to fill their staffing needs. The sixties and early seventies saw the arrival of a remarkably talented group of scholars at major graduate institutions such as Berkeley, Harvard, Princeton, Toronto, Chicago, North Carolina, and Columbia who were able to breathe new life into the subject. The one notable exception to this rule was at Yale, where another former Harvardian, Ramsey MacMullen, gradually won the admiration of his colleagues abroad with an astonishing output of extraordinarily original scholarship. Finally, of course, there was the issue of the budget. The old style courses on Greek and Roman civilization gave rise to demands for more - for courses on women, sexuality, slavery, religion, law, and spectacle to name but a few - with the result that American universities have now become hotbeds of innovation.
The growth of interest in social history that has helped shape the study of the ancient world in American universities has led to profound changes in the way the subject is now viewed. As I suggested above, if I had been asked to edit this book in 1990 rather than 1999 there would have been chapters on women, slaves, children, peasants, the urban poor, etc.; that is to say, it would have looked rather more like Andrea Giardina’s volume, The Romans (1993a), than it does. The reason for this is simple. The evidence for diverse groups in the Roman world has been assembled. The thrust of work for the future seems to me to be the interaction between different groups, and the closer collaboration between colleagues working in areas that have, for one reason or another, remained distinct. Roman historians can no longer afford to ignore the vast bulk of Roman legal writings, literary scholars are increasingly drawn to the study of literature within its social context, and documentary papyrol-ogists no longer confine themselves to the realm of paleography, where the great Herbert Youtie once placed them, but have moved into social history, as Traianos Gagos shows in his contribution. We have learned that we cannot readily write about the experience of women or slaves without consideration of social class and physical location. We cannot assume that there was a single experience of slavery, gender, or rural or urban poverty. In the chapters that make up this volume, the authors have sought to stress interactions. As Veronika Grimm shows, for instance, the study of food now more often becomes the study of its consumption, and the study of its consumption reveals a great deal about those who are doing the eating. As she points out, dining was central to religious, family, and social life. The study of dining cannot simply be dealt with through the analysis of food production, for which there are, in any event, no statistics, but rather must be examined as a function of social, political, and ideological discourse. Only then may we gain some understanding of the basic question of ‘‘who ate what.’’ The experience of gender identity may now be profitably studied through examination of sexuality or the institution of marriage, as Amy Richlin and Judith Evans Grubbs both show. Equally importantly, as Richlin and Evans Grubbs show in their very different ways, there is no single set of attitudes towards sexuality, and there is no single model for married life. Indeed, Richlin’s ‘‘Kinsey’’ report on sexuality in the Roman world is a stunning antidote to many earlier approaches. Even a subject such as the Roman army, once almost a subdiscipline hermetically sealed off from all others in the field has now come, as Nigel Pollard shows, to offer a paradigm for social relations of all sorts. In addition to the stress on dynamic interaction, one theme that ties many of the chapters in this volume together, thereby differentiating it from what might have been done earlier, and will, perhaps, be done at another time, is that we have shifted from the study of dominance alone to the discourse of dominance and inferiority.
World History
