The book in question sits in the middle of a planned series of six, a series that seeks to describe dominant theoretical frameworks to illuminate how we have arrived at the many ways in which Classical Studies functions today. Anglophone readers unfamiliar with the series will benefit from first consulting Troels Myrup Kristensen’s 2018 review of volume I, Från Laokoon till Troja. Antikvetenskapens teoretiska landskap (BMCR 2018.02.14), in which the aims of this ambitious undertaking are addressed.[1] Like Kristensen, I translate the Swedish antikvetenskap with “Classical Studies.” It will become clear that some of the structural challenges that Kristensen addressed in 2018 are also present in this volume, and, because Från Homeros till Rom constitutes the middle of a vast project, they prove at times demanding for the reader. Therefore, some of the summaries below may be more in-depth than usual.
Från Homeros till Rom is divided into six chapters bookended by an introduction and an epilogue. Each chapter looks at a certain way of “doing” Classical Studies by means of texts. Structurally, the chapters are organized around literary reviews and case studies. Chapter 1, “Introduction”, pp. 11-19, briefly refers to the two previous volumes in the series and gives a short overview of the project’s overall goals. This is where we get closest to understanding how the series is imagined. Case studies can highlight the specific points Siapkas wants to make. It is thus not the purpose of the series to introduce a wholly new understanding of either classical antiquity or the study thereof – a critique that appears to have been levied against earlier volumes (p. 19); rather, Siapkas wants to discuss some of the ways in which the discipline has operated and continues to operate. Ιt is to that end, it seems, that the series has been imagined as a mighty, but not exhaustive survey, with each volume playing a supporting role in illuminating aspects of Siapkas’ theoretical landscape.
In chapter 2, “Historical theories” pp. 21-52, Siapkas offers a chronological overview of how historians have shaped the discipline from the ground up. We are introduced to a variety of approaches that must be considered foundational by any student today, the most immediate being source criticism. In fact, in Siapkas’ theoretical landscape, the modern study of ancient history starts with Leopold von Ranke’s making source criticism an expressed concern in 1824: in other words, Classical Studies as framed here originates not from antiquarianism but from a specific attitude toward surviving texts. How reliable are our sources? How can we convincingly make arguments about the ancient world when our primary sources seem uncertain about the world they address? Is it possible to write “believable history” about a period when we have no written sources from that period? Siapkas’ survey, beginning with Ranke’s 1824 Geschichten der romanischen und germanischen Völker von 1494 bis 1514 and concluding with Richard J. Evans’ In defense of history (1997), underscores that at no point have scholars arrived at a consensus in answering those questions.
Chapter 3 “History as text”, pp. 53-69, addresses scholarship on the boundary between philology and history: research that instead of ascertaining the validity and reliability of primary sources focuses on solving problems within and around those sources. Siapkas asks whether the Iliad and Odyssey were products of the Aegean Bronze Age or reflect Greek society in the 8th century BCE to illuminate how 19th and 20th-century scholars have sought a “temporal home” for the works. Next, the chapter considers commentaries as a scholarly genre. To Siapkas, commentaries form a crucial mode through which source-critical engagement with texts can effectively occur: in other words, the genre is interesting because of how it allows the historian to produce history. Commentaries, Siapkas notes, are instrumental because they verify the veracity of our primary sources—a service crucial to all historians. Yet, they are not without fault: the genre does not typically contain a “methodological discussion or theoretical reflection” (p. 66), nor has it discernibly evolved since its emergence in the late 19th century.
Chapter 4, “Structural history”, pp. 71-114, relies on a series of case studies to assess a branch of Classical Studies that analyzes the political, sociopolitical, and institutional structures of the ancient world. The case studies include Greek proto-history (1100 – 500 BCE), the city state, Sparta, Athenian democracy, and cities and kings in the Hellenistic period. Here Siapkas demonstrates that the foundations for structural history – at least in the context of the Greek examples he addresses—were laid in the early 20th century and continue to be relevant today.
Chapter 5, “Biographical history”, pp. 115-153, focuses on biography as the study of “great men.” Two case studies – Perikles and Alexander the Great – form the backbone of the chapter which takes the form of an intense literary review. What have historians said about these “great men” on the basis of the available sources (a lot!), and what types of narratives seem to be of interest (psychologizing ones!)? Only in the final paragraph does it become clear why we should care about an approach that seems somewhat passé as a scholarly endeavor: it still sells books.
Chapter 6, “Event-driven history”, pp. 155-242, takes up almost a third of the book, although on none of those 87 pages do we find Fernand Braudel, whose name is almost synonymous with the term “histoire événementielle”. Siapkas views event-driven history mostly through a state-centered lens in which encounters between states either through conflict or other means of extended contact result in some action that we perceive as “history.” Here, Siapkas analyzes the colonization of Magna Graecia in the archaic period, the Persian Wars, Athenian imperialism, the Peloponnesian Wars, and Hellenistic colonialism and decline. Although states have played a central role in how scholars understand certain events and thus generated interpretative frameworks around those events, Siapkas cautions the reader that historians may have treated states too uniformly. Thus, there is more work to do.
It is not until Chapter 7, “Roman reflections”, pp.243-291, that we get Siapkas’ thoughts about Roman historiography. The chapter opens with an explanation why most of volume III has been dedicated to Greek examples. Since the Greek and Roman worlds are studied “essentially in the same way”, Siapkas wants to avoid the repetition of covering all of classical antiquity; it would be boring for the reader. Yet, you cannot write a series about Classical Studies without some consideration of the Roman world, so in chapter 7, Siapkas addresses the theoretical approaches from the previous five chapters through a Roman lens. Here, too, the chapter is organized into thematic case studies: prosopography, Romanization and imperialism, and the fall of the Roman Empire. There is no great difference here in scholarly approaches, Siapkas notes: in the study of the Roman world, texts are objects of study, and source criticism therefore drives research, preventing the field from developing theory and method. Yet, numerous conflicting theoretical approaches continue to exist and indeed to coexist today, without necessarily shifting the discipline in any one direction.
The book concludes with an epilogue, pp. 293-297, where Siapkas suggests that traditional Classical Studies is naïve. Ancient historians are uncomfortable with theory and therefore ignore it or even claim that their discipline lacks theory. But to Siapkas, that position is a theoretical stance: to rely on “common sense” is, in a way, to rely on a disciplinary consensus of what is done or not done. In other words, to invoke “disciplinary common sense” is to acknowledge the same structures that Siapkas views as a “theoretical landscape.” And thus, Siapkas concludes that it is the absence of reflection on theoretical frameworks that cripples Classical Studies—not the absence of theory.
First, a few minor points. For an endeavor that seeks to reveal the inner workings of a discipline and must therefore treat its secondary sources with utmost care, Från Homeros till Rom occasionally generalizes in ways that may irritate readers. For example, archaeologists do not care about interpreting their finds in their cultural contexts (p. 69), Donald Kagan is an “active Republican” which explains why he reads history through a “men with power” lens (p. 129), and John Traill’s Persons of Ancient Athens—a monumental prosopographic catalog of 20+ volumes—is criticized for lacking analysis, which means that Traill has a “traditional positivistic view of history”, and which, in turn, provides the grounds for insinuating that this work is old-fashioned (p. 253). A keen reader may ask why one would expect a catalog—raw data organized in a searchable form—to advance some form of interpretation.
But more importantly, its aims and scope make Från Homeros till Rom difficult to understand, a critique Kristensen also raised against the first volume in the series. On the one hand, Siapkas is to be commended for the breadth of his project, and, against the backdrop of this massive undertaking, his choice of thematic approaches and case studies makes organizational sense. But on the other hand, the scope makes the volume feel partial, not to say incomplete. This is exacerbated by the case studies being exclusively Greek until chapter 7: the informed reader knows that examples exist in a Roman context yet those are excluded without expressed rationale. As a reader, I found myself wishing for an overview of the entire series. A table of contents demonstrating how this piece fits into the larger puzzle would serve to establish connectivity and continuity of argument, balancing individual volume structure against project scope. In turn, this would clarify some of the organizational choices made between volumes as well as within chapters and crucially, help readers situate themselves in Siapkas’ landscape. Unfortunately, the current organization—an organization that I do think makes sense for a survey—results in some content choices seeming arbitrary. Take, for example, the discussion of commentaries in chapter 3. Most readers familiar with e.g. Plutarch, whose commentaries Siapkas focuses on, will have experienced the same kind of source-critical historical work in forms not necessarily packaged as commentaries: Christopher Pelling’s collection of essays Plutarch and History (2002) comes to mind. Those absences in the text become more prominent when the author does not justify his choice of “presences.”
Moreover, the intended use is difficult to grasp in that the series has no easily identifiable audience—and not because it is written in Swedish.[2] If the intended audience is scholarly, then the case studies need a more explicitly stated rationale around what is excluded. Such orientation would make e.g. chapter 2 useful for the historiography segment of an introductory undergraduate seminar in Classical Studies.[3] The non-specialist reader, on the other hand, who appears both a more obvious consumer of this work because of its survey nature and therefore less likely to understand its purpose, probably requires more detailed orientation around the project’s motivation – the pivotal “so what?” that all humanists grapple with in the 21st century. Why should non-specialist readers care about how Classical Studies functions?
In his 2018 review, Kristensen noted that volume I was more appetizer than main course. Now, six years later and three volumes in, I think it more pertinent to think of the series as a smorgasbord. I for one look forward to sampling more dishes in the years to come, although I hope they will come with clearer ingredient labels.
Notes
[1] Volume II, Antikvetenskapens teoretiska landskap II, Från Olympia till Leonidas (2018) has not been reviewed in BMCR. Please see Ingrid Berg’s review in Current Swedish Archaeology (2019) 27: 247-250.
[2] I want to underscore my own firm belief in a multilingual future for the academy and am excited to see Nordic Academic Press commit to such a massive undertaking in a language understood by “merely” ten million people.
[3] Kristensen notes that there are four such departments at Swedish universities: Lund, Uppsala, Stockholm, and Gothenburg.