This book is intended to mark a turning point. Rather than focusing on a specific topic within the field of ancient history, it addresses ancient history itself. It describes the current state of the discipline as lamentable, explains where the problems originate, and suggests ways to improve the situation. According to the blurb, minor reforms would not be enough; instead, “ancient history needs to be told in a radically different, global way.” The author’s ambition is not merely academic; he also wants to make the world a better place: “It is not just scholars and their students who deserve a better ancient history. Everybody does” (14). If successful, this book would rank among the most important in the long history of ancient history.
The starting point in the “Introduction” is a well-known phenomenon: When one introduces oneself as an ancient historian, people often assume that one is an expert on the Neolithic period or the cultures of the Maya or the Sumerians. They are therefore surprised to learn that the scholarly focus is limited to the Greeks and Romans. The public’s understanding of “ancient history” differs radically from the academic definition. The Wikipedia article on the subject covers a much broader field than the “Cambridge Ancient History” or the “Ancient History Bulletin.” The author criticizes this narrow definition, calling it the creation of an “exclusive club” (2), a club that, far from being successful, has ended up marginalized in both the public discourse and the academic world. However, there is a solution: Ancient historians must understand that the foundations of modern society were established in global antiquity and accept the similarities between ancient and contemporary worlds: “Everything that has happened since has been an elaboration. (…) the defining features of our own world are either updated versions of these innovations or directly derive from them” (7). To pave the way for a bright future, the problems that have characterized the discipline of ancient history since its beginnings in the nineteenth century must be eliminated. According to the author, ancient history was inclusive, diverse, and global (e.g. “And once we recognize this phase for what it was” (7)). It has been made exclusive, racist, and colonialist by scholars. Not everyone will be happy with this anti-constructivist assumption of a historical reality that simply has to be told in a proper way.
In the following chapters, the author elaborates on the ideas presented in the introduction. In Chapter 1 (“Worldmaking: How We Got There”), he emphasizes the uniformity of the modern world: Wherever one goes, the patterns of politics, economics, and communication are more or less the same, building on archetypes that emerged in antiquity after the end of the last Ice Age. He refers to the domestication of animals for meat, milk, eggs, wool, etc.; the shift to a sedentary lifestyle and to the development of villages and cities; the construction of durable infrastructure, such as houses, canals, and monuments; the formation of states and empires; the transport and exchange of goods; and the development of class structures and religions. He states that “everything since then has been the icing on the cake” (31). This is a radical generalization, of course, and the author knows it, referring himself to exceptions, e.g. the absence of cities and states in pre-modern New Guinea. However, since these exceptions did not shape the course of world history, in his view they do not affect the general picture of a unified global antiquity. At this point one becomes curious about the chronology of the epoch that the author calls “antiquity”, a topic addressed in the following pages. The author discusses various suggestions for periodizing world history and emphasizes the problems with each. He does not suggest a specific century for the beginning or end of antiquity but instead advocates a flexible model. What he favors is a “transtemporal approach”: It would be a mistake to limit historical comparisons to contemporary cultures; far more important is comparing developments, even if they took place at different times.
In Chapter 2 (“Worldbreaking: Where We Went Wrong”), the author examines when and why “inclusive, humanity-centered approaches” (64) fell into obscurity. The author follows the tradition of writing world history from Pompeius Trogus to Johann Christoph Gatterer’s “Abriß der Universalhistorie” (1765). The turn for the worse occurred in the 18th and 19th centuries, when academic professionalization under the auspices of nationalism and racism resulted in a more limited view of the past. The author focuses on the well-documented German enthusiasm for Greece, considering Johann Joachim Winckelmann, Johann Gottfried Herder, and Friedrich August Wolf to be key figures in this process. According to the author, one reason for German philhellenism was the French intellectual “occupation” of Rome, which left the Greeks to the Germans. Since enthusiasm for the Greeks (and neglect of other ancient cultures) dominated not only the academic world but also school curricula, it prevailed over other approaches. Eduard Meyer’s global-historical studies remained an isolated episode because he could not anchor them in institutions. The “great dismembering” (115) of the ancient world was the consequence.
Throughout the book, the author refers to the people who lived in ancient societies as “our ancestors.” In Chapter 3 (“Going Global: What We Should Do”), he asks who these ancestors actually were. The academic preference for the Greeks and Romans seems unjustified when considering the population of the United States. Even among white people, more than half claim ancestors from countries neither touched by Greek settlers nor conquered by Romans. For Latin Americans, ancient history means the history of the Maya, Incas, and Aztecs. Today’s Black Americans are described as connected to the Nok culture and the Kingdom of Takrur, Asian Americans to the ancient cultures of China and India. Although the author emphasizes that he does not intend to “essentialize descent or tribalize the citizenry” (156), these remarks nevertheless support the idea that people’s primary historical interest naturally lies—or should lie—with their own ancestors. The author’s main concern in this chapter is that no ancient society should be studied in isolation. Instead, one should examine connectivity and draw comparisons. However, connectivity presupposes synchronicity, contradicting the “transtemporal approach” outlined earlier in the book. Regarding comparison, the author acknowledges the key problem: scholarship requires specialization, and a thorough understanding of a society requires certain skills, starting with language proficiency. He offers collaboration as a solution, which he views as “remarkably rare” in current academia (190).
Chapter 4 (“Closing Classics: Why We Need to Move On”) shifts the focus from research questions to the structures of today’s universities. The author views the discipline of “Classics,” with its own departments and graduate programs, as the greatest obstacle to the “foundational history” he advocates. First, the mere existence of Classics privileges the Greeks and Romans, making it an unjust discipline. Second, the structure of the discipline hinders an understanding of broader historical contexts. Third, ancient historians working in Classics departments fall into a “language trap,” giving exaggerated importance to knowledge of Greek and Latin. The discussion of various reform proposals ends with the conclusion that minor adjustments would be ineffective and that departments of Classics must be closed down, as indicated by the chapter’s title. In the brief “Conclusion: Can We Do It?,” the author presents the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World in New York as a model. While it does not pursue a global history of antiquity, the institute at least investigates the connectivity of ancient cultures in Europe, Africa, and Asia. The chapter concludes with renewed praise for a “foundational history” and emphasizes how much is at stake for academia, and for the whole world.
Radical books like this are usually praised as thought-provoking, and thought-provoking it is, written in a powerful style and presenting its reasoning in a very clear way. The author’s knowledge of societies from different periods and places is astonishing, as are his insights into academic developments from the 18th century to the present. He is certainly right when he claims that ancient historians should have a broad perspective and reflect on their work. However, postcolonialism has been flourishing for decades, and there has been no shortage of warnings not to idealize the Greeks and Romans, not to study them in isolation, and to incorporate the perspectives of other societies. For the most part, the book follows familiar paths. Nevertheless, it differs from other postcolonial works in some respects.
The most remarkable feature is the excessive emphasis on similarities. According to the author, all contemporary societies are similar to one another, all ancient societies were similar to one another, and ancient societies were similar to contemporary ones. He believes that understanding this similarity is crucial because “without it, we cannot hope to understand the present” (7). However, it is well known that when comparing cultures, one can always choose whether to emphasize the similarities or the differences—one will always find both. The question is which yields more insight. Simply noting that something already existed in the past offers little benefit for understanding the present; rather, one must ask whether it is not precisely the awareness of cultural differences that opens up new horizons, thereby expanding the set of possible options for solving actual problems.
Furthermore, the author’s radical polemic against his own discipline is striking. He portrays the typical ancient historian as being blindly enthusiastic about the Greeks and Romans, completely uninterested in other ancient societies, unaware of any postcolonial approaches and unwilling to cooperate with specialists for other ancient cultures. Whatever his own experience might have been, the ancient historians this reviewer happens to know do not fit into that description. There are numerous examples of collaboration; one need only think of the series “Ancient World: Comparative Histories,” edited by scholars affiliated with a Classics department. Each volume covers a specific cultural feature and includes Egypt, Mesopotamia, India, China, the Incas, the Aztecs, and more.[1] These books are not mentioned in the 26-page bibliography, nor are recent works attempting to trace the interconnections between early European, Asian, and African cultures.[2] Ancient historians will notice these gaps, but they don’t seem to be the intended readers of the book. The radical changes the author calls for cannot be accomplished by scholars themselves. Rather, the book is written for a broader audience, and the author distances himself from the circles of his discipline. The anti-academic nature of the book is evident in phrases such as “What have academics made of this magnificent spectacle?” (8), and he also uses the metaphor of the “ivory tower” (2), which is popular whenever universities are under attack.
One important issue remains unaddressed in this book. In today’s world, it is not universities that are responsible for people’s greater interest in the Greeks and Romans compared to other ancient cultures. While surveys asking how often men think about the Roman Empire should not be taken too seriously; the Imperium Romanum is undoubtedly much more present on TikTok than other ancient empires; mighty men like Mark Zuckerberg—to name only one example—are obsessed with Augustus; and Sparta serves as a central reference point for fantasies about a masculine, warlike state. Simplified and often dangerous historical narratives are widespread and provide fertile ground for what the author wants to combat in his book: nationalism, colonialism, and racism. One of the most important tasks of historians is to deconstruct these narratives. Given this, it seems doubtful that closing Classics departments would be such a wise idea.
Notes
[1] E.g. Kurt A. Raaflaub (ed.), War and Peace in the Ancient World. Malden, MA et al. 2007; John Bodel / Saul M. Olyan (eds.), Household and Family Religion in Antiquity. Malden, MA et al. 2008; Kurt A. Raaflaub/Richard J.A. Talbert (eds), Geography and Ethnography: Perceptions of the World in Pre-Modern Societies. Chichester et al. 2010; Kurt A. Raaflaub (ed.), Peace in the Ancient World: Concepts and Theories. Chichester, UK/Malden, MA 2016.
[2] E.g. Hans-Joachim Gehrke (ed.), Making Civilizations. The World before 600, Cambridge, MA 2020.