Introduction: Reassessing Greece & Rome

Matthew S. Santirocco

The past remains integral to us all, individually and
collectively. We must concede the ancients their place.
. . . But their place is not simply back there, in a sepa-
rate and foreign country; it is assimilated in ourselves,
and resurrected into an ever-changing present.

–David Lowenthal, The Past is a Foreign Country1

It is difficult to square the rhetoric about the cur-

rent “crisis” in the humanities with the abundant,
if anecdotal, evidence that Greco-Roman antiquity
continues to thrive in the popular imagination. As I
am writing this, Mary Beard’s new history of Rome
is flying off the shelves; general interest magazines
publish articles on Greek papyri; the first transla-
tion of Homer’s Iliad by a woman has appeared to
wide acclaim; the challenge of teaching ancient
Greek made it to the op-ed pages of The New York
Times; a remake of the film Ben-Hur is scheduled for
release this summer; a traveling exhibition of large-
scale Hellenistic bronzes has become a “must see”
show of the season; productions of Greek tragedies
and their adaptations continue to be a staple of pro-
fessional and amateur theater; and television pro-
grams abound on ancient topics ranging from Cleo-
patra to the Colosseum.2 Of course, this preoccupa-
tion with the past has a negative side as well, depuis
even the modern attempt to mythologize Zenobia
as an Arab queen who re sisted Roman power was
not enough to save her city Palymra from those in
Syria who were hell-bent on erasing any signs of
what they deemed to be unorthodox. But even such
wanton acts of destruction, which seek to obliter-

MATTHEW S. SANTIROCCO, un
Fellow of the American Academy
depuis 2009, is Professor of Clas-
sics, Angelo J. Ranieri Director of
Ancient Studies, and Senior Vice
Provost for Academic Affairs at
New York University. His numer-
ous publications include Unity and
Design in Horace’s Odes (1986), et
the edited volumes Latinitas: Le
Tradition and Teaching of Latin (1987),
Recovering Horace (1994), and Saving
the City: Destruction, Loss, and Recov-
ery in the Ancient World (2003). A past
editor of the apa monograph se-
ries, American Classical Studies (1989
–1992), and the journal Classical
Monde (1993–2012), he currently
edits the Palgrave Macmillan se-
ries The New An tiquity.

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ate history, only provide further proof that
the past is still very much alive in the pres-
ent.3

That said, there are different ways to as-
sess the health of a field than by measuring
popular interest in the objects of its study.4
These signs of robust interest–of a fasci-
nation fueled perhaps by the way in which
Greek and Roman culture is simultaneous-
ly familiar and foreign to us–do not tell the
whole story. If we turn instead to data use-
fully amassed by the Humanities Indica-
tors of the American Academy of Arts and
les sciences, and by other professional sourc-
es, we get a somewhat different picture at
the institutional level–small (though rela-
tively steady) numbers of students major-
ing in classics, respectable enrollments in
Greek and Latin (though modest by com-
parison with many modern languages),
and some retrenchment in faculty hiring
(though it is not across-the-board and is
offset by hiring in other schools and col-
jambes).5

Even more striking, and encour aging, est
the fact that, as the number of individuals
specializing in the field has shrunk, plus
students than ever before are encounter-
ing Greece and Rome through courses on
“classics in translation.” A staple of un-
dergraduate general education programs
(whether distributional or core require-
ments) and popular as electives, ces
courses explore such topics as “Classical
Mythology,” “Women in Antiquity,” “Sport
and Spectacle in the Ancient World,” “An-
cient Religion,” “Greek and Ro man Dra-
ma,” and “Cinema and the Classics”–
to name just a few. Rather than “dumb-
ing down” the field, as some critics have
claimed, and being harbingers of further
decline, these courses have succeeded in
educating a whole new generation of citi-
zens, hardly an unworthy goal. They have
also helped to recruit new majors who had
not encountered this material before col-
lege. And they have even supplied a mod-

est pipeline into the profession, as some of
those latecomers to the field, upon gradu-
ation, make up for gaps in their linguistic
training by enrolling in post-baccalaureate
programs, yet another creative adaptation
by which the field prepares students for
entry into doctoral programs and scholar-
ly and teaching careers.

The visibility of antiquity in the curric-
ulum testifies to the resilience of the field
in the face of “crisis”–or, rather, “cri-
ses.” Greco-Roman studies has long been
recognized as the canary in the coal mine
of the humanities, having faced early on
some of the pressures that the other hu-
manities would encounter only later. Dans
the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries, the field lost its curricular hege-
mony, as American colleges and universi-
ties jettisoned Latin as a requirement for
admission or graduation. Alors, as private
schools, particularly Catholic ones, made
Latin optional or dropped it altogether,
one important pipeline for college majors
dried up. Plus tard, as the quintessential home
of “dead white males,” the field was at the
epicenter of the culture wars.6 And, now,
in a climate of economic anxiety, vocation-
alism, and concern with financial return
on educational investment, it is again vul-
nerable. Rather than circling the wagons,
the field has confronted these challenges in
creative ways. The curricular engagement
noted above was one of these strategies. Dans
fact, in a reversal of the usual model where-
by research influences what is taught in the
classroom, this curriculum also became a
powerful driver (though by no means the
only one) of exciting new research agendas
that focus on contemporary issues where
the past has something to teach us.

And so, if ancient Greco-Roman culture
is alive and well in the popular imagination
and in the general curriculum, the most im-
portant evidence of its vitality must never-
theless be sought in the quality of current
recherche. While the past several decades

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Dédale, le Journal de l'Académie américaine des arts & Sciences Reassessing Greece & Rome

may have seen no grand paradigm shift,7 it
is clear that our understanding of the past
has been dramatically enhanced–and in
some cases radically altered–by new ev-
idence, new methods, and new questions.
As befits a scholarly field whose history be-
gan to be written even in antiquity, it is not
surprising that there are periodic moments
of taking stock. The year 2000 occasioned
several, including Classics in Progress, a vol-
ume of essays by British scholars that was
published for our sister society, the Brit-
ish Academy.8 This special issue of Dæda-
lus was inspired by a different sort of mile-
stone, the important work of the American
Academy’s Commission on the Human-
ities and Social Sciences. The idea for this
issue started to come into view at the same
time that the Commission was preparing
its report, The Heart of the Matter; et le
appearance of this issue coincides roughly
with the publication of the Commission’s
follow-up report, which documents the ex-
tensive activities that have taken place over
the past two years.9 There could be no bet-
ter time to focus on the oldest of the hu-
manities fields, Greco-Roman studies, et
to assess (in the words of this volume’s ti-
tle) “what is new about the old.”10
Taken together, the essays in this vol-

ume exemplify some of the most impor –
tant recent developments in Greco-Roman
études. Here I would single out only four.
The first is, paradoxically, the persistence
of the old amidst the new–the continued
focus on the text, whether literary or doc-
umentary, and hence the continued im-
portance of philology and the traditional
specialisms necessary for recovering and
recuperating this category of evidence,
such as palaeography, textual criticism,
and linguistics. It is sometimes assumed
that the vagaries of transmission have left
us all that we will ever have of ancient lit-
erature–a minute percentage of the to-
tal production, to be sure, but more than

any one person could read in many life-
times. But new material regularly turns up,
whether in a manuscript miscatalogued in
a monastic library, or in a “quotation frag-
ment” (the work of one author cited by an-
other), ou, more commonly, on a scrap of
papyrus recovered from the dry and pre-
servative sands of Egypt.11 Indeed, un
scholar estimates that “Over the last hun-
dred years, one literary papyrus has been
published, on average, every ten days; le
agglomeration provides, for Greek liter-
ature at least, a small new renaissance.”12
(For a recent discovery that has attracted
much attention, see the elegant translation
by Rachel Hadas of the so-called “Brothers
Poem” by Sappho in the box on page 40.)13
These discoveries not only enlarge our
store of ancient literature, but also enable
us to restore what we already have, to rec-
ognize previously unknown connections
among works, et, on occasion, to rewrite
histoire, literary or otherwise. Entre-temps,
extant texts regularly require philological
attention. To take just one example: new
editions of authors are needed not only
to incorporate the new discoveries noted
au-dessus de, but also to take into account sever-
al phenomena, only recently understood.
One is contaminatio, the fact that most fam-
ily trees of manuscripts (stemmata codicum)
are complicated by horizontal transmis-
sion (the cross-fertilization of distinct tra-
ditions, when a copyist relying mainly on
one manuscript nevertheless incorporates
readings from another with a different lin-
eage). Another is even more basic: the re-
alization that in an oral culture, where texts
were often records of, or scripts for, par-
formance, variance existed from the out-
ensemble. Autrement dit, there may be no one
“right” reading. And just as new editions
refresh the texts, new commentaries and
critical studies provide exegetical support,
elucidating their linguistic, literary, archae-
ological, historical, and sociological con-
texts on the basis of the latest research.

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145 (2) Spring 2016Matthew S. Santirocco

En fait, a “new philology” is developing,
which considers not just the words upon
a page, but also the materiality of the text,
including the format of the ancient book
(the papyrus scroll and later parchment
codex) and its implications not only for
textual criticism, but also for ancient read-
ing practices.14

A second noteworthy development in
the field–and perhaps the most conse-
quential so far, since it has been underway
for over four decades–is how Greco-Ro-
man studies has opened up dramatically
in terms of its methodological approach-
es and theoretical underpinnings. This is
sometimes explained as the influence of
other disciplines. But this model, lequel
emphasizes the role of exogenous forces,
oversimplifies a more complicated pro-
cess. Greco-Roman studies had always
been multidisciplinary: even to this day,
classics departments, unlike their coun-
terparts in the other humanities, com-
monly include not only scholars of lan-
guage and literature but also ancient his-
torians, archaeologists, art historians, et
philosophers. En fait, most of these hu-
manistic disciplines trace their origins to
the study of antiquity, specifically philolo-
gy. In the mid-nineteenth century and ear-
ly twentieth century, cependant, these dis-
ciplines became divorced from their roots
and started to develop along different tra-
jectories. The result was that scholars of
Greco-Roman antiquity remained togeth-
er as a discipline unto themselves and,
over time, became more isolated from
developments in the larger disciplines that
they had spawned, but that had moved
in different directions.15

That changed several decades ago as a
gradual, if unspoken, realization set in that
Greco-Roman studies was not so much
a single discipline as a multidisciplinary
field, and individual scholars started to take
out “dual citizenship” with their larger
disciplines. Ainsi, the work of ancient liter-

ary scholars, historians, and art histori-
ans began to be informed by the method-
ological approaches and theoretical con-
cerns of those larger disciplines. (For an
elegant example, see the box on page 68,
where Michael Putnam’s explication of
a famous passage from Catullus displays
traditional philological rigor, while also
being informed by contemporary literary
approaches such as intertextuality, fem-
inism, and genre studies.) And none of
this was a one-way street, since scholars
of the ancient world engaged in dialogue
with their larger disciplines and made no-
table contributions to them, particularly
in such areas as the history of religion, gen-
der, and sexuality. In an even more con-
sequential move, scholars who were now
operating within these larger disciplinary
tents began also to acquire as individuals
disciplinary cross-competencies, the sort
of inter- (and trans-) disciplinary expertise
that had previously resided in the multi-
disciplinary collective of their departments
or the profession as a whole.16 Thus, liter-
ary scholars “materialized” the texts they
were studying, ancient history and art his-
tory took a “linguistic turn,” and so forth.
En même temps, these scholars also drew
upon other disciplines that had their ori-
gins outside of the field, such as structur-
al anthropology, psychologie, psychoanal-
ysis, et (most recently) cognitive sci-
ence and neuroaesthetics. And through
eux, they began to participate in larg-
er theoretical discourses, such as Marx-
ist theory and feminist theory (the latter
having had a particularly profound and
salutary role in the recent development
of the field).

In all of this scholarly activity, no one
theoretical outlook or methodology has
dominated, even for a time, and a com-
fortable catholicity of approaches pre-
vails. The end result has been that a field
seen by some as resistant to–or, more ac-
curately, innocent of–theory has become

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Dédale, le Journal de l'Académie américaine des arts & Sciences Reassessing Greece & Rome

much more self-reflective. Scholars have
gained an awareness of the historical con-
tingencies at work in the very formation
of the field. This has led them to approach
the ancient material and older (and some-
times triumphalist) interpretations with
a critical eye and a healthy dose of skepti-
cism. It has also led them to question the
cultural assumptions that not only past
scholars but also they themselves bring
to the evidence they study and the ques-
tions they ask. Enfin, there is increasing
appreciation of the constructed nature of
antiquity–even in antiquity.

The third development in Greco-Roman
studies is the most recent and perhaps the
most exciting: the new science of antiqui-
ty. A true instance of interdisciplinary col-
laboration, this offers the potential for ex-
ponential growth in our knowledge of the
past. Certain scientific techniques, tel
as radiocarbon dating, dendrochronolo-
gy, and glaciology have been around for a
long time. But these techniques have now
been joined by other powerful tools. Mul-
tispectral imaging, Par exemple, is making
legible papyri from Herculaneum that had
been carbonized in the eruption of Vesuvi-
us; 3D laser scanning, or lidar, is enabling
us to reconstruct ancient landscapes and
structures; and the techniques of bioar-
chaeology, such as dna sequencing and
isotope analysis, allow us to study human,
animal, and plant specimens, and thereby
reconstruct ancient ecosystems, diet, cli-
mate, maladie, migration patterns, and cul-
tural interaction. (See Malcolm Wiener’s
summary of some of these techniques and
their application in the box on page 112.)
Scientific techniques are now deployed
not just to date objects or events but to tell
a larger story. The data recovered in this
way constitute an ever-growing physical
archive that makes it possible, even nec-
essary, to reopen old subjects, to question
settled opinion, and to rewrite historical
accounts.17

Not unrelated to these scientific devel-
opments is the important role played by
digital technology. Perhaps because Gre-
co-Roman studies has always been preoc-
cupied with technologies of communica-
tion,18 beginning with the shift from oral-
ity to literacy, and then from the scroll to
the codex, the field was an early (peut-être
the earliest) adopter of what has come
to be known as digital humanities, and it
has been a major contributor to that field
depuis. At one level, technology has in-
creased access to evidence, as the digitiza-
tion of texts and images has made possible
research on a scale previously unimagined
and has thereby opened up whole new ar-
eas of inquiry. But at another level, tech-
nology offers not only access to evidence
but also powerful heuristic tools for ana-
lyzing it, ranging from geospatial mapping
of archaeological sites to the treebanking
of Greek and Latin texts (the systemat-
ic linguistic analysis of every word in a
text).19

The fourth and final development worth
noting is the expansiveness of the field.
The canon, Par exemple, has been dramat-
ically enlarged, not just by new finds, mais
also as a result of the new approaches not-
ed above. Ainsi, Greek and Roman medical
writings, once at the periphery of scholar-
ship, are now taking center stage because
of their potential to illuminate aspects of
ancient thinking and understanding of the
self.20 Ancient technical writings (on such
topics as science, mathematics, engineer-
ing, architecture, agriculture, law, war-
fare, magic, and divination) are also grad-
ually being mainstreamed. And now that
the literature of the Hellenistic period is
firmly in the canon, scholars are turning
their attention elsewhere, to the classiciz-
ing Second Sophistic, the neglected Greek
literature of the Roman empire, et le
literature of early Christianity.

As the canon expands, so too do the
temporal and geographical horizons of

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145 (2) Spring 2016Matthew S. Santirocco

the field. Older notions of periodization,
for example, are under review, as tradi-
tional divisions and categories (such as ar-
chaic, classical, and post-classical) are seen
to be artificial, privileging rupture over
continuity, and implying models of rise
and decline that do not comport with the
evidence. De la même manière, the older focus on
Greece and Rome has given way to broad-
er studies of the Mediterranean basin and
the ancient Near East that recognize the
interconnectedness of their cultures at dif-
ferent periods. And even where there is lit-
tle evidence of direct connection, compar-
ative history allows for those who work in
the Greco-Roman field to explore larger
problems that transcend one particular
culture or period. The current interest in
“big history” or “world history” is an ex-
pression of this impulse,21 as is the emer-
gence of a new field, ancient studies, lequel
takes as its project precisely this sort of
crossing of boundaries of time, espace, et
discipline.22

Enfin, Greco-Roman studies is being
increasingly subsumed under the larger
rubric of reception. Just as the “meaning”
of a text or material artifact is now under-
stood to be a function not only of the his-
torical and social contexts in which it was
produced and used, but also of how other
and later communities have interpreted it,
so too the study of the Greco-Roman world
in all its aspects is no longer just the study
of the past. As Mary Beard and John Hen-
derson have put it: “Classics is a subject that
exists in that gap between us and the world
of the Greeks and Romans. The questions
raised by Classics are the questions raised
by our distance from ‘their’ world, and at
the same time by our closeness to it, and by
its familiarity to us. . . . The aim of Classics
is not only to discover or uncover the ancient
monde. . . . Its aim is also to define and de-
bate our relationship to that world.”23 And
to do that entails one additional expan-
sive gesture, moving Greco-Roman stud-

ies into the public square and using tech-
nology to democratize the production of
connaissance, to disseminate discovery, et
to demonstrate how the past is relevant to
our own contemporary experience.24
The persistence of philology, the open-

ness to new methods and theoretical per-
spectives, the new science of antiquity,
and the expanding horizons of research–
these four developments in Greco-Roman
studies over the past several decades are
on full display in the essays that follow.
À ce point, a few editorial observations
are in order. Having just argued for the ex-
pansiveness of the field, I must now note
that many important subjects are missing
from this volume. Mais, given constraints of
space and time, topical coverage was never
the goal, nor could it be, and the contribu-
tors were given the freedom, within broad
parameters, to address their subjects as
they saw fit. For the same reason, these es-
says are not general surveys or overviews
of the state of research. While most con-
tributors situated their work in the context
of recent scholarship, they intended their
essays to be exhibits, original case studies
that display new approaches in action and,
in some cases, point in new directions.
Enfin, the organizing principle here is
straightforward: this volume moves from
literature to philosophy, visual and materi-
al culture, ancient history, et, finally, le
institutional contexts in which Greco-Ro-
man studies are conducted. Bien sûr, ce
arrangement necessarily oversimplifies the
interrelationship among these categories
and also among the essays themselves,
which display a significant degree of meth-
odological and theoretical overlap. This is
all the more remarkable, since the contrib-
utors did not share drafts with one another
or collaborate in other ways. But this fea-
ture only serves to demonstrate the main
theses of this volume, as noted above–the
interconnectedness of the field, the cross-

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Dédale, le Journal de l'Académie américaine des arts & Sciences Reassessing Greece & Rome

ing of boundaries of various sorts (chrono-
logical, geographical, disciplinary), et le
breadth of intellectual horizon. The short
summaries that follow are intended to do
something that the abstracts attached to
the individual articles could not do, namely
to point out some of these connections and
also to demonstrate a larger thematic con-
silience, since these essays, when read con-
secutively, come close to providing a coher-
ent narrative about “what is new about the
old.”

Given that the emphasis on texts is con-

stitutive of the field, the first four essays in
this volume address literature. Over the
past several decades, various approaches
have left their mark on literary interpre-
tation, y compris (but not limited to) le
“New Criticism,” reader response, struc-
turalism, deconstruction, and the “new
historicism” or cultural poetics. In addi-
tion to offering sophisticated readings of
individual texts, current scholarship also
explores a wide variety of larger topics, dans-
cluding the materiality of the text (as not-
ed above) et, simultaneously, its perfor-
mative aspects (such as the largely oral/
aural dimension of ancient literature); le
social and political contexts in which texts
were produced and functioned (such as lit-
eracy, idéologie, and patronage); and more
overtly “literary” questions of canonicity,
intertextuality, and reception–to name
just a few.

Focusing on Greek literature, Brooke
Holmes demonstrates how both that cat-
egory and its scholarly study have been
“blown open,” as the traditional canon has
itself expanded under the impact of some
of these different approaches. To take one
example: cultural poetics attempts to lo-
cate texts within their immediate social
and cultural contexts; on the other hand,
reception studies looks to the afterlives
of texts and raises questions about their
transhistorical value. Taking as her case

study Greek tragedy, the genre in which
the tension between these two approaches
is perhaps most evident, Holmes propos-
es a philosophy of the tragic that can ac-
commodate both approaches. She locates
Greek tragedy at a historical moment, le
fifth century, when questions of agency
and responsibility were especially urgent,
while also arguing for the resonances of
tragedy’s responses to these questions in
contemporary contexts. “Tragedy is about
suffering . . . but it is also . . . about the mys-
teries and fallout of agency, understood as
the ambiguous power to act in the world as
well as ambiguous openness to the world
that under extraordinary circumstances
impels one to act in ways that are difficult
to own.”

The next essay, by Shadi Bartsch, focuses
on Latin literature, specifically its complex
relationship with its Greek precursor texts,
the literature of a people whom Rome had
conquered. The nature of this relationship
and the Romans’ understanding of it has
been a staple of scholarship. But older no-
tions of imitatio have given way to an ap-
preciation of the creative processes of ae-
mulatio (competitive emulation) that were
at work in “carrying over” one literature to
another. Bartsch takes this revaluation fur-
ther by showing how linguistic usage sheds
light on Roman anxieties about their own
cultural imperialism. Offering a case study
of how the word translatio could refer both
to linguistic translation (of Greek texts
into Latin) and metaphorical transforma-
tion (of Romans, whose taste for Greek
culture corrupted them, turning them into
“Greeks”), she demonstrates that “Trans-
lation could be represented as a control
exerted over an alien text, but it may ulti-
mately have pointed to the uncontrollabil-
ity of any ‘import from afar.’”

These two essays demonstrate in differ-
ent ways how the reception of texts has
moved into the center of Greco-Roman
études. The third contribution, by Emily

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145 (2) Spring 2016Matthew S. Santirocco

Greenwood, addresses this topic head-on.
Focusing on the “cultural mobility” of the
Greek and Roman classics, she describes
the recent shift away from a “classical tra-
dition” model that posits a fixed canon
whose lineage can be traced through Eu-
ropean culture. Plutôt, by characteriz-
ing the ancient texts as “omni-local,” she
substitutes for this vertical and hierarchi-
cal conception a horizontal two-way re-
lationship, one in which these texts are
themselves “cultural composites that re-
sult from successive readers and audi-
ences encountering and making sense of
these works.” As a case study she focuses
on Sophocles’s Antigone, and on two dif-
ferent African responses to it, in which the
receiving community shapes the meaning
of the classic work, in this case making it a
vehicle of political resistance.25

Closing this set of essays on literature,
Caroline Alexander turns to one specific
type of reception, translation. Whereas
Bartsch had explored aspects of the idea
in Roman antiquity, Alexander’s interest
is in the contemporary practice of transla-
tion, which has made Greco-Roman texts
accessible to countless students and the
larger public. While translation studies
has emerged recently as its own academic
discipline, her focus is not on theory or crit-
icism, but rather on making, as befits one
who has just published her own translation
of the Iliad. Offering not so much a schol-
arly analysis as a “reflective essay,” Alex-
ander revisits Matthew Arnold’s essay (it-
self a “classic”), “On Translating Homer,»
and demonstrates the continuing relevance
of the principles that are set forth there in
light of her own experience of translating.

From literature, the volume makes a nat-

ural transition to philosophy (still more
natural in antiquity than might seem the
case today). Taking as his topic the relation
of the discipline to its classical past, Phil-
lip Mitsis describes the current divorce be-

tween the study of ancient philosophy and
the way that philosophy is now practiced,
that is, between historical or “continen-
tal” philosophers and modern “analytic”
philosophy, with its largely presentist fo-
cus, its powerful logical tools, its interest
in scientific method, and its linguistic par-
adigm. Mitsis reviews attempts to bridge
the divide, noting that ancient arguments
often adumbrate modern positions, et
that ancient philosophers seem “new” in
the way they take on real moral dilemmas
that have fallen out of contemporary theo-
rizing. And there are recent signs of poten-
tial rapprochement: the “linguistic turn”
may be loosening its hold on the field,
philosophy of mind may be more hospi-
table to ancient paradigms, et, at a time
of high specialization, some philosophers
are discovering that “the texts of the past
offer a place where one can again think
about some of the traditional central is-
sues of philosophy in a more synthetic
chemin. . . . In ancient texts one can again try
to see the forest for the trees.” A case study
is the philosophy of death, where there
has been a creative engagement between
the old and the new. The topic was a cen-
tral one in antiquity (where most philos-
ophers took the view that death is not an
evil), and contemporary philosophers are
now perforce rediscovering and grappling
with arguments that go back to Epicurus.
Mitsis concludes by expressing the hope
that the ancient philosophers will contin-
ue to help us meet the moral challenges we
face, and that they will also teach contem-
porary philosophers to speak to those is-
sues, and in ways that we can understand.

The next two essays shift our attention

from ancient literature and ideas to visual
and material culture, though certain con-
cerns persist. In a way that is familiar from
Mitsis’s discussion of ancient philosophy,
Verity Platt notes how the study of Greco-
Roman art has been sidelined within the

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larger discipline of art history, which fo-
cuses increasingly on the modern and
non-Western. De la même manière, she notes how
classical art history has struggled also to
define its relationship to classical philol-
ogy and the close engagement with texts.
Recent responses to these challenges are
familiar from the discussions of litera-
ture earlier in this volume. One is to focus
on reception, on “the dynamic and shift-
ing ways in which Greco-Roman art has
been–and continues to be–desired and
destroyed, restored and manipulated, col-
lected and displayed.” Another looks to
historicizing the objects, locating them in
their original cultural contexts; this is an
entreprise, Platt notes, in which “the kinds
of questions posed by contemporary art
history–with their focus on historically
constituted forms of visuality and, increas-
franchement, materiality–have an important role
to play.” Finally, there is growing atten-
tiveness to the relationship between art
and text, which is analogous to the “ma-
terial turn” in literary studies. Ainsi, Platt
closes by analyzing a provocative passage
from Pliny the Elder, which raises ques-
tions about the artist’s relationship with
his materials, models of perception, et
“the slippage between medium and repre-
sentation.”

The next essay, by Roger Bagnall, also fo-
cuses on material objects and texts, but of
a different sort, the written artifacts that
constitute an increasingly important doc-
umentary source for historical research.
These include texts on stone and metal (dans-
cluding coins), ostraca (potsherds), wood-
en tablets, and papyri. Drawing most of his
examples from papyrology, he describes
two “materializing revolutions.” The first is
a new interest in how these artifacts were
produced. Digitized texts and high-reso-
lution images of them now make it possi-
ble, within limits, to reconstruct the “eco-
system of writing” whereby “the materi-
al characteristics of writing materials and

writing itself have come to support inqui-
ry into the entire social dimension of the
technology of writing in ancient society.”
The second materializing revolution, un
collaboration between papyrologists and
archaeologists, focuses on the contexts in
which the written artifacts were buried
and what that reveals about different stag-
es in their use and reuse. Bagnall notes that
the two revolutions are connected, com-
plicating the notion that text and archaeol-
ogy are separate domains. This material fo-
cus represents a shift in papyrology itself,
from the predominantly literary and phil-
ological approaches of a generation ago
toward history in a broad sense: “We have
moved from being interested only in the
text of a new fragment of Sappho to want-
ing to know who was copying and reading
Sappho. . . . Interest has undeniably shift-
ed in the direction of the broader cultural
horizons of the ancient world in their em-
bodied form, and away from disembodied
canonical texts. This neither is, nor should
être, the end of philology. But if it were the
end of an isolated philology, that would be
no bad thing.”

The next three essays turn our attention

to ancient history. Au cours des dernières années, schol-
arship has expanded beyond traditional
politique, administrative, and military his –
tory to include also social, intellectuel, cul-
tural, et (recently) environmental his-
tory. Interest has shifted from elite actors
in big narratives to the smaller stories of
ordinary, marginalized, and “silent” peo-
ple, including women, enfants, slaves,
and “the other,” and to such topics as de-
mography, santé publique, religion, genre
and sexuality, identité, and emotion.

Angelos Chaniotis focuses on one of
these topics, the formation of identity,
both individual and collective. Drawing
on the sort of documentary evidence that
Bagnall has discussed, he takes as his
case study the city of Aphrodisias in Tur-

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key, which persisted for a long time and
has yielded unusually rich archaeological
finds. He explores how different sorts of
identité (civic, sociale, politique, and reli-
gious) overlapped and competed with one
another throughout the centuries; comment
they were constantly being shaped and
reshaped by language, custom, pratiques,
and myths; and how they were expressed
in various media, especially inscriptions,
which were key to the construction and
transmission of collective and cultural
mémoire. Not only the original use of this
matériel, but even its reuse tells a story,
as when an honorific inscription is repur-
posed centuries later as a building block,
its original role in preserving memory
having by then become obsolete. It is in-
teresting that debates about identity did
not undermine the city’s cohesion–un-
til late antiquity, when Christians, Jews,
and polytheists competed and religious
identity trumped all other forms of self-
representation. Since names constitute the
most basic expression of identity, the ul-
timate outcome of this competition is re-
flected in a name, the rechristening of the
“City of Aphrodite” as Stauropolis, le
“City of the Cross.”

The next essay, by Kyle Harper, uses a
very different category of evidence, pas
just textual and archaeological but also sci-
entific data. Revisiting a “classic” problem
of ancient history, le (so-called) fall of
Rome, he explores environmental factors
that had not figured prominently in past
accounts. Harper notes that Rome was an
agrarian tributary empire, and its econo-
my was remarkably resilient because of
a variety of risk-management strategies,
from technological improvements in ag-
riculture to the network of roads and sea
lanes that facilitated the movement of
foodstuffs and other goods. But if “trade
and technology let the Romans outrun the
Malthusian reaper for no short season,»
we now know, on the basis of scientific ev-

idence, that climate also contributed, spe-
cifically that the Mediterranean “patch-
work of microclimates” had been hospita-
ble for much of the imperial period. In the
ad 160s, cependant, the Antonine Plague,
which science has identified as smallpox,
was introduced through the Red Sea trade
“along the very networks that held the
empire together.” At same time, volcanic
eruptions in ad 169 ended the period of
stable climate, anticipating the later onset
of what science has identified as a “late
antique little ice age.” Next, in ad 244
and again in ad 246, the Nile failed to rise,
causing a food crisis in Egypt that had re-
percussions across the empire. And then,
a second pandemic, the Plague of Cypri-
un, started in Alexandria in ad 249 et
spread across the Roman world over the
next twenty years. The crisis of the third
century was underway, not as the result of
any one event, but instead due to a cascade
of environmental disasters that was relat-
ed to climate change and disease and that
était, in a sense, “the revenge of the giant
imperial ecology.” These disasters, finally,
“pushed the imperial system beyond the
threshold of resilience.”

After two essays that explore specific
problems in ancient history, Ian Morris
and Walter Scheidel reflect on the nature
of the enterprise itself. They review two
different versions of ancient history–the
classical model that regards Greece and
Rome as the beginning that matters, depuis
they were turning points in world histo-
ry, and the evolutionary model, lequel
is global in its outlook and goes back to
the origins of humanity. The approach-
es have competed and coexisted for two
hundred and fifty years, with the evolu-
tionary model taking hold in the social
sciences and the classical dominating the
sciences humaines. But as evidence and methods
are changing faster than ever before, le
evolutionary is in the ascendant: “Now,
the origin story that seems to matter most

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began not in first-millennium-bce Greece
and Rome, but with the invention of agri-
culture in the Middle East more than ten
thousand years ago, or the evolution in
Africa of modern humans more than one
hundred thousand years ago, or of the ge-
nus Homo nearly three million years ago.”
But if the classical model ignores most of
the world’s history, the evolutionary mod-
el has its own “flyover zone,” neglecting
much of what transpired between the agri-
cultural revolution and the industrial rev-
olution, c'est, much of recorded history.
The authors propose an alternative way of
doing ancient history, which is compara-
tive and can combine classical and evolu-
tionary thinking. Their first case study is
the Axial Age, the middle of the first mil-
lennium bce, when “an explosion of mor-
al thinking” occurred at roughly the same
time in different cultures–Chinese, Indi-
un, Iranian, Israelite, and Greek–without
much evidence of diffusion. The second
topic is the study of political organiza-
tion. Both Rome and China, Par exemple,
built empires; but they had very different
trajectories, and their divergence can be
explained only by systematic compara-
tive analysis. The Axial Age and the fate of
empires are, alors, two areas for research
in which both evolutionary and classi-
cal historians can work together. But to
do this, classical historians “will need to
. . . master new evidence, méthodes, et
questions, and recognize that the ancient
world was much bigger–and ancient his-
tory much longer–than our predecessors
made them seem.”

The last two essays in this volume return

to a topic that was discussed briefly at the
beginning of this introduction: the institu-
tional and professional context of Greco-
Roman studies. But the focus, now, is on
the future. Turning his attention to cur-
riculum and pedagogy, Peter Struck ex-
plains the displacement of classics from

its privileged position in nineteenth-cen-
tury American education as, in part, le
result of the expansion of universities at
that time, including the creation of pub-
lic land-grant institutions whose pragmat-
ic mission differed from earlier colleges’
goal of “acculturation into an aristocracy
of the learned.” Struck sees an interesting
parallel to contemporary higher educa-
tion, where more Americans have a B.A.
than ever before, and where undergradu-
ates increasingly pursue vocational stud-
ies. He makes a case for the classics in this
environment by noting that the breadth of
the field, the way it encompasses different
styles of thinking (literary, historical, phil-
osophical, et ainsi de suite), is analogous to the
liberal arts as a whole. But because these
different methods are housed in one cur-
riculum, “we move beyond the paratactic
aggregation of skills, and contribute to the
development of a different intellectual ap-
titude.” Now that the liberal arts are fac-
ing the same challenges that classics faced
decades ago, Struck argues that the liber-
al arts should make the case for pure re-
search by disseminating knowledge of the
past through popular media and online
courses, which can reach a broader pub-
lic and make our teaching a public good.26
Gregory Crane is also committed to hav-
ing Greco-Roman studies supported as a
public good. But his starting point is the
transformative power of technology–
not how specialist research and teaching
can be enhanced by technology (a top-
ic touched upon earlier in this introduc-
tion), but rather “the extent to which the
shift from print to a digital space changes
how our particular fields can contribute to
society as a whole.” Data from the Acade-
my’s Humanities Indicators demonstrate
that making the humanities accessible to
the general public is not considered essen-
tial by scholars in this and other major hu-
manities fields. But this leaves the human-
ities exposed (as figures for the National

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Endowment for the Humanities’ support
of research show). Crane suggests ways to
counter this “intellectual scholasticism.”
One is to expand open access, which is “a
necessary, though by no means sufficient,
condition for reaching beyond this closed
academic network.” Even more impor-
tant is to come up with “a new theoretical
foundation for Greco-Roman studies in a
digital age,” one which does not prioritize
the “idealized expert” with full control of
the scholarship, but extends to non-spe-
cialists, including specialists in other dis-
ciplines. Technology makes it possible for
such “citizen scholars” to develop requi-
site skills and make real contributions to
connaissance. His final point is that Greco-
Roman studies in a digital age needs to
open up not only to different audienc-
es and practitioners but also to “a global
network of historical languages and cul-
tures.” One traditional name for the field,
“classics,” ignores the fact that there are
many other “classical” languages and
cultures than those of Greece and Rome.
He suggests institutional reorganization,
forming partnerships with scholars of
non-European cultures and making use of
communications technology to work with
colleagues around the globe. His vision of
“students in Tehran and Texas reading
classical Greek and classical Persian to-

gether” is akin to the sort of comparative
ancient history that Morris and Scheidel
envision and is consistent with the larg-
er opening out of the field noted earlier.
While not all readers may agree about the
advisability or feasibility of some of these
recommendations, Crane’s final exhorta-
tion can serve not only as a conclusion to
this introduction27 but also as a prelude to
the essays that follow:

Those of us who have the privilege to earn
a living as students of the Greco-Roman
world have a decision before us about the
field we want to build. . . . We can contin-
ue writing and teaching in much the same
way we always have, exploiting new dig-
ital methods as ancillary tools by which
we compose more traditional articles and
livres, rather than asking ourselves what
the purpose of our research and teaching
should be and then exploring new forms of
intellectual activity and production. . . . De-
viating from any of these paths will be diffi-
cult: it entails redefining our field and thus
inevitably challenges established structures
of authority and institutional power. But the
potential benefits are immense and there
will be opportunities for anyone in the field,
at whatever level of seniority, to contribute
to and flourish within the world we collec-
tively fashion.

endnotes
1 David Lowenthal, The Past is a Foreign Country (Cambridge: la presse de l'Universite de Cambridge, 1985),

412.

2 Mary Beard, SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome (New York and London: Liveright, 2015); John
Seabrook, “The Invisible Library: Can Digital Technology Make the Herculaneum Scrolls Leg-
ible After Two Thousand Years?” The New Yorker, Novembre 16, 2015; Caroline Alexander,
trans., The Iliad: A New Translation by Caroline Alexander (New York: HarperCollins, 2015); James
Romm, “Beginning Greek, Again and Again,” The New York Times, Janvier 3, 2016, sr 10; “Jack
Huston: The ‘Ben-Hur’ Remake Was an Epic Undertaking,” The New York Times, Février 10,
2016; Jens M. Daehner and Kenneth Lapatin, éd., Power and Pathos: Bronze Sculpture of the Helle-
nistic World (Les anges: Getty Publications, 2015).

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3 This sort of destructive preoccupation with the past can be countered by technology, since we
are able to digitize detailed images of archaeological remains that are in harm’s way, and to
visit and study them, even after they are gone, through virtual reality–a new type of “salvage
archaeology.”

4 Throughout this introduction and the essays that follow, various names are used interchange-
ably for the field. Each is fraught. “Classics,” for example, has a Eurocentric bias in that it
ignores the existence of other “classic” cultures; “Greco-Roman studies” avoids that hege-
monic trap but falls into another, blurring distinctions between Greece and Rome and im-
plying a tighter cultural unity than existed (in the same way that references to a unified “Ju-
daeo-Christian” culture also mislead). Discussion of nomenclature figures in several of the
essays in this volume, such as those by Emily Greenwood and Gregory Crane.

5 More worrisome for all humanities fields is the move from a full-time faculty (whether on ten-

ure track or on contract) to an adjunct academic workforce.

6 See Phyllis Culham and Lowell Edmunds, éd., Classics: A Discipline and Profession in Crisis (Lan-
ham, Md.: University Press of America, 1989). For an example of the conservative critique
of the field in the climate of the culture wars, see Victor Davis Hanson and John Heath, Who
Killed Homer? The Demise of Classical Education and the Recovery of Greek Wisdom (New York: Le
Free Press, 1998); for a rejoinder to the conservative critique, see Page DuBois, Trojan Horses:
Saving the Classics from Conservatives (New York: New York University Press, 2001).

7 “There are no ‘paradigm-shifts’ in the Classics. That is the simple truth with which this survey
of the field at the end of the twentieth century must begin.” See Louis A. Ruprecht, Jr., “Clas-
sics at the Millennium: An Outsider’s Survey of a Discipline,” Soundings 82 (1–2) (1999): 242.
8 T. P.. Wiseman, éd., Classics in Progress: Essays on Greece and Rome (Oxford: Oxford University
Presse, 2002). This volume explores changes in the field in Britain over the past half-century,
since the publication of an earlier overview on the occasion of the Classical Association’s Jubi-
lee, namely, Maurice Platnauer, éd., Fifty Years of Classical Scholarship (Oxford: Puits noir, 1954).
For another millennial assessment of the field, see Carolina Ponce-Hernández and Lourdes
Rojas Álvarez, éd., Estudios Clásicos en América en el Tercer Milenio (Mexico City: Facultad de Filo-
sofía y Letras, unam, 2006), which contains essays on Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Chili, Co-
lombia, Cuba, Mexico, the United States, and Venezuela. The excellent overview of classics in
the United States by David Konstan, on pages 159–175 of that volume, can be read profitably
alongside my introduction to this issue of Dædalus.

9 American Academy of Arts & les sciences, The Heart of the Matter: The Humanities and Social Sciences,
for a Vibrant, Competitive, and Secure Nation (Cambridge, Mass.: American Academy of Arts & Sci-
ences, 2013); and American Academy of Arts & les sciences, The Heart of the Matter: Around the Coun-
try (Cambridge, Mass.: American Academy of Arts & les sciences, 2015). These reports are also
available online at http://www.amacad.org and http://www.humanitiescommission.org.
10 The original plan for this issue had been to survey a wide spectrum of ancient cultures, not just
Greece and Rome. But the impossibility of the task in the time and space allowed soon became
evident; en effet, even the current, more narrow focus of this volume entailed a great deal of
selection. Enfin, although the field is international, the essays here are by scholars at work in
American institutions. It is worth noting, though, that while distinct national “styles” of schol-
arship persist in certain subfields, these distinctions have increasingly fallen away in the En-
glish-speaking world and beyond.

11 Not all texts are recovered from papyri. One of the most famous of recent finds, documents
from Vindolanda, a Roman frontier settlement near Hadrian’s Wall, were preserved on
wooden tablets, and many other fragments, including some of Sappho, survive on ostraca
(potsherds).

12 See Peter Parsons, “New Texts and Old Theories,” in Classics in Progress: Essays on Greece and Rome,

éd. Wiseman, 42.

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145 (2) Spring 2016Matthew S. Santirocco

13 The poem refers to two individuals, Charaxos and Larichos, who are mentioned by later au-
thors as Sappho’s brothers, but whose names did not until now appear in her surviving works.
The context may be a sister’s prayer for the safe return of the former, a merchant sailor, et
the growth to maturity of the latter, who will bring joy to his family. This was one of two frag-
ments of Sappho recently found on a papyrus. For a popular discussion by the scholar who
discovered them, see Dirk Obbink, “New Poems of Sappho,” Times Literary Supplement, Fév-
ruary 5, 2014; for the scholarly publication that followed, see Simon Burris, Jeffrey Fish, et
Dirk Obbink, “New Fragments of Book 1 of Sappho,” Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik 189
(2014): 32–49.

14 On the “new philology,” which originated in medieval studies, see the seminal essays in Specu-
lum 65 (1) (1990), a special issue edited by Stephen G. Nichols. See also the conclusion of Roger
Bagnall’s essay later in this volume on the need for a new, “less isolated” philology.

15 See James Turner, Philology: The Forgotten Origins of the Modern Humanities (Princeton: Prince-
ton University Press, 2014), especially pages 231–235, for a succinct overview of how, dans le
mid-nineteenth to early twentieth centuries, philology fragmented and spawned most of the
humanities disciplines (except philosophy, whose roots were not in philology). For different
approaches to the disciplinization of the field, see the essays in Glenn W. La plupart, éd., Disciplin-
ing Classics–Altertumswissenschaft als Beruf, Aporemata 6 (Göttingen: Vandehoeck and Ruprecht,
2002). Enfin, on the return to philology in the humanistic disciplines generally, see Geof-
frey Galt Harpham, The Humanities and the Dream of America (Chicago and London: University
of Chicago Press, 2011), 43–79.

16 Bien sûr, there had always been scholars who were able to bring the insights of several dis-
ciplines to bear on the subject in the service of a holistic Altertumswissenschaft. But this crossing
of disciplinary boundaries is now increasingly common, at least as a goal. Working in multi-
disciplinary teams is another way of achieving this goal; but it isn’t particularly common in
the field, except among archaeologists.

17 See Kyle Harper’s essay later in this volume, which uses scientific evidence to offer a radical

reassessment of the fall of Rome.

18 For a thoughtful overview of the impact of technologies of communication from antiquity to
the present, see James J. O’Donnell, Avatars of the Word: From Papyrus to Cyberspace (Cambridge,
Mass.: Presse universitaire de Harvard, 2000).

19 For early uses of digital technology in the field, see John Solomon, éd., Accessing Antiquity: The Com-
puterization of Classical Studies (Tucson and London: University of Arizona Press, 1993); voir, aussi, le
essays on “Computing in the Classics,” in Classical World 91 (6) (1998): 457–568. For an overview
of how quickly and how far the field has progressed, see Alison Babeu, “Rome Wasn’t Digitized in a
Day”: Building a Cyberinfrastructure for Digital Classics (Washington, D.C.: Council on Library and In-
formation Resources, 2011), available online at http://www.clir.org/pubs/abstract/pub150abst
.html.

20 See the essay by Brooke Holmes later in this volume for discussion of the relevance of medical

and legal materials to an understanding of Greek tragedy.

21 For comparative ancient history, see the essay by Ian Morris and Walter Scheidel later in this
volume. There may be a parallel here to the way that “world literature” is emerging as a schol-
arly field, either distinct from or as part of comparative literature.

22 A good example of this approach is New York University’s Institute for the Study of the An-
cient World (isaw), which offers doctoral training, post-doctoral research opportunities, et
scholarly outreach. According to its website, isaw “aims to encourage particularly the study
of the economic, religious, politique, and cultural connections between ancient civilizations. . . .
[B]oth historical connections and patterns, as well as socially illuminating comparisons, will
always be central to its mission.”

23 See Mary Beard and John Henderson, Classics: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford Univer-
sity Press, 1995), 6–7; voir, aussi, page 116: “Classics must also include the study of Classics.”

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Dédale, le Journal de l'Académie américaine des arts & Sciences Reassessing Greece & Rome

24 This is a theme in several essays in this volume, including those by Peter Struck and Gregory

Crane.

25 The illustrations on the two inside covers of this issue of Dædalus exemplify, from the visual
arts, precisely this sort of reception. The image on the inside front cover, The Siren’s Song (1977),
is from Romare Bearden’s “Odyssey Series,” collages and watercolors that use Homer’s epic
about a hero’s torturous homecoming to reflect on the African-American experience of dis-
placement and journey, from the trans-Atlantic slave trade to the Great Migration. On the
inside back cover, Picasso’s late work, Rape of the Sabine Women (1963), was inspired by the Cu-
ban missile crisis and uses the violent Roman foundation myth to express, in the tradition of
Guernica, the brutality of war in terms of the horrors it visits upon women and children.
26 See Matthew S. Santirocco, Nicholas Lemann, Kevin Guthrie, and Daphne Koller, “The Evolv-
ing Role of Technology in Higher Education,” Bulletin of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
lxix (2) (Hiver 2016): 31–41.

27 I am grateful to the American Academy’s Committee on Studies and Publications, and to Les-
lie Berlowitz, for very helpful suggestions on the shape and content of this issue; to Phyllis
Bendell and her colleagues at the Academy, Nora Khan and Peter Walton, for the profession-
alism and care with which they shepherded this issue, and its guest editor, through the publi-
cation process; to the Corporation of Yaddo for the residency that enabled me to reflect and
write; to the contributors to this issue for numerous stimulating conversations; to Kevin Da-
vis, for advice and assistance on editorial and technical matters; and to David Konstan, OMS
read and improved my introduction and whose own wide-ranging and forward-looking schol-
arship has been an inspiration to me, and many others working in this field.

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145 (2) Spring 2016Matthew S. Santirocco
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