Handbook for Classical Research

David Schaps

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781136919664
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

One of the glories of the Greco-Roman classics is the opportunity that they give us to consider a great culture in its entirety; but our ability to do that depends on our ability to work comfortably with very varied fields of scholarship. The Handbook for Classical Research offers guidance to students needing to learn more about the different fields and subfields of classical research, and its methods and resources.

The book is divided into 7 parts: The Basics, Language, The Traditional Fields, The Physical Remains, The Written Word, The Classics and Related Disciplines, The Classics since Antiquity. Topics covered range from history and literature, lexicography and linguistics, epigraphy and palaeography, to archaeology and numismatics, and the study and reception of the classics.

Guidance is given not only to read, for example, an archaeological or papyrological report, but also on how to find such sources when they are relevant to research. Concentrating on "how-to" topics, the Handbook for Classical Research is a much needed resource for both teachers and students.

PART I
THE BASICS

1
THE NATURE OF THE FIELD

WHY DO WE PURSUE RESEARCH IN THE HUMANITIES?

There are many open questions in the humanities: whether the poems of Homer were written by one person, two or many; whether the works of John Cage can properly be called music and those of Jackson Pollock art; whether it was Richard III, Henry VII or someone else who was responsible for the death of the last legitimate Yorkist heir to the throne of England. I suppose that there have been people who were attracted to the study of the humanities by the hope of solving these and similar questions. I doubt that there have been many. Most of us who study and teach the humanities do so from a fascination—perhaps love, perhaps curiosity, perhaps even hate¹—of the works, the people and the periods that we study, and our interest in the subject is not dependent upon its further development by research.² A student generally falls in love with Homer, not with the Homeric Question; with music, not with its classification or description; with history, not with this or that party to an ancient conflict. We would rather be Homer than Wilamowitz, rather Beethoven than any of his biographers. Why, then, do most of us spend a good deal of our lives researching the humanities rather than simply enjoying and sharing them?

A cynic’s answer would be that many of us are employed by universities that, dominated by a paradigm more appropriate to the natural sciences, pay us in proportion to the number and quality of our research articles; but that cannot be the entire answer. Scholars were researching the humanities, and arguing about them vituperatively, before anyone dreamed of paying them for it.³ Why did they do it? Why do we?

Probably each researcher will have a personal answer, but in the general case I think it can be said that anyone who is fascinated by a subject will think about it, will ask questions about it and will want to know more about it. On first looking into Homer we may be spellbound; on the second or third reading we start to notice things we hadn’t noticed before, and to wonder about matters that had not at first commanded our attention. As long as we keep our questions and opinions to ourselves, we may be satisfied with them; but the moment we reveal them to others, we discover that they may see things otherwise. What seemed self-evident to us may seem nonsensical to them. At this point we start looking for an argument that will demonstrate that we are right; and that is the point where passive enjoyment has ended and research has begun.

There is, in fact, a practically unlimited variety of ways in which to read a book, to hear a symphony or to imagine a historical event. Some of these ways are more enlightened, more enlightening or simply more correct than others. It is the intention of this book to put before classical scholars a brief account of the resources and methods that are available to us to help us delve more deeply into the things that interest us.

TEACHING AND RESEARCH

I will admit at the outset that the relationship between teaching and research in the humanities is fundamentally different from that in the natural sciences. Teaching in the sciences is the handmaiden of research: we train biologists and physicists by the thousands because we hope for further progress and need a new generation of researchers to carry our knowledge forward. Most students of the natural sciences will not become researchers, but it is only by training large numbers that we will produce the leaders whose solutions to the outstanding questions in the sciences are likely to have momentous consequences for us all, hopefully for the better. It is certainly a great public benefit to disseminate broadly the scientific knowledge that is so essential a part of our lives, and it could be wished that our electorates and decision makers had more such knowledge; but few university departments of natural science take the broad dissemination of scientific knowledge as their central purpose.

In the humanities the situation is somewhat different. Few lives will be changed by solving the question of whether the Iliad and Odyssey were written by a single author, or why Cleopatra’s ships fled at the battle of Actium; but we do think that almost anyone’s life will be made richer by knowing the Iliad, almost anyone’s political understanding and judgment about public affairs deepened by reading Thucydides or Cicero. We certainly do research; it is a superficial reader who can read widely without asking questions, and a singularly incurious questioner who does not look for an answer to the questions that arise. But research does not occupy as central a position in the humanities as it does in the sciences—surely not in the classics, a discipline whose essence is not so much the invention of new knowledge as the preservation of old knowledge for the use of the future. Our research output is neither the only nor the essential justification for teaching the classics in universities. This point is often lost sight of in universities built on a research-oriented model whose basis is in the natural sciences.⁴

Another important point that a classicist must always keep in mind is that nobody can be a good classicist who does not know the classics. A modern research university is built not only around research but around research projects, planned in advance with defined questions, methods and research goals, and often—very importantly for the continued existence of the university and its departments—outside funding to support the research. Many such projects are quite valuable; but they are not a substitute for a thorough knowledge of the classics, which means reading and rereading the texts, visiting the sites, and looking at the artworks and artifacts on which our knowledge of the ancient world is based. Unless you are exceptionally fortunate, nobody will pay you for sitting down with Plato, Plautus or Plutarch just to read them and think about them; on the contrary, your employers may consider it a waste of time. Their opinion must be taken into account, since they pay for your bread and butter; but it is precisely wide reading and thinking, broadened and deepened over the years, that produces the great classicist that your employers, too, want you to be. Somehow time must be made for constant and undirected reading, observing and exploring if you are ever to get from the classics what they have to offer.

THE CHANGING SIGNIFICANCE OF ANTIQUITY

The Distinctive Position of Greco-Roman Culture

The study of Greco-Roman antiquity has meant different things to different people over the ages, and its place in the totality of culture has varied widely. That we study the past is unremarkable; every generation learns from its predecessors, and it would be foolhardy not to do so. That we study the past in greater depth and in greater detail than most people also needs no apology: if the past is worth knowing, it is worth knowing accurately. What is peculiar about our field is the privileged position it gives to two societies of the past, skipping over others closer to us in place and in time, and treating one particular area and one particular period as being of exceptional importance—as being classical.

It is not unreasonable to ask why Greece and Rome should hold this privileged position, and whether it is still worth our while to study them. Readers of this book, no doubt, have already made that decision; but it is worth noting that the answers to these two questions have varied considerably; and the way the subject is approached will depend quite a bit on the answers that we ourselves give to them.

The simplest explanation for the special regard given to Greece and Rome is one that classicists are loath to put forward: force of arms and institutional power. Greek culture was spread from the Indus to Ethiopia by the conquests of Alexander, and became part of the culture of the Romans when they, in their turn, spread their rule from Britain to the Euphrates. Although their dominion eventually fell, the religion that they had adopted remained, and so the Roman Empire (and before it classical Greece) was always seen as the ancestor of the Catholic church, which indeed continued to speak the language of the Romans until 1963. According to this understanding, which parallels the way non-Europeans tend to see the current ascendancy of European and American culture, the prestige of Greco-Roman culture is merely a consequence of the military success of the Greeks and Romans and the institutional success of the church, unrelated to any intrinsic value that their culture may or may not have. This argument has a good deal of force, particularly in a post-imperialist age, and it is almost certainly part of the answer; but it is not the entire story, for people of different ages have had widely varying reasons for studying the Greco-Roman classics.

How the Particular Became Classical

Discussion of past events and of great literature in classical Athens was not qualitatively different from any society’s interest in its own past; the activities of Hellenistic scholars in the Museum of Alexandria were remarkable but understandable, an effort to maintain what the conquerors saw as their superior culture in a sea of barbarity. That the Greeks considered their culture to be superior to others was only natural;⁵ if anything, the Greeks were exceptional in their willingness to admit that other nations had cultures worthy of study, or at least of description.

It was in Rome that Greek civilization became classical. Many influential Romans accepted the Greeks’ estimation of Rome as a barbarous or semi-barbarous state, and set out to learn true culture from the Greeks. From the third to the first pre-Christian centuries, Rome underwent a period of conscious and even extreme Hellenization, in which its literature, its artwork and its architecture refashioned themselves on Greek models. During this period, the study of Greek culture was, for those who pursued it, the study of culture itself: one studied Homer or Theognis in order to learn how to write poetry, the works of Phidias to learn sculpture, Demosthenes to learn to speak persuasively. Cultured Romans spoke Greek, and, to study the arts in which the Greeks excelled, Roman nobles might travel to Athens or import Greek teachers to Rome. It is perhaps to this age that we owe the impression that Greek culture and the culture that the Romans built upon it are in a sense the only real culture that there is.

Not every Roman thought that way. Cato, who dismissed the entire study of rhetoric (at which he excelled) with the formula rem tene, verba sequentur,⁶ and Sulla, who told the Athenian ambassadors who pled for mercy on the grounds of their city’s illustrious past that he had been sent not to enjoy learning but to defeat rebels,⁷ expressed as well as any modern Philistine the opinion that the world could get along quite well without the study of the classics. But once we have learned something, we may accept it or reject it, but we cannot think it away and return to the state we were in before we knew it. However uneasy it may have made some of them, the Romans had become what we can only see as Greco-Romans.

To the Greeks, in the meantime, it became bitterly obvious that the days of their greatness were over, and there developed a cultural nostalgia that expressed itself in an effort to restore the forms of ancient Greek life and literature, and even their language.⁸ This was the first clear sign of an inevitable and fateful development, the increasing distance between the language of the classics and the spoken language. In the west, the dominance of Latin written on classical models was so complete that it is almost impossible to trace the early development of the modern Romance languages; by the time they were written at all, they had become entirely different languages, not merely Latin dialects. In the Latin-speaking areas, Latin had become a foreign language by the early Middle Ages, its use confined to certain classes of people and certain religious, social or institutional contexts.The Greeks do not quite admit that ancient Greek is a foreign language⁹—there exists a modern dictionary of all Greek from Homer to today,¹⁰ and one could hardly imagine a single dictionary of everythi...