Class, Embeddedness, and the Modernity of Ancient Athens

Extract

In a famous issue of Times Literary Supplement (TLS) focusing on the state of historical scholarship, Moses Finley called for “Unfreezing the Classics” through “serious history” and lamented that, “Less than a generation ago the profound disagreement between Hugh Last and (now Sir) Ronald Syme about Augustus was . . . serious. But today? While our colleagues engage in polemics over the Tudor Revolution in government, the rise of gentry, the roots of Industrial Revolution or the causes of the First World War, what excites us to debate?”Finley 1966:290. Less than a generation later, the field of classical scholarship had been so transformed that Keith Hopkins, one of Finley's successors as the chair of ancient history at Cambridge could report without much exaggeration that, “Ancient economy is an academic battle ground where the contestants campaign under various colours—apologists, Marxists, modernizers, primitivists . . . Even within schools, there are sects. Besides, new strategies, new alliances, new compromises are repeatedly devised. Fresh contingents of scholars arrive, new tactics (such as underwater archaeology) are developed . . . But no new weapon is finally decisive. The war continues.”Hopkins 1983:ix.