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A HUNDRED YEARS OF ROMAN HISTORY: HISTORIOGRAPHY AND INTELLECTUAL CULTURE

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 September 2012

Christopher J. Smith
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Abstract

In 2010, the Society for the Promotion of Roman Studies achieved its centenary. In 2012, the British School at Rome, which was closely linked to the origins of the Roman Society, celebrates the centenary of its Royal Charter. This marked the formal establishment of the distinctively broad and interdisciplinary remit of the School by the inclusion of humanities, art and architecture in a single institution. The combination of these two anniversaries has given rise to this attempt to think through some of the paths that Roman studies have taken, and to understand them within the context of broader developments in particularly British and Italian historiography. The Roman Society and the British School at Rome have many points of connection, both in terms of individuals and in terms of research interest. Recent work on the development of a British historical tradition has shown that it remains important to ground the reading of historical scholarship within the intellectual trajectory of its practitioners. This is, therefore, an argument about how the research represented in the Journal of Roman Studies, and conducted at the British School at Rome, and ultimately more widely, should be seen in a historiographical context.

Nel 2010, la Society for the Promotion of Roman Studies ha raggiunto il suo centenario dalla nascita. Nel 2012 la British School at Rome, che è stata strettamente legata alle origini della Roman Society, celebra il centenario della sua Carta Reale. Questo ha marcato la costituzione formale del compito chiaramente ampio e interdisciplinare della BSR con l'inclusione delle scienze umane, dell'arte e dell'architettura in un'unica istituzione. La combinazione di questi due anniversari ha dato il via a questo tentativo di pensare a quali strade siano state intraprese dagli studi romani e di comprenderli all'interno del contesto di sviluppi più ampio, in particolare della storiografia britannica e italiana. La Roman Society e la British School at Rome hanno molti punti in comune, sia in termini di individui sia in termini di interessi di ricerca. Un recente lavoro sugli sviluppi della tradizione storica Britannica ha mostrato che rimane importante ancorare la lettura della ricerca storica all'interno della traiettoria intellettuale dei suoi specialisti. Questo è pertanto un argomento su come la ricerca rappresentata nel Journal of Roman Studies, e condotta alla British School at Rome, e ultimamente più ampiamente, debba essere vista nel contesto storiografico.

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Papers of the British School at Rome , Volume 80 , October 2012 , pp. 295 - 323
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Copyright © British School at Rome 2012

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References

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17 Wiseman, Short History (above, n. 10), 18, but compare the enthusiastic description of whom one might meet at Eugenie Strong's salons, cited by Wiseman, Short History (above, n. 10), 15: ‘scholars of all kinds and of many nationalities, distinguished artists, cardinals, bishops, and humble and learned friars’. On Mrs Strong more generally, see Beard, M., The Invention of Jane Harrison (Harvard, 2000), 14–29Google Scholar; Dyson, S., Portrait of an Archaeologist: a Biography of Eugenie Sellers Strong (London, 2004)Google Scholar.

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19 Wiseman, Short History (above, n. 10), 3; Stray, ‘Century of Roman studies’ (above, n. 1), 3.

20 Stray, ‘Century of Roman studies’ (above, n. 1), 1.

21 Stray, ‘Century of Roman studies’ (above, n. 1), 7–8.

22 Bentley, Modernizing England's Past (above, n. 13).

23 Taking as a parallel the world of British historians talking about British history has the effect of radically understating the international nature of ancient history as a discipline, and as practised in both the foreign institutes in Rome and in British universities; this is redressed only partially here. For an excellent account of the post-war international collaboration between foreign institutes at Rome, see F. Whitling, The Western Way: Academic Diplomacy: Foreign Academies and the Swedish Institute in Rome, 1935–1953 (unpublished Ph.D. thesis, European University Institute Florence); I am grateful to Dr Whitling for allowing me to see his work.

24 Perhaps the most challenging part of Bentley's argument rests with his definition of ‘modernism’, which has been criticized by Peter Ghosh (‘Review of Bentley, M., Modernizing England's Past: English Historiography in the Age of Modernism, 1870–1970’, English Historical Review 121 (2006), 1,509–12)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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26 ‘An inaugural address delivered before the First Annual General Meeting of the Society, 11th May, 1911’, JRS 1 (1911), xi–xx. Discussed by Stray, ‘Century of Roman studies’ (above, n. 1), 2; and on Haverfield more generally, see Freeman, P.W.M., The Best Training Ground for Archaeologists: Francis Haverfield and the Invention of Romano-British Archaeology (Oxford, 2007)Google Scholar; Hingley, R., ‘Francis John Haverfield (1860–1919): Oxford, Roman archaeology and Edwardian imperialism’, in Stray, C. (ed.), Oxford Classics: Teaching and Learning, 1800–2000 (London, 2007), 135–53Google Scholar; Hingley, R., ‘Romanization, Haverfield, and imperial Britain’, Journal of Roman Archaeology 22 (2009), 705–9CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Rogers, A. and Hingley, R., ‘Edward Gibbon and Francis Haverfield: the traditions of imperial decline’, in Bradley (ed.), Classics and Imperialism in the British Empire (above, n. 14), 189–209Google Scholar.

27 Levine, P., The Amateur and the Professional: Historians, Antiquarians and Archaeologists in Nineteenth-century England, 1838–1886 (Cambridge, 1986)Google Scholar; Clark, P., British Clubs and Societies c. 1580–1800: the Origins of an Associational World (Oxford, 2000)Google Scholar; Sweet, R., Antiquaries: the Discovery of the Past in Eighteenth Century Britain (London, 2004)Google Scholar, esp. pp. 155–87 on the Romans in Britain; for a general account of the transformation from eighteenth- to nineteenth-century practices, see now Hoock, H., Empires of the Imagination: Politics, War, and the Arts in the British World, 1750–1850 (London, 2010)Google Scholar.

28 Woolf, D.R., The Social Circulation of the Past: English Historical Culture, 1500–1730 (Oxford, 2003)Google Scholar; Uglow, J., The Lunar Men: the Friends Who Made the Future 1730–1810 (London, 2003)Google Scholar.

29 See below (p. 313) for Hugh Last's preoccupation with collective activity. Haverfield may have been reflecting the mood that led to Lord Acton's project, the Cambridge Modern History (1902–12).

30 Inglis, F., History Man: the Life of R.G. Collingwood (Princeton, 2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

31 JRS 2 (1912), 201–14Google Scholar.

32 See Symonds, R., Oxford and Empire: the Last Lost Cause? (revised edition) (Oxford, 1992)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Hall, E. and Vasunia, P. (eds), India, Greece, and Rome, 1757 to 2007 (Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies Supplement 108) (London, 2010)Google Scholar, especially R. Alston, ‘Dialogues in imperialism: Rome, Britain, and India’, 51–77, with pp. 63–5 on Pelham.

33 For Oxford, see Murray, O., ‘Ancient history, 1872–1914’, in Brock, M.G. and Curthoys, M.C. (eds), The History of the University of Oxford VII (Oxford, 2000), 333–60Google Scholar. See also Richard Alston's characterization of the shift from mid-nineteenth- to late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century British writing about the Roman Empire (including Pelham's Outline of Roman History, published in 1893): ‘Roman history was revised so that instead of being a story of liberty lost and state decline in the Augustan period, it could be read as a tale of liberties spread through an imperial aristocracy’ (‘Dialogues in imperialism’ (above, n. 32), 63). See also, for the curricular changes, Vasunia, P., ‘Greek, Latin and the Indian Civil Service’, Cambridge Classical Journal 51 (2005), 35–71CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

34 For the relationship between Ashby and Haverfield, see Hodges, R., Visions of Rome: Thomas Ashby, Archaeologist (London, 2000), 21–44Google Scholar; for the photograph, see Wiseman. Short History (above, n. 10), pl. 1b.

35 Hurst, H., ‘Giacomo Boni seen from a British viewpoint, then and now’, in Fortini, P. (ed.), Giacomo Boni e le istituzioni straniere: apporti alla formazione delle discipline storico-archeologiche: atti del convegno internazionale, Roma, Museo Nazionale Romano-Palazzo Altemps, 25 giugno 2004 (Rome, 2008), 71–8Google Scholar; other essays in the same volume explore different aspects of Boni's relationships.

36 Hurst, ‘Giacomo Boni’ (above, n. 35); M. Pretelli, ‘L'influsso della cultura inglese su Giacomo Boni: John Ruskin e Philip Webb’, in Fortini (ed.), Giacomo Boni e le istituzioni straniere (above, n. 35), 123–38. On the Collingwoods and Ruskin, see Inglis, History Man (above, n. 30), 2–16.

37 On this relationship, see Wiseman, T.P., ‘With Boni in the Forum’, in Wiseman, T.P., Talking to Virgil: a Miscellany (Exeter, 1992), 111–48Google Scholar.

38 Hurst, ‘Giacomo Boni’ (above, n. 35), 78.

39 For just one example, see De Feo, G.C., Francesco Randone, il maestro delle mura (Torino 1864–Roma 1935) (Rome, 2000)Google Scholar. Francesco Randone was a theosophist and potter, who opened a school with remarkably advanced pedagogical theories inside the Aurelian walls near the Pincian Gate, where the mother of the much-missed Lucos Cozza taught.

40 For evidence that Last worked at Bletchley Park, see Richmond, J., ‘Classics and intelligence: part 1’, Classics Ireland 8 (2001)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Syme spent part of the war in still mysterious activities in Ankara. A vivid picture of Oxford during the war was given by Murray, O., ‘Momigliano in England’, in The Presence of the Historian: Essays in Memory of Arnaldo Momigliano (= History and Theory 30.4 (1991)), 49–64Google Scholar.

41 Fraser, P.M., ‘Last, Hugh Macilwain (1894–1957)’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography [hereafter DNB] (revised edition) (Oxford, 2004)Google Scholar (http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/34413 (last consulted 01.04.2012)); ‘Bibliography of the published writings of H.M. Last’, JRS 47 (1957), 3–8. The truly extraordinary photograph of Last in that volume (‘taken by his friend Lt.-Colonel W.B. Fletcher on the seashore at Morfa Nevin, Carnarvonshire, in August, 1937’), horizontal, pipe in mouth and looking rather louchely at us, provokes questions this article cannot answer.

42 See a DNB entry by another Camden Professor, Fergus Millar: ‘The post-war period saw Syme back in Oxford, where in 1949 he succeeded H.M. Last as Camden professor of ancient history, and fellow of Brasenose. It was very unfortunate that Last, a major figure but not to be compared with Syme in intellectual creativity, was there still as principal. Their profound disagreements, which the surviving correspondence shows to have been Last's fault, significantly soured his life at Brasenose and his attitude to it’: F. Millar, ‘Syme, Sir Ronald (1903–1989)’, DNB (http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/39822 (last consulted 07.04.2012)). A more detailed account was given by Glen Bowersock in his tribute to Sir Ronald Syme, in the Brasenose College magazine, The Brazen Nose 29 (1994–5), with some rebuttals in a letter to the magazine by Peter Brunt the following year. On one critical aspect, Brunt argued that Last was more likely to have refused than not been offered a Fellowship of the British Academy; ‘[Last's] review (Journal of Roman Studies, 1953) of a history of the Academy's first fifty years; he contended that unlike foreign Academies it had no means of organizing and funding large-scale research and publishing the results, and thus had no useful function. It would have been entirely characteristic of Last to refuse membership of an institution he despised’. Brunt concluded that Last ‘must have come to see that Syme was pursuing paths in the interpretation of Roman history not bounded like his own by tradition. Syme ignored or minimized the importance of ideas and institutions. This must have been anathema to Last, to whom it was crucial to understand Roman civilization, and in particular Roman law. Though his amicable relations with Syme survived the publication of Syme's Roman Revolution, it seems to me probable that a conviction gradually sunk into his mind that Syme's approach to Roman history was pernicious, and that he seized on apparently more objective grounds to discredit him, when he was in fact actuated by something resembling odium theologicum’. This is the same trajectory by which Herbert Butterfield came to despise the squadrons of Lewis Namier; Bentley, Modernizing England's Past (above, n. 13), 162–3.

43 I am extremely grateful to Alessandra Giovenco for helping me with information available in the British School at Rome archive.

44 Last, H.M., ‘The Servian reforms’, JRS 35 (1945), 30–48Google Scholar.

45 Last, H.M., ‘Imperium Maius: a note’, JRS 37 (1947), 157–64Google Scholar; Last, H.M., ‘On the Tribunicia Potestas of Augustus’, Rendiconti dell'Istituto Lombardo 84 (1951), 93–110Google Scholar.

46 Murray, ‘Momigliano in England’ (above, n. 40); O. Murray, ‘Momigliano on peace and liberty. First triennial Gilbert Murray Lecture on classics and internationalism, 2008’ (http://www.gilbertmurraytrust.org.uk/documents/momigliano%20on%20Peace%20and%20Liberty%20(1940)%20final%20version.pdf (last consulted 01.04.12)).

47 Bowersock, G.W. and Cornell, T.J. (eds), A.D. Momigliano: Studies on Modern Scholarship (California, 1994), viii–ix;Google Scholar on Münzer, see Ridley, R. and Ridley's, T. introductions to their translation of his masterpiece, Roman Aristocratic Parties and Families (Baltimore, 1999)Google Scholar. Isaiah Berlin once, brilliantly, dismissed a pedestrian approach to the transmission of ideas in a footnote: ‘as if ideas do not travel without labels, and men cannot be influenced by Marx or Freud unless they mention them by name’, Three Critics of the Enlightenment: Vico, Herder, Hamann (London, 2000), 165–6Google Scholar.

48 Millar, F., Scheid, J., Demougin, S., Speidel, M.A., Girardet, K.M., Hölscher, T. and Wallace-Hadrill, A., La révolution romaine après Ronald Syme: bilans et perspectives: sept exposés suivis de discussions, Vandoeuvres–Genève, 6–10 septembre 1999 (Entretiens Fondation Hardt 46) (Vandoeuvres/Geneva, 2000)Google Scholar, and especially Wallace-Hadrill, A., ‘The Roman revolution and material culture’, pp. 283–313, with comments on Syme's six months at the British School at Rome in 1928. Andrew Wallace-Hadrill's own work, Rome's Cultural Revolution (Cambridge, 2008), explicitly parallels Syme's political revolutionGoogle Scholar.

49 Bentley, Modernizing England's Past (above, n. 13), 150, cited from a letter of Rowse to Jack Plumb. It should be emphasized that, to an extent, this demonstrates the ease with which Namier's views could be regarded reductively; Bentley has cited alternative readings of Namier as fearful of the traumatic power of ideas. See also Colley, L., Namier (London, 1989)Google Scholar, who suggested that both Namier and Syme were ‘in rebellion against heroic history. He [Namier] was reacting against the practice of accounting for political change by reference either to the activities of great men or to major developments in constitutional thought. By focusing instead on the impact of elites, connections and family groups, Namier — like Syme — was acting in conformity with his own conservatism, with the widespread political cynicism of his time and with scholarly purism’ (p. 75).

50 See now Bentley, M., The Life and Thought of Herbert Butterfield: History, Science and God (Cambridge, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Namier, J., Lewis Namier: a Life (London, 1971)Google Scholar.

51 For a recent attempt to revivify whig history, see Patterson, A., Nobody's Perfect: a New Whig Interpretation of History (Yale, 2002)Google Scholar.

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53 Syme, R., Roman Papers (edited by Badian, E. and Birley, A.R.) (Oxford, 1979–91)Google Scholar, III, 937–52, esp. p. 398 (= ‘History or biography: the case of Tiberius Caesar’, Historia 23 (1974), 481–96).

54 Last, H.M., ‘The social policy of Augustus’, in CAH X (Cambridge, 1934), 425–64Google Scholar.

55 Pinsent, J., ‘Editorial’, Liverpool Classical Monthly 14.7 (1989), 97–8Google Scholar (also noting Syme's attribution of ‘splendour and terror’ to dinners held in the presence of Last when Principal of Brasenose).

56 Compare Bentley's careful assessment of Butterfield's derided and apparent support for Nazism, Herbert Butterfield (above, n. 50), 119–46. Last may have had similar ambiguities with regard to the Italian situation; the issue is not to defend those views but to understand them in context, in all their political and psychological complexity.

57 Gilbert Murray, his predecessor on the day (who read a paper on Dis Geniti, starting from the ideas of Jane Harrison's Eniautos Daimon), thought the Declaration an unhelpful declaration of abstract principles, so dinner might have been frosty; see Stapleton, J., ‘The classicist as liberal intellectual: Gilbert Murray and Alfred Eckhard Zimmern’, in Stray, C. (ed.), Gilbert Murray Reassessed: Hellenism, Theatre and International Politics (Oxford, 2007), 261–91, at p. 289CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

58 It is hard to refrain from pointing out that less than a decade later, Butterfield was, somewhat improbably, chairing the British Committee on the Theory of International Politics; Bentley, Herbert Butterfield (above, n. 50), 320–44.

59 Oakeshott, M., On Human Conduct (Oxford, 1975)Google Scholar, 100. Having studied at Cambridge before and after World War II, he was a Fellow at Nuffield College, Oxford between 1949 and 1951, before going to the London School of Economics, where he worked on the volume cited for many years. This is presumably a memory from those years.

60 Podoksik, E., In Defence of Modernity: Vision and Philosophy in Michael Oakeshott (Thorverton, 2003), 14–15Google Scholar.

61 See Roche, J., ‘The non-medical sciences, 1939–1970’, in Harrison, B. (ed.), The History of the University of Oxford VIII. The Twentieth Century (Oxford, 1994), 251–89Google Scholar, at p. 287, where Last was quoted describing himself in 1955 as ‘one who believes that, whereas research is one duty of Oxford, a large part in the education of the intellectual aristocracy of the country is another’. This was in response to a sense that the sciences were taking too much attention; see below, n. 82 for later developments of this theme.

62 Last, H.M., ‘Review of E. Cesareo, Sallustio’, Classical Review 47 (1933), 141–2CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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64 Last, H.M., ‘Ancient history and modern education’ (Presidential address), Proceedings of the Classical Association 47 (1950), 7–20Google Scholar.

65 On Last's passion for accuracy, see Peter Fraser's insightful summary in his DNB article (above, n. 41): ‘Last had lost the most important qualities of a historian — a lively historical imagination and a lasting creative vein — and his hyper-developed critical sense made this defect only more marked’. This was (allegedly) the cause of the final break with Syme, Last's anger over Syme's errors in a review of an edition of Tacitus (Syme, JRS 38 (1948), 122–31), corrected by Brink, C.O., ‘Justus Lipsius and the text of Tacitus’, JRS 41 (1951), 32–51Google Scholar. See Bowersock's tribute to Syme (above, n. 42).

66 Last, H.M., ‘Review of The Oxford Classical Dictionary’, JRS 39 (1949), 193–5Google Scholar.

67 Last, H.M., ‘Review of A.J. Toynbee, A Study of History’, JRS 39 (1949), 116–21Google Scholar, at pp. 117–18: ‘Collingwood went so far as to say that the historian ‘is only concerned with those events which are the outward expression of thoughts, and is only concerned with these in so far as they express thoughts’ (‘Human nature and human history’ in Proceedings of the British Academy 22, 1936 = The Idea of History 217). Now, to take an extreme case, suppose that the north-easterly gale of June, 1944, which did great damage to the Mulberry Harbours, had blown hard enough or long enough to stop the supplies of the Allied Forces already landed in Normandy, so that those forces were destroyed and the enemy was thus enabled to concentrate on other fronts until finally he established his grip on Western Europe for an indefinite future. It is difficult to believe that such a gale would not be the proper concern of an historian. Yet there is no sense intelligible to an ordinary man in which one could describe it as the expression of someone's thought; and I at least am not philosopher enough to be prepared to say that the historian's concern would not be with the gale but only with the thoughts it induced in the unhappy troops being killed or captured because their ammunition had run out, or with the thoughts of the victorious enemy or of the peoples thus condemned to remain his thralls’.

68 See Inglis, History Man (above, n. 30), 97.

69 Quoted in Wiseman, ‘With Boni in the Forum’ (above, n. 37), 131.

70 Last's major contribution as Chair of the Faculty seems to have been to assist John Ward-Perkins in winning a battle over and funding for rolling-stacks for the periodicals basement of the Library. In 1950, during the meeting in which Ernst Badian among others was elected to a scholarship, Last is recorded as responding to a question from Mortimer Wheeler about selection criteria thus: ‘it was felt in Oxford that a man should have seen the country about which he was going to teach’. He wrote subsequently to Ward-Perkins that he had lectured Badian sternly about behaving properly when in Rome.

71 Fraccaro is pictured alongside a gaunt looking Last at his honorary doctorate ceremony in 1953; his laureation address is published in Mantovani, D., ‘La laurea honoris causa di Oxford al Rettore Plinio Fraccaro’, Athenaeum 98.2 (2010), v–viiGoogle Scholar. For more on Fraccaro and his circle, see Gabba, E., ‘Sull'insegnamento di Plinio Fraccaro all'Università di Pavia. Ritratti di maestro e allievi’, Athenaeum 97.1 (2009), 229–39Google Scholar. For Momigliano and Croce, see Dionisotti, C., Ricordo di Arnaldo Momigliano (Bologna, 1989), 27–64Google Scholar.

72 Collingwood, R.G., The Idea of History (ed. Knox, T.M.; revised ed. van der Dussen, J., Oxford, 1992), 202Google Scholar.

73 Momigliano, A., ‘Review of R. Syme, The Roman Revolution’, JRS 30 (1940), 75–80Google Scholar.

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75 Peter Astbury Brunt (1917–2005), Craven Fellow, British School at Rome, 1946; see Crawford, M.H., ‘Peter Astbury Brunt, 1917–2005’, Proceedings of the British Academy 161 (2009), 63–83Google Scholar. Interestingly, Brunt in the 1930s nearly studied Modern History, and remained attached to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. He might have made a good Butterfield ally.

76 Brunt, P.A., Italian Manpower 225 B.C.–A.D. 14 (Oxford, 1971)Google Scholar, on pp. viii–ix thanks both Ward-Perkins and also Martin Frederiksen, on whom see below.

77 Bentley, Modernizing England's Past (above, n. 13), 210, quoting V.H. Galbraith.

78 See Miller, P.N. (ed.), Momigliano and Antiquarianism: Foundations of the Modern Cultural Sciences (Toronto, 2007)Google Scholar. Momigliano was arguing for a history of historiography in the late 1940s, before Butterfield.

79 On White's impact on British historiography, see Bentley, Modernizing England's Past (above, n. 13), 226–8.

80 Martin William Frederiksen, 1930–80, Rome Scholar in 1954, tutor at Worcester College, Oxford, 1959–80. For the sake of completeness, we should note that the current Camden Professor, Nicholas Purcell, who held his Oxford University Craven Fellowship at the British School at Rome in 1978, completed and edited Frederiksen's still astonishing work, Campania, which was published by the British School at Rome in 1984. See the notice by Brunt, P.A., ‘M.W. Frederiksen, 1930–1980’, JRS 70 (1980)Google Scholar, x; see also W.V. Harris, ‘Some reflections about Martin Frederiksen and his work’, and Dench, E. and Curti, E., ‘Looking for Frederiksen’, in Harris, W.V. and Cascio, E. Lo (eds), Noctes Campanae: studi di storia ed archeologia dell'Italia preromana e romana in memoria di Martin Frederiksen (Naples, 2005), vii–xii and 13–22 respectivelyGoogle Scholar.

81 On Hopkins, see Harris, W.V., ‘Morris Keith Hopkins, 1934–2004’, in Proceedings of the British Academy 130: Biographical Memoirs of Fellows 4 (Oxford, 2007), 81–108Google Scholar. Harris has noted Hopkins's debt to Brunt, who spent 1968 to 1970 in Cambridge as Bursar of Gonville and Caius College.

82 It is interesting that when Past & Present set out its manifesto for history as a social science in 1952, it referred to various disciplines, many of which were already a part of prehistoric and new archaeology: ‘We believe that the methods of reason and science are as applicable to history as geology, palaeontology, ecology or meteorology, though the process of change among humans is immensely more complex’ (quoted in Ortolano, G., The Two Cultures Controversy: Science, Literature and Cultural Politics in Postwar Britain (Cambridge, 2009), 144)Google Scholar.

83 de Ligt, L. and Northwood, S. (eds), People, Land and Politics: Demographic Developments and the Transformation of Roman Italy, 300 bc–ad 14 (Leiden, 2008)CrossRefGoogle Scholar is an excellent collection, and for the relevance of the Tiber valley survey, see within it R. Witcher, ‘Regional field survey and the demography of Roman Italy’, pp. 273–304.

84 Ortolano, The Two Cultures Controversy (above, n. 82), esp. pp. 151–4 on Snow; and Laslett, P., The World We Have Lost (London, 1965)Google Scholar, demonstrating the complex relationship between individuals and entities.

85 Woolf, G., ‘The present state and future scope of Roman archaeology: a comment’, American Journal of Archaeology 108.3 (2004), 417–28CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

86 The obvious example is Wickham, C., The Inheritance of Rome: a History of Europe from 400 to 1000 (London, 2009)Google Scholar.

87 Canfora, L., La natura del potere (Rome/Bari, 2009)Google Scholar; Canfora, L., L'uso politico dei paradigmi storici (Rome/Bari, 2010)Google Scholar; Schiavone, A., L'Italia contesa. Sfide politiche ed egemonia culturale (Rome/Bari, 2009)Google Scholar; Settis, S., Futuro del ‘classico’ (Turin, 2004)Google Scholar.

88 Cameron, A., ‘Thinking with Byzantium’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society (sixth series) 21 (2011), 39–57CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

89 Bentley, Modernizing England's Past (above, n. 13), 231–2.