Keynote lecture
Ronald J Mellor Professor of Ancient History UCLA
Only Disconnect. Resisting the Deep History of Roman Greece
May 15th 2024, 5.00 pm
The British School at Athens
Upper House
Nearly a quarter of a century ago The Corrupting Sea placed ‘connectivity’ high on the agenda of ancient historians and archaeologists. It has remained there ever since, and studies of mobility and networks have flourished. But some of their original nuance has been lost. For Horden and Purcell connectivity was a potential, one possible response to a specific regime of risk. Some appropriations of their work forget risk and treat connectivity as a general and enduring condition of the ancient Mediterranean. New perspectives are emerging. Ramgopal reminds us of the “the disconnectivities…of mobility in the empire… the severance of ties and destruction of networks that resulted from phenomena that have been categorized as instances of connectivity and connection.” Concannon and Mazurek in their collection Across the Corrupting Sea challenge the idea that connectivity was either stable in the long term, or a property of the entire Mediterranean world. My lecture will press the concepts of connectivity, mobility, and networks harder, using Roman Greece as field of engagement. Movements of people and goods were intermittent and localized and the region was crisscrossed by shifting networks of very different kinds. Considering these social worlds as constituted by shifting and inconsistent exchanges allows us to escape from the territorial frames offered by both ancient provincial administration and modern national boundaries. Episodes of mobility generated new diasporas, some of which were then stranded in period of low connection. Shifting economic connections created new margins and new peripheries… and then uncreated them. There were communities and individuals responded by investing energy in constructing a highly ideological deep history of Roman Greece. This paper challenges these interested fictions.