Prof. Greg Woolf

Only Disconnect. Resisting the Deep History of Roman Greece 

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.

Greg Woolf is the Ronald J. Mellor Distinguished Professor of Ancient History in the Departments of History and Classics at the University of California, Los Angeles. Before taking up this position in July 2021 he was Director of the Institute of Classical Studies at London and before that was Professor of Ancient History at the University of St Andrews (1998-2015). He has degrees from the universities of Oxford and Cambridge and has taught at both. Woolf specialises in the economies, cultures and societies of the ancient Mediterranean, particularly the Roman Empire. He has written monographs on cultural change in the Roman provinces, on ancient ethnography, and on the deep history of urbanism, and co-edited volumes on ancient literacy, Roman religion, the city of Rome, ancient libraries and women’s history. The second edition of his book Rome. An Empire’s Story was published in 2022. Current projects include writing up the Townsend Lectures which he gave at Cornell in 2018 on how Roman Cultures Changed, and the Sather Lectures which he gave at UC Berkeley in Fall 2022 on Seasonality and Society in Rome. He is also writing a book on human mobility in the Roman world.  Much of his work combines historical and archaeological material. He is a former editor of the Journal of Roman Studies and is currently Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Roman Archaeology. He is a Fellow of the British Academy, of the Societies of Antiquaries of Scotland and of London, and a Member of Academia Europea, and has held various visiting fellowships. He divides his time between California and Scotland.