“Ancient Rome is important.”
Descartes’ starting point was to doubt everything - to doubt the truth of every statement – and this is what I do here – recognising that my doubts may themselves be dubious!
“Ancient Rome is important.”
This is the opening sentence in the prologue to Beard’s book (p. 15). I shall now quote each of her sentences in turn in quotation marks – and this is followed by my comment on the sentence in brackets.
“Ancient Rome is important.”
[Ancient Rome has a presence. But how important is it? It is a matter of degree – a quantitative issue. There is a distinction between absolute importance and relative importance.
How important is not(Ancient-Rome)? My assumption would be that not(Ancient-Rome) is much more important … not-ancient and not-Rome. Rome – or Greece? South Europe – or North Europe?]
Knowing about Ancient Rome means that we know about “the distant past”.
[one part of the distant past – what about the other parts?]
“Rome still helps to define the way we understand our world and think about ourselves …”
[Who is we? Hasn’t knowledge increased exponentially? My assumption would be that modern understanding depends much more strongly on modern science and technology, physical and social … and (ordinary) thinking depends on modern media.]
“… from high theory to low comedy.”
[My assumption would be that: most modern high theory is modern in origin; and low comedy is and has been present in all cultures.]
“After 2000 years it continues to underpin Western culture and politics what we write and how we see the world and our place in it.”
[“2000” is in Arabic numerals not Roman numerals. But how important is Ancient Rome for the non-Western world? Christian culture was expressed in Hebrew and Greek before Latin. (Architecture, drama, music – cathedrals, sagas, church music - I shall need to check.) The word ‘politics’ comes from the Greek ‘polis’. Western politics is democratic and David Held’s book Models of Democracy places Greek origins somewhat ahead of Roman (33-35, 45, 74). Monarchy?]
Paragraph 2
“The assassination of Julius Caesar … the template … the sometimes awkward justification … for the killing of tyrants … ever since …”
[I don’t know. It seems unlikely to me that a single event can be the only template or justification – and ‘ever since’ is a very strong claim.]
“The layout of Roman imperial territory underlies … the political geography of modern Europe …”
[I am sympathetic: here in Milton Keynes the old A5 follows Watling Street. Hadrian’s Wall separates me from my homeland in Scotland (approximately). But might it not be that physical geography, water and uplands, underlies both Roman territory and modern Europe (and indeed pre-Roman territory)?]
“The main reason that London is capital of the UK is that Romans made it the capital of their province Britannia …”
[London, Damascus, (Jerusalem?), Constantinople (Istanbul), Athens and Rome are the modern capitals on Map 5 of the Roman World (pp. 12-13) but only London was primarily established by the Romans.]
“… the great ocean that encircled the civilised world.”
[Our present modern geographical understanding of the world is post-Roman.]
“Rome has bequeathed to us ideas of liberty and citizenship … imperial exploitation … vocabulary of modern politics … ‘senators’ … ‘dictators’”
[Held p.15 says “The development of democracy in Athens has formed a central source of inspiration for modern political thought. Its political ideals – equality amongst citizens, liberty, respect for the law and justice …”]
“It has loaned us its catchphrases …
[Several such are mentioned. But how many are there? What is their relative frequency? In one book of quotations, the Bible and Shakespeare are the two dominant sources.]
“It [Ancient Rome] has prompted laughter, awe and horror …”
[The young Winston Churchill and his chums measured pulchritude in Helens. The “what have the Romans ever done for us?” scene with John Cleese in The Life of Brian film also comes to mind. But how many such instances are there? What is their relative frequency? Is there a generation and class differential here? In the 1950s/1960s I did indeed study Latin and Greek in my fee-paying school. My wife did not and my two daughters did not.]
“Gladiators are as big box office now as they ever were.”
[What are we comparing with the gladiators of ancient Rome? What big box office are we referring to? Olympics? – but that is Ancient Greece?]
“Virgil … more readers [today] than in the first century CE”
[I can imagine this is true: but is it just because the world population is greater now, because literacy has increased, because the West is dominant, etc.?]
The study of history
Paragraph 3, pages 15-16
“Yet the history of Ancient Rome has changed dramatically over the last 50 years (1965-2015) …”
[Interesting. I do not know about this …]
“ … and even more so in the almost 250 years since Edward Gibbon wrote The Decline and Fall off the Roman Empire, his idiosyncratic experiment that began the modern study of Roman history in the English-speaking world.”
[… so we have a history of history – and a geography of history]
“… new ways of looking at old evidence … different questions we choose to put to it … different priorities … past speaks to us in a new idiom … gender identity … food supply …”
[Different aspects of the past. The different agendas of the historian.]
“It is a dangerous myth that we are better historians than our predecessors. We are not.”
[‘Better’ in what sense? Better surely in that there is more historical knowledge and more sophisticated methods and procedures? See the next sentence.]
“… new discoveries … more than could ever have been known before …” … various examples are given here.
[Interesting. Is this ever-increasing detail? Does it make us totally revise our understanding?]
Para 3 p16
“… always being rewritten … we know more … work in progress …”
“This book is my contribution to that larger project, it offers my version of why it matters.”
[Does it matter whether or not it matters? Might Ancient Rome simply be of intrinsic interest?]
“SPQR. Senatus PopulusQue Romanus. The Senate and the people of Rome.”
https://www.britannica.com/topic/government/Rome
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPQR
to be continued …
The Dwyer book makes me nervous about my ignorance of proper academic history!