Laudator Temporis Acti

John Scheid, Religion, Institutions and Society in Ancient Rome. Inaugural lecture delivered on Thursday 7 February 2002, tr. Liz Libbrecht (Paris: Collège de France, 2013), § 25:

Seen from the outside, ancient history can thus give the impression of stretching unduly the scope of the few available ancient sources. That is not inexact. But it is precisely this ceaseless return to the same sources that constitutes the interest of ancient history. For this rumination makes one think. Whether they have a classical education or not, all Westerners have the impression that they know the Greek and Roman world. In fact, that is not so at all. The volume of documents is infinitely smaller than that of other periods of history, and often even the evidence on a particular issue is limited to a few pages of exploitable sources. But how do our colleagues who have an endless mass of sources work? Are they not also forced to make choices? Does the only difference not lie in the fact that scholars of the Classics cannot make choices? Their corpus of sources is largely pre-established, but fortunately not entirely. Despite the limits that restrict their freedom of movement, every time researchers take a closer look they discover something new that no one before them had seen in its entirety. All in all, their situation is fairly similar to that in which ethnologists find themselves when they return to visit a tribe that has already been studied by a predecessor, and find it very different to their colleague’s descriptions of it. This is how ancient history constitutes a science in the making and not a museum of received ideas. By its way of proceeding, it puts out a warning that can be beneficial to all. It highlights the dangers stemming from the impression of familiarity that a culture close to us gives, and denounces the facileness of superficial syntheses. In their daily lives, teachers, researchers and citizens alike operate with general ideas which are often, let’s admit, exaggerated or at least approximate, because these are inspired by emotion, ideological choices or even intellectual laziness. From this point of view, ancient history has the virtue of encouraging mistrust, and erudition is assigned a mission that is not limited to filling in footnotes.