Lesson 1: Introduction
A brief introduction to the basic approach that the student needs to take to the study of Classical Athens.
Un-learning
One of the biggest psychological hurdles that the student of Classical Civilization has to overcome is the idea that Ancient History is exactly like Modern History except that it deals with an earlier period. This is a dangerous misconception. Unlike the sources available to a historian writing about, say, the Second World War, the sources available to ancient historians are often very fragmentary. Ancient historians use two important kinds of sources in writing their histories. Archaeological sources are by far the most important because their reliability is not in question. Stones and bones do not lie. Unfortunately, neither can they speak to us in a language that we understand. We have to interpret them, and this is not always as straightforward as television programmes would lead us to believe. Any historical reconstruction based on archaeological evidence is no more than an educated guess. This is why there are so many disputes among ancient historians. A reconstruction presented by one historian is often dismissed as a wishful fantasy by others. Literary sources provide us with a far more comprehensive view of what might have happened in the past. However, we must bear in mind that the kind of academic, evidence-based history writing that we are used to simply did not exist in the past. Ancient historical texts are therefore quite different from modern ones. Their reliability is often questionable. In other words, when we read an ancient historical text, we cannot be certain that the author is telling it straight. This is not to say that modern history writing is entirely free from bias. You only need to compare a history of the British Empire written in the 1930s to one written in the 1990s to appreciate this. However, in modern history writing, we can do just this: compare one history with another written by a historian with a different point of view. With ancient history writing we often only have one point of view, and nothing to compare it with. For example, the Philistines have gone down in history as archetypal ‘bad guys’. But that is only because the stories that we have about them have all been written by their enemies – the Ancient Israelites. If we had a text written by a Philistine historian, then we may well find a story that tells us about a heroic warrior named Goliath who is unfairly murdered by a sneaky enemy called David who kills him with a ‘cowardly’ weapon that strikes from afar. Keep these points in mind when reading any book on Ancient History. Remember - reading about the Peloponesian War is not like reading about the Vietnam War.
