Intro to Ancient History

1
Intro to Ancient History

• Week 9 narratives, periods and comparisons

2
Narrative and analysis

• Why is narrative discouraged?
• Too easy not proper history.
• Elitist focus on upper classes, politics.
• Misleading focused on short-term events.
• Too literary dangerously close to fiction.
• Too difficult to do well likely to be derivative.

3
Analysis and Narrative

• But of course analysis is always dependent on
  pre-existing narrative structures generally very
  conventional ones, taken for granted.
• Why study slavery under the Republic and
  slavery under the Principate? What difference
  does this make to understanding the development
  of Roman slavery?
• Periodisation assumption that political
  structures determine everything else?

4
Telling Stories about the Past

• Story is not intrinsic to facts narratives are
  invented, not found, historian selects certain
  events (story elements) and makes certain
  connections between them. Events acquire
  significance from incorporation into story.
• Archetypal plots historian approaches past with
  an idea of the sort of stories that might be told
  about it (Hayden White). Tragedy, romance,
  comedy, satire.

5
Grand Narratives

• Conceptions of overall shape of history, and
  underlying laws of motion key terms like
  evolution, progress, development.
• Key issues determinism, teleology.
• Shapes conception of antiquity in relation to
  other periods modern and pre-modern?
• Can we use evidence from slavery in the US in the
  nineteenth century to study Rome?