A&S Lecture in Classics: John Ma (Columbia University)

How to Do Hellenistic History

How should we write the social history of the Hellenistic world, that highly diverse, multipolar, extensive, richly documented world of the last three centuries BCE ? Successful, illuminating examples abound, from Mikhail Rostovtzeff's immense, transformational, richly illustrated survey of The Social and Economic History of the Hellenistic World (1941) to Jean-Manuel Roubineau's and Gillian Ramsey's highly original treatments of the topic in recent years. The material is very rich; yet the temptation remains ingrained of returning to the political, events-dominated vision of our narrative and documentary sources; even sophisticated readings of such material (based in discourse analysis, for instance, or a sense of space, or a sense of economic relations and class struggle) have not always managed to break out to the level where Hellenistic history can be said to have had its own nouvelle histoire. This lecture does not do this; it simply represents the personal effort of one scholar in the field of Hellenistic studies to keep in focus various objects— the Greek city, the imperial state, economic relations, gender roles, private life— and to think reflexively about the opportunities and costs of the various ways in which we write history.