How Often Do I Think About Ancient Rome? About Other Ancient Civilizations?
In response to the recent social media trend about women discovering that the men in their lives think about ancient Rome weekly—even daily—I too must confess that I think about ancient Rome pretty often, probably several times a week, though not daily. While I am not an archeologist or a professional historian, my writing has covered and explained ancient history quite often, particularly that of India, Persia, and Southeast Asia. Most of my recreational reading is history, so I think and write about it a lot.
Ever since the Italian Renaissance began to bloom some six centuries ago, Western scholars have begun to collect, analyze, and expand upon Greco-Roman literature, creating a large body of secondary literature that interprets and constructs narratives from the primary source material. Until this step, history is actually just a collection of uncollated records, coins, inscriptions, and the like. Without the interest and input of a large literate class interested in history as a discipline, stories of the past often devolve into legend in the collective conscious, such as the medieval Alexander Romance, which largely stood in for the real history of the life and campaigns of Alexander the Great for centuries.
As a result of the Renaissance, the spread of books and literacy after the printing revolution, and the subsequent Enlightenment and the development of academic history departments in the 19th century, Roman history is well known, studied, and referenced by a large number of scholars, amateurs, thinkers, writers, journalists, and politicians from all walks of life. This is not just a function of source-bias, but a reflection of the lasting linguistic, legal, architectural, scientific, and religious impact the Roman Empire had on the West. The American Founding Fathers, the Enlightenment thinkers, the political theorists of the Industrial Revolution: they were all steeped in a culture of classicism.
Thus, the ubiquity of ancient Rome in the modern West is a function of this background: ancient Rome is a common reference point for Westerners. And given the West’s influence on global culture over the past two centuries, Roman history is now well known all over the world. Of course, other cultures have done work in writing about their own histories, but the voluminosity of Western historiography simply dwarfs those of any other culture.
Of course, this will change, particularly as people move up Maslow’s hierarchy of needs in Asian and African countries and think less of survival and more about questions of identity and history. But it will be a long time before a movie about some Khmer prince is as commercially successful as Gladiator was in the West. (Everyone should watch HBO’s Rome, one of the greatest shows ever made.)
This aforementioned ubiquity is one reason why I think about Rome so often; it’s just there to think about. There is just a lot more material out in English there for anyone who loves reading about ancient history. In the past year, most new releases in the “ancient history” category of books have been about ancient Greece or Rome, although there was a book on Assyria that got some buzz as well.
Leaving aside this source bias, the particular nature of the Roman political system, its imperialism, its transition from a republic to an empire, provide not just drama, but raise issues that are relevant to contemporary times in a way that a Western audience can identify more easily with than say the history of the Achaemenid Persian Empire or the Han Dynasty (these polities are obviously referenced more in contemporary Iran and China).
At the end of this article, the reader will find a chart that shows how much of my ancient history thinking time is occupied by various ancient civilizations. I placed ancient Rome second, at around 20 percent of my ancient thinking time, right behind ancient India. If I didn’t have a particular interested in ancient India, I’m sure Rome might have been first, not through design, but because of its ubiquity. I’m extremely interested in ancient Persia, maybe more so than ancient Rome, but there is a dearth of material and narratives on it. There’s more written about specific days of Roman history, like the Ides of March in 44 BCE, than there are about centuries of Persian history. I have just read Adrian Goldsworthy’s new Rome and Persia: The Seven Hundred Year Rivalry, which goes into much more detail about Roman politics and military movements while speaking about the Parthian Empire in generalities to the point where it is unclear how the successive kings of the Arsacid Dynasty of Parthia were related to each other (this is not the author’s fault as the surviving records themselves do not give us clarity on the lineage and relationships of many kings.)
However, although it may sound as though my interest in Rome is mostly due to osmosis from exposure to ancient history, there are also periods of Roman history that I am actively interested in. In particular, the two periods appeal to me: the late Roman Republic and the transition from the republic to empire (133-27 BCE) and the 4th century CE transition of the empire from a pagan to Christian entity.
The historical study of India is at a place where Roman history was at several hundreds of years ago. All of a sudden, a great number of texts are being read, translated, shared, digitalized, discussed. Many of these texts and discussions were obscure until recently, but increased literacy and internet-access have changed this. India has only begun to write Western-style narrative history recently, and even then, there was a dearth of material and analysis.
I’m very heartened by the discourse and amateur interest I see on Twitter about Indian history. We need people to dig up, comment on, translate, and share old texts that would otherwise be buried, unread, in some library or museum or else provide new perspectives on well-known texts and ideas. Much of it will be totally wrong, and there is a certain sense that a lot Indians are pushing inaccurate narratives on “WhatsApp University” but there is also a lot of solid research as well, and the increased voluminosity of the discussion can only increase the probability that more and more interesting and useful knowledge will be unearthed and created. Being a part of and contributing in my own way to this tsunami of information on Indian history is a part of why I think about it every day. Among other things, for example, I have been reading the unabridged Sanskrit Mahabharata of Vyasa (in translation) for the past two years and have hundreds of pages of notes on it that is great fuel for content.
Below is a chart that approximates what the proportion of time—when I am thinking about antiquity that I spend thinking about various specific ancient civilizations. There is some overlap obviously between these categories, i.e. the Romans ruled Greece, Persia is intertwined with the Near East, and so on.
The Ancient Near East & North Africa category is a relatively amorphous one that includes Egypt, Mesopotamia, Anatolia, Arabia, the Levant, Carthage, the Nubians, the Elamites, and the southern Caucasus. However, the history of this region is relatively well documented—or ripe for further discoveries—such as the recent discovery of a new language last month at the Hittite capital of Hattusha, because cuneiform tablets preserve well in its mostly dry climate.
There is really no consensus around when the “ancient” era becomes the “medieval” era, if those periodizations are even valid, or if they are valid in some regions and not others. I think they’re useful for some parts of the world—Europe, the Middle East, and India—both in classifying chronological time and in denoting differences between major sociocultural changes (feudalization, spread of monotheistic religions). For my purposes, I am using an approximate date of 600-700 CE as the cutoff for ancient civilizations in Europe, the Middle East, Persia, and Central Asia, coinciding with the rise of Islam and medieval Frankish Christendom, the near fall of the Eastern Roman (Byzantine) polity, and the fall of the Sassanid Empire of Iran. For India, I am using 1000-1200 CE, roughly coinciding with the Islamic conquests of the northern subcontinent.
For China and the rest of East and Southeast Asia, I don’t think the ancient-medieval periodization works well at all, but I have used 1200 CE as an approximate boundary for the sake of the chart, coinciding roughly with the Mongol conquests and the decline of older empires in Southeast Asia like the Khmers, Mon, Champa, and Srivijaya, which heralded the way for this largely Hindu region to become either Theravada Buddhist or Muslim.
What then do we, those of us who think about history a lot, contemplate when our minds wander to this ancient civilization or that? It differs from individual to individual, of course, but is in various ways, entertaining, informative, inspiring, or even addicting. Most people find some era or the other of history interesting, even if they are not deeply immersed in it. I personally enjoy it for its own sake, for learning about the human experience, the specific customs and artifacts that made each culture unique, the interesting ideas about political institutions and social organization, the foods people ate in bygone eras, the weapons they wielded, the deities they worshipped. The experience of enjoying history is not that dissimilar to following and being passionate about another genre of literature, a sport, or a band. Follow whatever stimulates and illuminates your mind.