Yes. Unfortunately, the only people who can write these books now are late antiquity folks (as Watts also is). Classics has decided to retract to a narrow canon and g to has big consequences when scholars are highly specialized.
I'm pretty new to all this, but I definitely saw a lot more late antiquity on the archaeological side than classics in Chicago last Jan. More next time at least!
There’s a reason I have found myself attending primarily AIA panels at the annual meeting. There are a handful of late antiquity papers on the SCS program but my conference is now clearly NAPS, not SCS.
Certainly a lot more counts as "Roman history" than this book covers (and as MB would surely admit), but the theory of the reivew seems to be that Classics is in fact exhausted, so we should move on to colonize something else?
No? I took it as “classics folks should be aware that they are putting up very artificial barriers between what they claim or reject as an object of study.”Gavin Kelly spells this out in detail in an essay on periodization in the Gibson and Whitton Cambridge volume,
But also? Isn’t the theory of the “global classics” movement essentially that Classics is played out/deeply western-centered in a way that promotes bad ideas so we should resurrect ourselves through geographic expansion?
Just speaking for myself I think that's got it backwards: freeing ourselves from boring/played-out/problematic ways of thinking (like periodizations) may lead to productive new lines of inquiry that may expand our view temporally or spatially. Expansion for its own sake seems silly to me
Just expanding because "Augustan Rome is played out" has the potential, as Andrew pointed out, to lead to new forms of uncritical colonizations. (Although I suspect that Byzantium is plenty colonized, if understudied compared to earlier periods)
So, you should read the Gavin Kelly piece on periodization. It shows exactly what can be done with the concept if we think about it in different terms. I’ll DM you on FB. Gavin puts in the legwork that is less apparent from the review.
