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So my long-awaited Cambridge Companions to Tacitus and to Roman Historiography arrived today. At least one person in the Tacitus one is saying stupid and overly-simplistic things about Tacitus and senatorial martyrs -- NOT THAT I'M SURPRISED.
More to the point, there is an astoundingly angry essay by J.E. Lendon about how "Woodman and Wiseman and people like them [i.e. scholars who approach ancient historians from a literary/rhetorical/theoretical perspective] are hacks and self-serving careerists enamored of sketchy ~French~ ideas who have utterly destroyed the noble discipline of ancient history." So...yeah. To be fair, a large portion of the article is making legitimate arguments about Cicero's discussion of historiography. But the opening and last portions basically consist of: "the following people and their namby-pamby ~theory~ suck..."
(Full disclosure: I stand (pretty) firmly on the literary/rhetorical side of the literary-historical divide, and I have even been known to be pretty scornful of the "well first we can delete the speeches, because obviously those were made up, and these elaborate descriptions and digressions are also obviously the creation of the author so we can remove them, too: okay no we know what happened" school of approach to ancient historians.)
But the point of bringing contemporary theory to bear on non-contemporary texts is NOT that some ancient author is amazingly anticipating the theoretical frameworks of Zizek or Foucault or Derrida. It's that there are observations about the way texts function and the way social pressures function that are -- surprise! -- visible in pre-modern texts as well as modern ones. No one seems to be upset that, e.g., Eastern European scholars have been using the experience of the intellectual dissident under a Soviet regime to think about Tacitus... (which is not to say that some very "theory-heavy" classics can get out-there and can get very far from plausible reality -- John Henderson is amazing and brilliant and ridiculously clever, but he may have extra gimmicks that don't really add to his argument.)
Also: quotes like this? "The result is like the diary of a fat teenager: riveting only to its creator, repellent to others, and illuminating to none." Was that adjective really necessary, Professor Henderson?
And: "But historians too have not answered as vigorously as they ought. Unconquerable love of ease is no doubt part of the reason for this long neglect, but more powerful is the admirable inclination of most historians simply to get on with it and not worry too much about the theoretical basis of what they are doing: theirs is the hard-skulled practical habit of mind that simply ignored Hayden White, and preserved academic history from the squalls of nonsense from France that overwhelmed the modern languages" (Italics mine). SERIOUSLY? SERIOUSLY? Are we self-important, much?
More to the point, there is an astoundingly angry essay by J.E. Lendon about how "Woodman and Wiseman and people like them [i.e. scholars who approach ancient historians from a literary/rhetorical/theoretical perspective] are hacks and self-serving careerists enamored of sketchy ~French~ ideas who have utterly destroyed the noble discipline of ancient history." So...yeah. To be fair, a large portion of the article is making legitimate arguments about Cicero's discussion of historiography. But the opening and last portions basically consist of: "the following people and their namby-pamby ~theory~ suck..."
(Full disclosure: I stand (pretty) firmly on the literary/rhetorical side of the literary-historical divide, and I have even been known to be pretty scornful of the "well first we can delete the speeches, because obviously those were made up, and these elaborate descriptions and digressions are also obviously the creation of the author so we can remove them, too: okay no we know what happened" school of approach to ancient historians.)
But the point of bringing contemporary theory to bear on non-contemporary texts is NOT that some ancient author is amazingly anticipating the theoretical frameworks of Zizek or Foucault or Derrida. It's that there are observations about the way texts function and the way social pressures function that are -- surprise! -- visible in pre-modern texts as well as modern ones. No one seems to be upset that, e.g., Eastern European scholars have been using the experience of the intellectual dissident under a Soviet regime to think about Tacitus... (which is not to say that some very "theory-heavy" classics can get out-there and can get very far from plausible reality -- John Henderson is amazing and brilliant and ridiculously clever, but he may have extra gimmicks that don't really add to his argument.)
Also: quotes like this? "The result is like the diary of a fat teenager: riveting only to its creator, repellent to others, and illuminating to none." Was that adjective really necessary, Professor Henderson?
And: "But historians too have not answered as vigorously as they ought. Unconquerable love of ease is no doubt part of the reason for this long neglect, but more powerful is the admirable inclination of most historians simply to get on with it and not worry too much about the theoretical basis of what they are doing: theirs is the hard-skulled practical habit of mind that simply ignored Hayden White, and preserved academic history from the squalls of nonsense from France that overwhelmed the modern languages" (Italics mine). SERIOUSLY? SERIOUSLY? Are we self-important, much?
