The concept of other human beings in antiquity is one of the issues that drove me away from the topic. I find the general disconnect too vast.
I really love them. It's easier with the Romans, who are horrible but in familiar ways; sometimes I find the Greeks just a little too alien. But doing classics is like any kind of cultural immersion -- you start to see how the other people think, even if it isn't in patterns which seem natural to you, and you can't really help being carried along by it, just a little way. And it's a challenge, to try to get your head around a culture (or a set of people) who can say "not to be born is best for humans, and never to look on the light of the sun" and mean it -- but there's the moment of fluency where everything slots into place, at least for a moment. Historians, like anthropologists, are always at risk of going native.
And I hate them as well -- I think we all do. I hate the Greeks more than the Romans, actually, which I felt for a long time meant I shouldn't study the Romans. I don't think it's illegitimate to judge their manifold failings (although I think it would be to do so while pretending that my own society is perfect): that's part of what historians ought to do. That's what makes what we do matter, or at least, part of what makes what we do matter.
But I never doubt that they're individuals -- I don't think you can, when you're immersed in what they've created. It's too idiosyncratic -- Cicero's correspondents, for example, or Tacitus, or Horace, they all leap off the page as people. You may loathe some of them, but they're very real.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
timeasmymeasure
Re: Why I hate Octavian
Date: 2007-02-13 05:04 pm (UTC)I really love them. It's easier with the Romans, who are horrible but in familiar ways; sometimes I find the Greeks just a little too alien. But doing classics is like any kind of cultural immersion -- you start to see how the other people think, even if it isn't in patterns which seem natural to you, and you can't really help being carried along by it, just a little way. And it's a challenge, to try to get your head around a culture (or a set of people) who can say "not to be born is best for humans, and never to look on the light of the sun" and mean it -- but there's the moment of fluency where everything slots into place, at least for a moment. Historians, like anthropologists, are always at risk of going native.
And I hate them as well -- I think we all do. I hate the Greeks more than the Romans, actually, which I felt for a long time meant I shouldn't study the Romans. I don't think it's illegitimate to judge their manifold failings (although I think it would be to do so while pretending that my own society is perfect): that's part of what historians ought to do. That's what makes what we do matter, or at least, part of what makes what we do matter.
But I never doubt that they're individuals -- I don't think you can, when you're immersed in what they've created. It's too idiosyncratic -- Cicero's correspondents, for example, or Tacitus, or Horace, they all leap off the page as people. You may loathe some of them, but they're very real.