Waterloo

I had an interesting conversation the other week with one of my new Innsbruck colleagues about the effects of how one conceives of one’s area of study. One familiar image is that of the battlefield; certainly it’s the one I’ve come across most often, not least because Keith Hopkins used it to describe debate about the ancient economy in a much-cited piece from 1978, still being explicitly echoed in a new Handbuch der Antike Wirtschaft (von Reden & Ruffing, 2023). It’s all about a struggle against a defined enemy, strategically deploying articles and reviews to outmanoeuvre them, constantly searching for new weapons or tactics to undermine their defences; other scholars are allies or potential foes. And that of course extends to graduate students, being trained up to take their place as cannon fodder – and perhaps needing to be scrutinised for potentially traitorous thoughts. Shout-out to veterans of the Loxbridge meetings back in the early nineties, where (at least from the Cambridge side) we were expected to demonstrate that our teachers were much cleverer than your teachers…

It’s easy to see, if you take a step back, how this conception of the world and one’s place in it would then shape all aspects of professional behaviour and even self-perception; approaching every seminar or public lecture as a field of conflict, constantly looking out for ambushes, while the drive for victory always contains the possibility of ignominious defeat. It’s also entirely possible to think of different metaphors. What happens when we think of the study of the ancient economy, quite naturally, as a kind of market? Still (viciously?) competitive, but in a quite different manner, and perhaps this offers a better way of thinking about both the rise of new forms of research management (the shift from the individual artisan scholar to the Taylorised research project enterprise) and the effects of globalisation (the irresistible rise of English as the language of publication and the Anglophone university as the template for success).

I’ve suggested before that the model of collective improvisation in jazz might offer a more positive vision of what we’re all trying to do – and that’s just a specific example of a communal, collaborative, conversational approach to scholarship, in which the goal is simply to create something new by building on one another’s ideas or to play with possibilities to see where they end up or just to enjoy the exchange for its own sake. Of course – like actual jazz – this also has to take account of the real world, in which financial constraints and competition and exploitation are a constant presence (there are only a few opportunities to do this professionally, let alone to enjoy substantial rewards). But it’s surely important to hold on to the collective ideal, even if you’re one of the lucky ones who gets to be treated like a star. And, yes, I’m sure we can all think of an example of a scholarly Wynton Marsalis, trying to police the boundaries in the name of tradition.

I wonder how Richard Duncan-Jones thought about it. It’s not something I ever talked to him about, as we only interacted once or twice; he didn’t often come to events in the Classics Faculty in Cambridge, but stayed in Gonville and Caius College, teaching (I assume) Caius students, and working on his research. I think of him in this context because clearly Hopkins did, and was baffled by him: where did he stand? what side was he on? “Can you try and find out what he actually thinks about anything?” he said to me on hearing that I was going to see Duncan-Jones to talk about an issue in my own work. If Hopkins had thought through his own metaphor a bit more, he might have concluded that Duncan-Jones was genuinely neutral, manufacturing scholarly material – not weapons, but precision ball bearings or finely-ground lenses or something like that – that could be employed by anyone in their own work, without any concern about their end use. Clearly, however, he regarded every new publication from that quarter as potentially booby-trapped.

I never got anywhere with answering Hopkins’ question because I was too concerned with my own problems: I was going to talk to Duncan-Jones because a massive aporia had opened up in my research project, the question of the population of Roman Italy, and he had written the OCD entry on the topic that had neatly raised questions about all sorts of things that were supposed to have been settled. I could have stuck with the existing consensus, but I was young and foolish, and felt that every part of my dissertation needed to be equally robust, and if the population of Roman Italy could with equal plausibility be five million or fourteen million, how could we know anything about anything?

Duncan-Jones gave me lunch in college, and listened politely, and manifestly had no idea why I was getting so worked up; he had simply asked questions that needed to be asked, and if that established that we didn’t really know anything, well, that’s where we are. Manifestly he was not, as Hopkins presumably feared, slowly moving different forces into position in an apparently random, directionless manner that would suddenly be revealed as a strategic masterplan leading to a devastating coordinated strike. He studied specific historical problems as puzzles, fascinating in themselves but pretty well entirely isolated from one another. I had to work on my existential crisis in my own time.

The Duncan-Jones style of scholarship – almost pointilliste, you could say – is utterly alien to my temperament and interests; so I continued to read his publications but never made any effort to renew conversation, and have no idea of whether he read my floundering efforts in Roman demography (maybe) or my analysis of his rhetorical style as a counterpoint to Hopkins’ (probably not). Neither antagonistic nor competitive nor collaborative; scholarship as a matter of individual concentration and craft, endless meticulous tinkering and a genuine indifference to whether anyone else cares. If he didn’t have a room in college, I imagine he would have had a shed.

This resolute march to his own beat doubtless explains why it was only by accident, six months after the fact, that I learned he had died. No announcement on the Classicists email list, so far as I have seen, just a short notice on the Cambridge Classics Faculty webpage that I stumbled across when looking for someone’s email address. I imagine that a bit more fuss was made in Caius, but I don’t know.

And I’m conscious that I may be making this sound like a sad story, without any evidence that this is the case. If your goal is neither to drive your enemies before you and hear the lamentations of their graduate students, nor to be acclaimed and envied by all as the dominant figure in contemporary ancient history, nor even just to be invited to somewhere nice occasionally to give a paper, then slipping away quietly is no tragedy. There’s just the regret, one imagines, that there was always another historical problem to be explored that now perhaps will gather dust for a few decades.