July, 2023 Research Update

Amici!  It is now August!

August is always a month which comes in the academic calendar with a touch of dread, as it means the end of summer and the beginning of the Fall semester.  My own classes start in the week of the 21st, so I now have to be finalizing syllabi, planning readings, coordinating with TAs and so on.

As you may recall earlier in the summer, I managed to secure a one-year teaching contract with a full course load at NCSU, so I'm teaching two courses in the Fall, one 70-student section of their Ancient Mediterranean History survey (which covers the Near East, Egypt, Greece and Rome) and one 70-student section of the US Military History course.  Mercifully, I have TAs for both courses, so the grading load won't be too onerous, but the US Military course is a new course for me, so I have to write the syllabus.

For those curious on the readings, I've opted to use the textbook everyone seems to use for US military history, Millett, Maslowski and Feis, For the Common Defense.  I'm also assigning two memoirs to the students, All for the Union: The Civil War Diary and Letters of Elisha Hunt Rhodes, ed. Robert Hunt Rhodes and also Charles B. Macdonald, Company Commander.  I'm interested to see how those memoirs go to decide if I should keep them in future years or not.

Meanwhile the main text for the ancient history survey is, as always, de Blois and van der Spek, An Introduction to the Ancient World, now in its third edition (along with a pack of shorter primary source readings as PDFs).  I have a fair number of quibbles with this textbook and I still consider its treatment of the Near East and Egypt to be thinner than I'd like (it is more ample on Greece and Rome) but it is the best I've seen for the purpose and I will say that the third edition is much better than the second edition was on the Bronze Age.

At the same time, this has been a busy month for writing and research!

As I noted in the last update, earlier this month I submitted five chapters plus a chapter-length introduction as part of a book proposal package to Oxford University Press.  Well, the proposal has now made it past the editor's desk and is headed into peer review.  It may be quite some time before we get the results of that peer review.  Reviewers are notoriously slow in the first place and the total word-count (including footnotes and bibliography) in for the proposal chapters is right about 100,000 words.

I've already noted to the editor that I fully expect to have to trim some of that to get the final project in under the proposed 150,000 word budget (though the six chapters included do include what I expect to be the two longest final chapters by far).  Nevertheless, going 'long' on the for-review version is a good idea (and indeed, something the editor suggested to me when we met back in January - wait until after you've cleared peer review to trim, when you'll have a editor's feedback on what to trim).

The other big writing event this month was the emergence, at long, painful last of my article against Spartaganda at Foreign Policy, effectively a hyper-compressed version of This. Isn't. Sparta. I feel the need to note, since so much of the subsequent discussion focused on the headline title, that my original headline suggestion was, "On the Dangers of Spartaganda."  Authors never get final say in the headlines their stories get, neither the short headline (the 'hed') nor the slightly longer one-sentence bit that follows it (the 'dek').  I have to admit, I wouldn't have used the word 'proto-fascist' had I written the dek, but I get why FP did: it's short and to the point compared to whatever overlong academic nonsense I would have used ('proto-totalitarian slave state' maybe?).

In any case, I actually wrote that article back in December, you may recall.  But of course it is the nature of writing about these kinds of things that at a publication where most of their articles are very time sensitive, editors are going to hold on to something that isn't time sensitive to fill gaps and that sort of thing.  The problem for me is that the last six months have been so damn eventful in foreign affairs, what with a major war in Ukraine, a civil war in Sudan, the big NATO meeting in Vilnius, now a coup in Niger, and always the bubble of political news out of the PRC, that it took a long time for the article to finally get out.

In the event it was worth the wait.  "Spartans Were Losers" shot to the top of Foreign Policy's trending list and stayed close to the top for a full week.  It did, to quote my editor, "genuinely insane numbers" and sparked several waves of discourse on social media (amusingly rippling through both Classics-Twitter and History-Twitter at different times), through the week.

Some folks who were very invested in the mythology of Sparta were, as you might imagine, quite upset.  Apparently I am 'destroying history' by relating true things about the Spartan state.  Also, apparently, we're not allowed to discuss past societies on the basis that slavery is bad.  It was also pretty amusing, coming so soon after my Status Quo Coalition blog post had folks calling me a neoliberal, quasi-fascist American imperialist to jump right to being a pinko-commie-socialist who hates western civilization.

It never ceases to amuse me that these declarations that I am only writing because I have an evil agenda always come from folks who appear wholly incapable of correctly identifying my politics.

In any event, the disconnect in the response was remarkable, because I could watch in real time as on the one hand actual historians found little to disagree with in the essay, while on the other hand 'history defenders' were absolutely incensed.

I think you can see an interesting (if also distressing) continuum of emotional responses that come out as a result.  On the hand you have folks who know a dash about Sparta, mostly Gates of Fire, and so understand Sparta as an exemplar of certain values and any attack on Sparta as an attack on those values, even when the 'attack' on Sparta is to point out that Sparta never really was a great exemplar of the values in question.  Often their response is to say that the critique is "exaggerated" or "derogatory" or "mean."  They're not prepared, of course, to dispute any of the details, but instead respond with the vague sense that you are attacking them and their identity and that's not very nice.

Then you have, I think, a second group that simply recoils against any reassessment of the historical memory of anything, especially anything they were taught sat at the roots of their current culture.  It's not that they love Sparta, so much as they are uncomfortable with change, uncomfortable with the feeling that the stones beneath their feet, which they understood as being solid, might be unstable.  But their response is to demand that the job of historians ought to be to make sure those foundation stones do not move, when in fact that is the opposite of what historians do.  The unfortunate interaction this produces is that many folks with this response end up rejecting expertise, facts and the discipline together because it is emotionally more comfortable to pretend the ground under their feet is as solid as they thought it was.  Which in turn makes them easy prey for...

The folks who know full well what Sparta was - at least to some degree - and like it for that reason.  They like that it was authoritarian, that the benefits of the state were only afforded to a select special few, that it was exclusionary and most importantly that it was white and 'Western.'  These folks respond with fury when you point out that Sparta's model was unsuccessful because they want to implement a version of that model.  But of course they generally aren't going to say that, instead hiding behind circumlocution and 'drawing boxes' of analysis which just exclude Sparta's lower classes at the outset.  No need to defend helotry, it is enough merely to never discuss it.  Naturally this group too cannot abide the existence of expertise and so actively reject it, on the basis that anyone with advanced training in history must be a secret Antifa Super-soldier bent on the destruction of Western Civilization.

What they cannot accept of course is that there are in fact many historians who do not reject the European intellectual or political tradition and do not have radical left-wing politics.  Recall, the defense of classics that I ran - which included a defense on the basis in part that the classical past is the root of our modern political tradition.  They cannot accept that because those historians too hold them in contempt, because their crypto-fascism is based off of a child's reading of history and also morally bankrupt.

For my own part, I find all of these responses embarrassingly childish.  An adult faces the world as it is, even when that makes them feel a little upset.

Looking forward, I've got a few projects in motion which I hope to make some headway on as we lurch towards the semester.  I am actively working on a co-authored article on Roman Strategy, aiming to 'reset' the debate on the topic by focusing on the Roman Republic rather than the imperial period.  I may run a fireside or two in the midst of our current Roman Republic blog series to give me a bit more time to do my bit on that project.

Beyond that, I've promised to write a chapter for a potential edited volume on history in video games where I would be covering how the ancient world in general and ancient warfare in particular appears in games.  I intend to argue that the role of the ancient world in video games remains very limited, largely confined to warfare and monumental urbanism (e.g. Caesar, Pharaoh sorts of games), in marked contrast to the much wider range of stories and experiences available in other periods of history and that, while presenting at least a facade of historical accuracy has become important in the marketing of games set in the ancient past, this has generally not corresponded to a widening of perspectives.

Finally, I'm starting to try to put down the groundwork for an article-length bottom-up reassessment of the Roman dilectus.  Writing the post on it really brought home how there hasn't been a comprehensive look at the process since Brunt (Italian Manpower, 1971), but that many reassessments here and there of parts of the process have rendered Brunt's vision of it untenable.  So it seems like a reassessment of the complete process and its implications might be a ripe topic.

And that's the month!