mayhap's friends

Posted by Bret Devereaux

https://acoup.blog/2026/01/23/fireside-friday-january-23-2025-on-the-cowardice-of-the-statue-pfps/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=fireside-friday-january-23-2025-on-the-cowardice-of-the-statue-pfps

https://acoup.blog/?p=33400

Hey folks, Fireside this week! Hopefully everyone enjoyed our series on the running debate over hoplites! As a social media note, I am going to attempt to start setting up a presence on Threads (with my own name, bretdevereaux, as my handle as always). I’m not leaving Bluesky by any means, just diversifying a bit; my presence on Twitter is likely to remain very limited as the quality of the discourse on that site has been…very poor. Which actually leads neatly into this week’s musing.

For this week’s musing, I wanted to just lay out some relatively scattered thoughts on where formal historical training and autodidacticism (being self-taught) meet. These thoughts were occasioned by some contretemps on the App Formerly Known As Twitter over the role of diversity and inclusion in the Roman Empire. The Banner of Formal Training was born forth capably and tirelessly in particular by Theo Nash (PhD student at the University of Michigan’s Interdepartmental Program in Mediterranean Art and Archaeology), while the autodidacts were a motley collection of enthusiast accounts without formal training (but many with a history of bigoted or white supremacist statements, because this is Musk-Era Twitter) huddled around the ‘Roman Helmet Guy.’¹ The usual term for this crowd, collective are ‘statute profile pictures’ (or ‘statue Pfps’) though of course they do not all have marble statue profile pictures (but many do).

Now Classics is in an odd spot here because as a field that is under substantial pressure – we’ve talked about the history crisis but the classics crisis is much worse because where history departments shrink, Classics departments close – Classics is pretty damn eager for just about any supply of enthusiastic members of the public it can get. And yet it is difficult to recommend much dialogue with this crowd beyond debunking, in part because the Roman Helmet crowd is just aggressively hostile to actual training or expertise. They’ll insist they’re not hostile to knowledge – but only when that knowledge comes in the form of primary texts wholly uncontextualized by any other form of learning so that nothing gets in the way of them applying their preferred – often quite embarrassingly wrong – reading. Also, it is worth noting at the outset, many of them are quite appalling bigots, a facet which comes through in the ever more frequent unguarded moments and which contributes greatly to their inability to understand antiquity.

One of the motifs that this crowd appeals to frequently is the idea that academics and other professional historians and classicists are at least blinded by our training and ideology to the reality of antiquity, if not actively engaged in a conspiracy to conceal the past. Now on one level, this argument is fairly obviously self-serving and offered in bad faith, as a way to de-legitimize anyone who disagrees with their deeply ideologically inflected (oh irony!) view of antiquity. In the case of the current contretemps, they wanted to argue against the idea that Roman strength came from the unusual willingness and ability of the Romans to incorporate and include a wide range of peoples and cultures (an observation in such ample evidence that it has been commonplace among academics for many decades – to the point that even the hoary old racists of yestercentury had to admit it was true and were stuck arguing that it contributed to decline even though that chronology does not really work out). But the idea that academia is strongly ideologically inflected is culturally ubiquitous and worth addressing.

The thing is, it is simply true that there is a strong political ‘lean’ in most academic fields (although the insistence that this lean is universal is invariably wrong; there are conservative classicists and historians).² And that lean does have a shaping impact on scholarship, particularly on the volume of scholarship directed towards some topics over others. But I think enthusiasts who imagine that this leaves entire ideologies wholly ‘frozen out’ have misunderstood how academic scholarship works in the humanities and the way that arguments get ‘pressure tested.’

And at least in history, it simply doesn’t. Journals and book publishers want to publish arguments that are going to spark a lot of debate and discussion, which means they want to publish provocative arguments, so long as those arguments are well made enough (in terms of evidence) to actually cause a serious discussion. In most journals, if you make an argument that makes the peer reviewers mad but they can’t disprove, the journal is going to ask you to revise to answer their specific complaints and then publish it because clearly that argument is on fire (in a good-for-the-journal way). A book publisher is going to be even more interested because controversy moves books. If everyone is writing articles about how you are a very great fool, well that’s a lot of people who need to get their libraries to buy copies of your book so they can make that argument.

Thus, Victor Davis Hanson does not struggle to get published even if he does tend to prefer publishers (The Free Press, Basic Books) which won’t edit him very much or push back much during peer review (but Warfare and Agriculture (1983) was University of California Press, Hoplites (1991) was a Routledge collection and the broadly pro-orthodoxy Men of Bronze (2013) in which he has a chapter was Princeton University Press; Western Way of War (1989) was picked up by Oxford University Press when it was a hit). Likewise, even a brief glance at the ‘Fall of Rome‘ debates will show that the often very conservative coded decline-and-fall scholars have no problem getting published. Bryan Ward-Perkins’ The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization (2005) broadside, with a title (“The End of Civilization”) that pretty clearly puts it on a side in the broader cultural debates about the place of Rome for modern western societies, was published by Oxford University Press!

There is an ideological lean in academia and it can produce a kind of ‘chilling effect’ on certain forms of speech but it does not lock out ‘right-coded’ arguments from publication. I say this, of course, as someone whose book project on military materiel in the third and second century – ‘how stuff for fighting made the Romans the best at fighting and winning’ being a generally pretty ‘right-coded’ book topic! – is under contract with a very prestigious publisher! I got a book contract from the first press I approached. I can’t go into details, but I also have interest from another very prestigious press for writing about the Gracchi in which I was clear my take was a lot more negative (again, a ‘right-coded’ position) and the press seems – at this early stage where nothing is certain – very interested! No one is stopping me!³

What I find striking is that these (largely extreme right-wing) autodidacts are unwilling to put themselves into the arena and actually publish. Oh, they’ll write long posts on social media or on their substack, but submit to peer review? Never.

And it is simply not the case that peer reviewed scholarship is closed to autodidacts or those without degrees. The late, great Peter Connolly was not ‘Dr.’ Peter Connolly, he had a degree in art and started as an author-illustrator. But working alongside H. Russel Robinson for years, he achieved a very high degree of expertise on Roman military equipment and by the 1990s and 2000s, in addition to his for-the-public illustrated books, he was publishing original scholarship in peer-reviewed venues. Several of his articles (particularly his reconstruction of the sarisa) remain important in military equipment studies today and many of his books, although marketed to the public, are well regarded by scholars. No one kept him out!

Likewise and more recently, Janet Stephens was trained and worked as a hair-dresser, but got interested in the hair styles appearing on Roman sculpture that scholars had long concluded had to be wigs. She did her research, demonstrated that the hair-styles could be achieved through the use of natural hair and pins and published an article in the Journal of Roman Archaeology, one of the premier journals in the field. No one kept her out! Indeed, quite the contrary, she was widely lauded and made lots of appearances at academic conferences; I attended a talk she gave a number of years ago. My sense is that, in Roman sculpture studies, her conclusions have been largely accepted and the field has shifted its understanding as a result.

No one is stopping you trying to take your novel arguments about antiquity to a peer-reviewed journal and get them published. It doesn’t even cost anything to go through peer review in history or classics. Our journals do not charge!⁴ Apart from your time, it’s free.

But you have to be willing to leave your comfort zone, to leave your cozy little huddle of supporters who all think what you think and submit to criticism – potentially very harsh criticism. Peer review is double-blind and while it isn’t supposed to include personal attacks or vulgarity (and usually doesn’t), no punches are pulled: if the reviewer thinks your argument is flawed and idiotic they will say that, usually quite bluntly.

So I find it striking that these fellows are unwilling to step into the arena, as it were, to attempt to develop their arguments with real rigor beyond 280 characters or to defend them against real criticism. Instead it is the supposedly soft, duplicitous academics who engage in good faith, under our real names, with our work exposed to criticism and passing through the testing of peer review. Meanwhile the fellows who complain that we are ‘woke’ and ‘weak’ hide behind nom de plumes and write only in their sheltered walled gardens online, surrounded by an audience that knows as little about antiquity as they do and shares their viewpoints and so is equally both unprepared and unwilling to challenge them.

Cowards. I’m saying they’re all cowards. And if they disagree, they are welcome to ‘come at me bro’ in the pages of a peer-reviewed history or classics publication.

On to Recommendations!

First off, if you missed it, I had another piece at War on the Rocks, this time for their ‘Cogs of War’ series, a written interview on ‘What Thucydides Thought About Technology and War.‘ I am actually quite pleased that the editors let this one go, because on some level I was writing in answer to their questions that they had asked the wrong questions – that Thucydides is not, in fact, very focused on technology or production. But I think that is, in this case, the more interesting (and also accurate) observation: our focus on technology and production is itself historically contingent and not a universal view, which ought to give us pause and a bit of perspective.

We also have a new Pasts Imperfect, this time opening with an excellent essay by Inger N.I. Kuin on Diogenes and the remarkable range of ideas in ancient philosophy. It is an important point to make, especially at a time when it feels like every fellow who has half-read the Meditations is prepared to hold up that reading as the single, unified ‘wisdom of the ancients.’ In practice, the Greeks and the Romans thought many things and part of what made ancient philosophers interesting and controversial was that they often espoused viewpoints that went against prevailing cultural attitudes (there was a reason no one liked Socrates!).

Also, via that Pasts Imperfect, I wanted to highlight a recent episode of Anthony Kaldellis’ Byzantium and Friends podcast where he talked about the survival of small and endangered academic fields like Sumerology, Hittitology (that is, the study of the Sumerians and Hittites) and Byzantine studies with Sumerologist Jana Matuszak and Hittitologist Petra Goedegebuure. It’s striking to hear the discussion coming from fields even more endangered than Classics writ-large, but I think it is a really useful discussion, touching on how fragile small fields can be in an environment where higher education is shrinking where it isn’t collapsing. Critically, it is important to recognize that these fields are passing down key skills – like language skills in dead languages – which only a very small number of people have, that have to be continuously trained and preserved, or we’ll largely lose them (again). As a result, disruptions to these small fields can threaten to sever that thread of knowledge, leaving a poorer, less knowledgeable world.

Meanwhile in ancient military equipment news, archaeologists in Sunderland in England have found a deposit of some eight hundred Roman whetstones. The site has a large formation of sandstone, a good stone to use for whetstones and seems to have been a local production center, quarried on the north bank and then processed on the south bank. The 800 or so stones we have are likely production ‘rejects’ – not quite the right size, shape or consistency – and so were dumped. Discussions on the site have focused on the potential use of whetstones by the Roman army – Roman soldiers will have needed to sharpen their swords – but I think underplay the potential of whetstones as a ‘consumer good’ in an agrarian society where every farming household would need to keep plows, knives and sickles sharp too.

For this week’s book recommendation, I have a real gem of a recent book, O. Rees, The Far Edges of the Known World: Life Beyond the Borders of Ancient Civilization (2025).⁵ The book’s theme is there in the title: it takes as its focus not the usual centers of our perspectives on antiquity (mainland Greece and Roman Italy) but rather the ‘peripheries.’ But the delight of the book is in part that it centers these peripheries, treats them as the ‘main characters’ in their own stories, as they must have felt to the people who lived there at that time. These places exist on the edges of imperial power or cultural hegemony but that doesn’t mean they were ‘rough’ places – most of the places Rees takes us are urban, even cosmopolitan in nature, existing as they often did at the intersection of different cultures and empires. And of course these places at the ‘edge of the world’ (but the center of their own) are every bit as much a part of antiquity as the streets of Rome or the acropolis of Athens.

The book is structured into four sections each with a slightly different defined ‘core’ to which we shall find a periphery: the first section focused on the peripheries of Egypt (from pre-history through the bronze age), the second on the edges of the Greek world, the third on the edges of the Roman world and the fourth finally reaching far beyond the broader Mediterranean to the very edges of the world that our classical cultures even knew existed. Each section is then broken into three or four chapters, with each chapter picking a single place well beyond that ‘core.’ Rees takes us to a wide variety of places, some of which (Hadrian’s Wall, for instance) may feel familiar but many of which (Lake Turkana, Olbia, Naucratis, Volubilis, Aksum) will come as a delightful surprise to most readers.

What I like so much about this approach is that it treats each of these sites as the main characters of their own stories, through the evidence we have for them. That is often mediated through the great empires or hegemonic cultures (because that’s where our evidence is from) but it never becomes a story about the hegemons – it is a story about these places. And the reader quickly realizes that while to the Egyptians or Greeks or Romans these places must have seemed distant and ‘out of the way,’ they were at the centers of their own interconnected worlds. And Rees succeeds in writing carefully but evocatively about these places, with wonderful anecdotes grounded in archaeology or source testimony, like the long-distance trade contacts of Megiddo coming through from the banana proteins found in the remains of someone’s teeth or the striking moment where the Greek colony of Olbia – today in Ukraine – under siege saves itself by expanding citizenship to its resident foreigners and slaves to have the strength to resist attack.

The book is clearly written for a public audience, but is carefully footnoted for those who want more depth, so while it is a well-written and often pleasantly breezy read, it is also a serious work of scholarship. It also have a number of wonderful full-color plates that add some – you’ll have to pardon me – color to its descriptions. Alongside this, the book has some of the most consistently useful and helpful maps I’ve encountered in such a work, with each chapter featuring at least one (some several!) maps helping the reader situate where they are in relation to the rest of the ancient world. And I do want to stress, even I knew relatively little of many of these places prior to reading. So this is a book that is going to delight anyone interested in the ancient world but even if you know quite a lot about antiquity, you will find things here to expand your horizons.

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https://acoup.blog/?p=33400