More thoughts on Millar, Emperor in the Roman World (1977). THREAD Hopkins' review (rehashed in a recent essay in the TLS) wished for another book, of "new" social history. Millar's gambit was that documentality, institutions and ideology were tightly bound, and produced...
a totalizing history of the state in action, i.e. government-- through documentality (i.e. the performative nature of language), culture (the specificity of institutions, which "good" i.e. non simplificatory positivism got at), identity (constructivism) and geography...
I think the model has been influential, even when people have disagreed or critiqued the model (notably the problem of just how totalizing the picture is). In the meantime, two big developments in anc history now are 1. the return of Hopkins-style social and economic history...
with figures, estimates, etc (of the type which early Hopkins did, before he underwent a po-mo turn)-- this is a sort of history which Millar I think did not do (he shared this sense of uncertainty and unknowability with Finley)-- even though admired Rosto's Hellenistic World...
and 2. New Institutionalism (like @ProfSimonton does so well), which e.g Ober (who opposed old style political institutions so strongly) and Bresson do. I wonder what new institutionalism would do within a Millaresque frame about the Roman empire and the particular gambits...
reactivity, diffuse power, petition-and-response, eographical pull of frontiers (esp Eastern), etc. Currently living in a country on the cusp of authoritarianism, I also wonder about dysfunction and clownish brutality, rather than Millar's structural frames of analysis.
I should tag, in a friendly spirit, @GeorgyKantor and @carlosfnorena who were kind enough to follow earlier musings, and @growe0 with whom I read a lot of Fergus' work in the late 1990s. #ClassicsTwitter I guess, or #AncientHistory
I'm also pleased to say that I've made more index cards for Aramaic, fresh and hard rather than worn by sojourns in my pocket and warped by NYC humidity. This, too, was something Fergus taught: learn a bit of a Semitic language if you can (it's a long game anyway).
