Bret Devereaux

In defense of the tripartite specialty division, first off, are our professional associations, at least in the USA. The largest is the SCS, formerly the American Philological Association, followed closely by the AIA, the Archaeological Institute of America. 3/?

While the SCS changed its name, its philological focus is preserved in the name of its journal, The Transactions of the American Philological Association (TAPA). 4/?

And then of course, much smaller than the other two, there is the Association of Ancient Historians. I'd hazard nearly all AAH members are SCS or AIA members, but clearly, given the numbers, relatively few SCS or AIA members are AAH members. 5/?

Now is there crossover between those disciplines? Of course, that's why we share a big annual meeting (SCS/AIA) and often a department (Classics), though of the five universities have been at, in 3 of them, the ancient historians were actually in the history department. 6/?

I should note that conflict over if ancient historians and archaeologists should, for instance, have different philological and teaching expectations was one of the (admittedly, more minor) flash points at the (in)famous Future of the Classics panel in 2019 7/?

And in AAH 2020, @WalterScheidel returned to the topic in his (quite interesting: https://web.stanford.edu/~scheidel/Scheidel%20AAH%202020%20Keynote%20Lecture.mp4 …) keynote, openly suggesting that ancient history should intentionally unshackle itself from 'Classics' 8/?

Now to be clear, I think all of those specialties are good! And I think good classicists reach over those boundaries a lot. But I also know quite a few 'pure' philologists, whose study is centered very much on texts and language, for whom hist-context is quite secondary. 9/?

Which can be a valid way to interrogate a text, its meaning, continuing relevance, etc.! But it's also clearly different from how an ancient historian, or an archaeologist, might approach the same evidence - the questions we'd ask, the answers we'd seek. 10/?