Bret Devereaux

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/?

Of course we build on each other's evidence and arguments. The historian's study is informed by the archaeologist's fresh evidence and goes in to inform the philologist's understanding of their text's context (and vice versa, not a one-directional flow). 11/?

At the same time, my research uses zoological evidence, which does not make me a biologist or a zoologist, just like being a material culture historian doesn't make me an archaeologist. And I think that is a valid distinction to make. 12/?

If I may offer an analogy, the hastatus, the triarius, the veles and the eques are all on the same team, relying on each other, but that doesn't mean they all do the same thing or that there are no differences between them. 13/?

In terms of the main point, I want to make clear that I think the world of @AncientWorldMag is very important and valuable. Classics - at least in the USA - is in trouble in the long run; embattled departments, disappearing funding, falling enrollments. 14/?

And while there are all sorts of Classicists doing that work, it seemed to me that, despite being a fairly small slice - in the USA at least - of 'Classics,' ancient historians tended to have outsized presence in public outreach. And I wondered why. That's all.