It’s a tragic reality that few school students get the opportunity to study ancient history before university. My experience of history at school is easily summarised: if it wasn’t nuclear bombs or Wall-Street crises, it was Elizabethan fire-ships, or Roundheads and Cavaliers.
That isn’t to say I didn’t enjoy these periods. Before university, I would have mainly considered myself a modern military historian interested in the American soldier’s combat experience in WW2, Korea and Vietnam. But as I now embark upon the final year of the ancient and modern history degree (AMH), I’m closer to the ancient world than I ever thought possible. Three out of my four final papers are ancient, and my thesis treks all the way back to the mysteries of 88 BCE. I now think of myself as a historian of the A, and little of the M.
That’s the beauty of AMH at Oxford: it offers those of any background and experience the brilliant opportunity to study Romans alongside Tudors, or Greeks in tandem with the Age of Empire.
But, if you've only ever studied the modern world, or you simply don’t think you’d enjoy classical studies at university, why should AMH get you excited?
I’d say it’s the chance to acquire historical skills in a plethora of settings and translate them in creative ways to the counterpart of either your beloved ancient or modern.
Thanks to the great flexibility of options AMH offers, my newfound ancient interest meant it wasn’t until the final term of my second year that I actually took a modern paper and realised the extent to which studying the ancient world improved my study of the American nation from 1776-1898.
Where modern historians can often find their copious records overwhelming, ancient historians revel in the tantalizing sparsity of their evidence pool. The constant interaction, evaluation and scrutiny of textual and material evidence, which sometimes amounts to little more than a broken sentence or an ambiguous name of a magistrate, brings out the best in any student's analytical toolbox. This ancient experience gave me the keen and wary eyes needed when ploughing through endless diary entries, newspaper articles, letters and court records that constitute such a crucial aspect of, for example, Early American studies. Having been taught to conceptualise every piece of the ancient evidence as part of a mysterious and incomplete puzzle (of which we may have two pieces we think fit together in the top right corner, but in reality are from dead centre and bottom left) was invaluable in navigating the sensitive, variegated and regionalised material of the African American slave experience or the ideologically-charged literature of Southern white planters.
More than anything, studying the ancient world alongside modern interests gives students the unique opportunity to develop a deeply personal and authoritative voice. When given an ancient reading list, the primary material can often be the same small cluster of inscriptions or texts that fully-qualified researchers have analysed for decades. To continue to pursue the ancient world in further detail, much less can be taken for granted analytically: creativity is the name of the game. That such a simple question as “who attended Roman Republican public meetings” continues to generate innovative and challenging responses based on minute re-translations or novel cross-references, demonstrates the demand for students to develop their own distinct brand of scholarly and analytical voice. Standing out is less about “finding” new evidence in an archive or a private collection, but more about convincing your tutor or peers that your interpretation of a long-pondered coin or passage offers new insight beyond that written before.
This great promotion of creativity in the classics provides endless benefits for a student engrossed in the modern. Mastering the skills of strong and assertive writing will help you emerge with greater clarity from the mass of memoirs, letters, articles and books which surround much better documented modern periods.
In my own experience, the tenacity and vigorous pursuit for creative scholarly individualism that ancient studies can foster often gave me the extra shove I needed to try something new in my America paper, even if it was criticised or needed amending after the weekly tutorial meet. Alternatively, the challenges of standing out in the often cluttered space of modern historical study can only make you more confident in pursuing that creativity and individuality so crucial to accurately understanding the ancient world. Ultimately, if you decide to be all M and little A, all A and little M, or something in between, studying AMH gives you the chance to be the best historian you can be.
Max Buckby is a third-year ancient and modern history student at Somerville College, University of Oxford. If you have any questions for Max, you can reach him at [email protected].