I write this book to convince you of the importance of studying ancient Greek history. I argue that Greek antiquity was exceptional and consequential. It was contingent – it did not have to be the way it was. And it was decisive, helping to shape what followed.

The contio was vital to the political conversation between the senate and people, creating a shared political space. Its success was not so much rooted in the institutional framework but in the contiones’ ability to connect with the audience’s lived experience. In particular, the nobility’s leadership was found acceptable because it was portrayed as beneficial to all; aristocrats were able to substantiate their claims for social eminence with real assets. The capacity to create consensus by means of a set decision-making process faded over time. The second half of the article traces the growing involvement of the contio with domestic issues since the time of the Gracchi, if not earlier. While promises of spoils and profit remained a recurring theme in public speech, they appeared less and less believable. The political crisis of the late Republic was thus also a crisis in the communication between mass and elite. The consensus evaporated because its inherent benefits had fallen flat: the contio became an outlet of discontent and communications counterintuitive to the preservation of the libera res publica.

It may be useful at this point to recapitulate and/or clarify the precise scope of the two chief factors in the discussions that follow, the Greek corpus and the concept of interaction. First, the corpus. The poetry in my period extends from Archilochus at one end to Aeschylus, Pindar and Bacchylides at the other. It comprises, that is, the whole of archaic and early classical verse with the exception of the two hexametric traditions: Homer with the later hymns and epic fragments, and the Hesiodic corpus together with its distant Presocratic relatives, notably Parmenides and Empedocles. In the case of Homer, the main reason for exclusion is the peculiar difficulty of establishing standard usage for the period (’ which period?’), and the situation of the other early hexametrists is comparably problematic. Their successors are omitted only for the sake of genre consistency.

The notion of the “Greek miracle” is problematic for an obvious reason: it implies that some transcendent set of values was present in a parochial section of humanity. While anti-racist arguments serve to historicize this miracle and show how it is explained without reference to the identity of the Greeks, we should be on our guard concerning the potential racist ways in which discussion of the “Greek miracle” may be appropriated. The chapter surveys such racist appropriations and comments that we need, nevertheless, to come up with concrete accounts of the Greek miracle, precisely so as to refute such racism and also, and less obviously, we should recognize the way in which certain processes, begun with the Greeks, have a progressive political valence, the theme of the remainder of the book.

I begin with those categories that involve neutral terminology. The inherent connection of neutral terms with the ground, the likeness of an image, has been indicated already. Interaction of other kinds does not have this characteristic. It is worth stressing that, in many ways, the more apparent the connection with the ground, the less interesting the interaction. This applies especially to explicit imagery, where, of course, the ground, or part of it, is usually made explicit as a matter of predictable organisation.

Although I have regularly cited Authority and Tradition in Ancient Historiography in the twenty-five years or so since it appeared, it is only with the current reissue of the work that I have gone back and read it through from beginning to end. About ten years after it was published, I gave serious thought to writing a revised version, both to incorporate much material that I had left out of the original and also (naturally) to update it in the light of more recent scholarship. In the end, I decided not to do so, mostly from the belief that scholarship is an ongoing conversation, and that a work, once published, becomes part of that conversation, dependent on its time and context. Authority and Tradition appeared at a particular point in the discussion of the nature of Greco-Roman historiography, when the linguistic and literary turn was becoming more and more prominent, and the book reflects that moment.

Through the complex processes of generating mutual expectations and demands, senatorial consensus resulted in a wider consensus held by all. Only on four occasions did the popular assemblies ever vote in a way that went against the senate’s expectations, in 209, 200, 167, and 149 BCE. Discussion of each of these instances demonstrates that the people were not accustomed to, or interested in, following their own preferences: when rogationes were brought before the popular assemblies, they were certain to be agreed. What united the very few cases of rejection was that the people’s response was highly personalized, that is, the initial rogatio pertained to a specific individual; the response aimed at inconveniencing that person; and the senatorial elite was itself divided on the person. Egon Flaig performs a threefold analysis: he measures the strength of preferences in the peoples’ assemblies; he explores the limitations to what is labelled the institutional automatism behind the acceptance of motions; and he teases out the tactical and ritualized manoeuvres of withdrawing precarious proposals. The results are merged into a checklist that gauges the semantic and situational variety of action before the contio.

The eighth chapter pursues the urge among artists to imaginatively reconstruct the original structures that became ruins, and not just of individual buildings but of the whole ancient city. Reconstructions are to be seen in two-dimensional ‘flat’ art (paintings, drawings, watercolours, engravings, panoramas) and in three-dimensional architectural models. These occasionally inspired the erection of modern buildings which realised the reconstructed image. Modern reconstructions employ digital and computer-generated imagery. In the twentieth century three-dimensional models of ancient Rome were constructed, and imaginative visions of Rome were devised for cinema and television.

All the critical twiddle-twaddle about style and form, all this pseudo-scientific classifying and analysing of books in an imitation-botanical fashion, is mere impertinence and mostly dull jargon.’ The first thing to say is that Lawrence’s protest deserves honest respect. If one had to make an exclusive choice between that version of ’criticism’ which confines itself to the technical and the typical, and a kind that sees as its task assessment of particulars unfettered by reference, even, to types and to any sort of technical consideration: if one must choose, one must choose the latter. Comparative inarticulacy is preferable to a decreative sophistication. And the second thing to say is that we need not make such a choice. Our ability to confront literature fruitfully - to be creative - requires articulacy; and true articulacy requires the direction of the recreative mind. But must articulacy imply classification and analysis?

Inasmuch as all imagery embodies the temporary displacement of the terminology ’at issue’ in favour of ’extraneous’ terminology, all imagery embodies a deviation from the terminological norm, albeit a familiar kind of deviation. Metaphor alone has the distinction of achieving this deviation through a simultaneous departure from the normal usage of the language as a whole. This, as is well known, is precisely what the so-called ’dead’ or ’faded’ or ’linguistic’ metaphor does not do. Tree in a family tree, for instance, is a ’dead metaphor’ and involves no departure from normal usage.