ANCIENT HISTORY AND COMPARATIVE STUDIES

Abstract

Two common themes loosely connect the fourteen chapters in this collection: the relationship between rulers, elites and governments on the one hand and the general public on the other; and the formation of identity at different scales ranging from specific societal groups (such as nobilities and civic associations) to entire civilisations (insiders vs ‘barbarians’). Taken together, these contributions not only advance our understanding of historical similarities and differences, but also highlight the potential and limitations of the comparative perspectives on display. A number of chapters embrace and reinforce the (conventional) view that political power was more centralised and ‘top-down’ in early China than in Greece or Rome. The editors, in their joint overview of how ‘the people’ were conceptualised in those three systems, note the absence of the notion of citizenship from early China and the intensely paternalistic image of its rulers. Vankeerberghen, in a stimulating discussion of how aristocrats expressed their status in the Roman Republic and the Western Han Empire, observes stronger familial discontinuities in the latter case even as – unlike in the former – elite status was formally hereditary. Autocratic intervention explains this difference. Unfortunately, Vankeerberghen does not address what she considers the ‘fascinating’ question (p. 47) of whether this changed under the Roman monarchy, which would have allowed her to compare like with like (i.e. the position of nobles under a monarchy). M. Brown and Z. Zhang study how local notables were honoured – with inscriptions and statues in Roman-era Greece and with stelae in the Han Empire – by giving parallel accounts of the attributes and popularity of these types of monuments in each setting. In Greece, these artefacts were public-facing and focused on the local community, rooted as they were in the polis tradition and the ‘strength of local identity’. In Han China, by contrast, they were connected to tombs and familial commemoration, the ‘byproduct of personal networks’ that were trans-regional in nature and reflected the primacy of the empire over local relations and the ‘pull’ of its capital (pp. 85–6). C.F. Noreña stresses the same features in a comparative assessment of associations of craftspeople and merchants. Common in the Roman world, where they represented a default template for corporate identity and collective action in urban contexts, they were far less prominent in Han China, in as much as they existed at all. He identifies both genetic and structural reasons for this difference, which shaped the lived experience of urban middle strata: the deep roots of the city-state format and the ‘upward pull’ self-governance by local elites exerted on middling groups in Roman cities, and the ‘downward push’ the THE CLASSICAL REVIEW 432