Progress

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Martin - the impression I get from most surviving Roman texts, though, is not one of 'progress' being a motor of society. The Empire always had to contend with the notion that the Republic (particularly when ppl couldnt remember the Republic) was better/fairer/juster. Tacitus (I think - maybe Livy) is big on how everything was grebt when he was a lad but now the youth are out of control and morals are declining. There is certainly no sense - apart from in ultra- political texts like Imperial inscriptions - of "now is the best time to be alive", let alone "in 100 years it will be even better", which are the basic ideas of a 'progressive' interpretation.

Of course progressive narratives have existed. I was thinking about The War Of The Worlds yesterday - one reason it and other disaster-stories were so popular is that to the educated Late Victorian mindset there was no way other than a science-fictional catastrophe that the march of progress could be halted.

I wouldn't argue with you on that, Tom, because you certainly know more about it than me, but I have gathered the impression from various texts that the Romans had a sense of being the natural and noble successors of the great Greek civilisation they saw wither: it's not so much a narrative of continuing progress as a construction of themselves as the peak of a kind of evolution (obviously not a concept that then existed). But as now, there would be competing narratives, and as a good Postmodernist I decline to privilege any particular one. My point was that I think we are deluding ourselves by trying to turn anything as messy and confused and irregular as the history of societies into anything resembling a narrative of either decline or progress.

tom and martin have either of you read EMPIRE by michael hardt and antonio negri? i am 3/4s of the way thruogh it and i think it is TERRIFIC despite occasional walks through fields of pomo buzzwords which i HATE and ph34r (oh no!! deterritorialization!! OH NO!!)

The first book I ever read where I thought (for more than a page at a time): this is in the same space politically as me.... k-blimey-o!!

I've not read that. Has it made it to remaindered bookshops yet, because I almost never buy full-price new books? (Yesterday I bought a complete collection of Sophocles' plays (7) for £1.99: I am not interested in anything that is less good value than that.) I'll try to remember to seek it out at a library (East Ham is a bit rub, but UCL might have it.)

In the case of Rome, having Goths, Vandals and whatnot harrying at/steadily eroding their frontiers surely didn't encourage a 'narrative' of progress. Having said that, Mark S will probably pop up shortly and tell me that there were no such thing as Barbarians.

b-b-but the barbarians are on TV on channel 4 as we speak, so they must exist!! (except it's on monday not tonight)

i think the romans had stopped writing histories of themselves by the time the goths and vandals swept into town: earlier barbarians were not just part of the narrative, but proof of the progress (one of them even got quoted as saying THEY MAKE A DESOLATION AND CALL IT PEACE, which is one of the all-time great critiques of the concept of imperialism-as-progress)