THE CHANGED INTELLECTUAL CONTEXT

With the publication of this volume, the Leventis conference of November 2015 at Edinburgh takes its place as the latest in a series of colloquia, events and projects that have been organised by historians of ancient Greece round various routes of outreach towards the social sciences. The Cambridge project on ‘The anatomy of cultural revolution’ was a precursor, focusing both on ‘change’ and on ‘revolution’ itself, and was followed by a conference in Dublin in July 2009 that tapped economic sociology and social theory in order to explore the use of networks as a structure or a metaphor for modelling social action. There followed two colloquia in Berlin, one in January 2010 that explored ‘Geld als Medium in der Antike’ in the light especially of the communication theories of Niklas Luhmann, and the other in June 2012 that used theories of modernity in order to study the contrast between ‘modernisation’ and ‘tradition’ in fourth-century Athens. I make no claim that this list is complete.

The Edinburgh conference was therefore following a ready-made trajectory. However, it was doing so in a radical way, since its theme and format not only challenged the conventions of the discipline of ‘Greek history’ but also required an active performative response. In consequence, those who participated in the conference, whether as speakers or as auditors, found themselves taking on an unusual and unsettling responsibility, since it posed wider and even more intractable issues than those tackled by its various precursors. Accordingly, to thank Josh Ober and Andrew Erskine as instigators and organisers of the conference, as well as the Trustees of the Leventis Foundation for their financial support, is more than a normal act of propriety on behalf of participants. It is more even than a grateful recognition that the instigators had had a good and timeous idea and had put effort and intelligence into the task of turning it into reality. It is to acknowledge that historians of ancient Greece were being asked to reconsider the intellectual foundations and procedures that have shaped their discipline for the past two hundred years, and to modify their attitudes and objectives accordingly.