What’s the point of a manual if super-fast search engines answer almost every question within seconds? Hartwin Brandt’s history of the Roman Empire shows that syntheses between book covers are not obsolete in the 21st century.
The past is not dead, it is not even past: fragment of a colossal statue of Emperor Constantine from the 4th century AD.
How do I get reliable information in the age of fake news and digital disinformation? Many now trust the algorithms of the search engines on the global web or look them up in the “free internet encyclopedia” Wikipedia. Others rely on media-savvy experts who spread their competing insights across all channels. The Covid 19 pandemic has shown once again that their statements are not necessarily the ultimate wisdom. Some contemporaries therefore stay in their chat group, where everyone shares one and the same worldview.
The democratization of the knowledge culture, which is based on the constant availability of information in the digital present, is accompanied by the fragmentation and relativization of knowledge stocks, which even specialists are now finding difficult to grasp. As a result, the generally or at least widely binding doctrine that reflects the state of research is becoming increasingly difficult to identify. Not only in the church, but also in science, the number of heretics is constantly increasing – not always to the benefit of mankind.
The problem of reflecting on the state of science and codifying the prevailing opinion is only new in its radical nature, but not in principle. A solution was found in the 19th century: the handbook. At that time, the rapid expansion of the universities led to a diversification of disciplines. The polymath gave way to the specialist, or as Theodor Mommsen put it succinctly: the master had become a journeyman. The constant increase in knowledge and the change in “doctrinal opinions” were documented in handbooks that were in demand far beyond the university environment. So many publishers opted for this new medium, which played an important role in the exchange process between science and the interested public.
The science that no longer exists
The scientific and – from the publisher’s perspective – economic success of the manuals can be explained by their conception: They reliably processed specialized knowledge for use at universities and schools. By structuring the material and standardizing the content, the handbooks also changed knowledge itself and made a significant contribution to the renewal of the individual sciences.
One of the most successful humanities handbooks was the “Handbook of Classical Antiquities”, which the Munich publisher C. H. Beck has been publishing since 1885. There was also a need to organize the stocks of knowledge in classical studies. At the same time, in the age of a multi-segmented scientific system, the handbook maintained the fiction of a science of classical antiquity that encompassed all individual disciplines. The name said it all, although a glance at the edition schedule showed that this classic study of ancient history had long since ceased to exist.
It was only logical that after the First World War, the Munich classical historian Walter Otto, who had taken on the task of editing, renamed the series the “Handbook of Archeology”. Otto represented a universal historical perspective and regarded the ancient Near East as an integral part of the ancient world. He calculated the size of the handbook at 55 volumes in 12 sections, which should also open up new areas such as legal history and Byzantine studies. This goal proved to be too ambitious, and the handbook remained unfinished. Otto and his successors found it increasingly difficult to find authors who could produce syntheses within a reasonable period of time.
Not one alone anymore
The revision of already existing volumes was tedious. The new edition of the “Roman History” is symptomatic. The narrow outline, the first edition of which was published in 1889 and the fifth edition of which came out in 1922, had to be renewed after the Second World War. Important ancient historians were asked to take on the task. Everyone waved him off, so that the Munich ancient historian Hermann Bengtson, who had written a conventional but reliable history of Greece from the beginnings to the Roman Empire for the handbook in 1950, took over this volume himself.
In 1967 the first edition of his “Roman History” was published. The work was not well received by critics. The author was rightly accused of having little understanding of the history of the Roman Republic and the Imperial Era. There was a lack of sovereign mastery of the material and in-depth knowledge of research. Moses Finley, the famous ancient historian at Cambridge, is said to have been so dismayed after reading the work that he doubted progress in ancient world historiography.
Even then, the volume raised the question of whether the format was still up to date. At the beginning of the 1980s, the publishing house was looking for solutions to get the former flagship of German classical studies, which at the time seemed quite shabby, back on course. No longer should one alone be at the top. The publishing house used two editors: the Freiburg ancient historian Hans-Joachim Gehrke and his Greek colleague Bernhard Zimmermann.
Teamwork
Then they said goodbye to the idea of an all-round renewal. Instead, individual volumes were identified that urgently needed to be edited. However, the progressive differentiation of classical studies made it necessary to conceive new volumes and split up existing volumes. Ultimately, younger scientists should be won who were willing to work continuously on a manual volume, even if such a publication could hardly achieve public success.
A highlight of the reorganized series was the newly conceived «Handbook of Latin Literature», which was planned as a Franco-German joint venture. The fifth volume, published in 1989 by the brilliant Constance philologist Reinhart Herzog, put research into Latin literature of late antiquity on a new basis. The literary-historical volumes in the “Handbuch der Altentumswissenschaft” give the lie to everyone who believes that the state of research cannot be captured between two book covers. This shows that teamwork can lead to success in such projects. But over the course of its history, what was originally intended to popularize knowledge has become a learned showpiece of science.
The handbooks, which canonize knowledge in constant change, are by no means obsolete in the historically oriented sciences. But do we still need the single volume written by an author? Who can be expected to do the hard, self-sacrificing work on a manual? Isn’t it more appealing to write introductions, spread flashes of inspiration and celebrate anniversaries?
Certainly through three centuries
The new volume of the handbook, which the Bamberg ancient historian Hartwin Brandt has presented about the Roman Empire from Octavian to Diocletian, proves that a single author, based on his scientific competence and intellectual discipline, is still able to make the necessary selections to create a broad present the subject coherently without getting bogged down in details. The failed handbook on Roman history that Bengtson released to the public in the 1960s has thus been replaced, at least for the imperial period.
Brandt surveys the ancient tradition as confidently as the research literature and guides the reader safely through three centuries. But unlike his predecessor, he convincingly structures the immense material through his focus on imperial governmental practices, monarchical communication and representation, and imperial strategies for gaining acceptance for their rule.
Such a handbook still offers the most reliable information about the current state of research, not only for colleagues in the field, but also for readers with an interest in history. Even in the age of Google, the handbook has a future because it overcomes the reductionism of individual scientific considerations, the subjectivism of ideological assumptions and the relativism of presentist interpretations.
Hartwin Brandt: The Imperial Era. Roman History from Octavian to Diocletian. (Handbook of Archaeology. C.-H.-Beck-Verlag, Munich 2022. 707 pages Fr. 136.–.