Progress

Catalog description

Ancient historians in the 18th and 19th centuries were often happy to talk about Greco-Roman antiquity as a time of progress, but classicists developed more and more doubts about such language in the course of the 20th century. In this seminar we discuss what we should mean by "progress" and consider the usefulness of this category for the study of history as whole. We will examine textual and archaeological evidence, focusing primarily on selected areas of Greco-Roman history (the economy, science, technology, morality ...), and look again at the debate over whether progress was reversed in late antiquity.