Empires in Collision in Late Antiquity

Foreword

Foreword The lectures that follow were delivered by Professor Glen W. Bowersock, Professor Emeritus of Ancient History at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, as the 2011 Jerusalem Lectures in History in Memory of Menahem Stern. Over the last fifteen series of these Jerusalem lectures we, the audience in Jerusalem and then the readers of the published versions, have traveled far and wide in European and Eastern History. By design, only a few of the lecturers and their topics have been close to the issues that were the heart of Professor Stern’s own scholarship. With this year’s lectures, however, we return to a topic closer to Stern’s major contributions . Many of the ancient authors who figure prominently in Bowersock’s scholarship also have a place in Stern’s collection of Greek and Latin Authors on Jews and Judaism, with the Emperor Julian the most prominent among many examples. I would like to divide my introductory remarks to these lectures into three sections: (1) first a very viii | Foreword brief summary of Professor Bowersock’s scholarly career, next (2) a longer discussion of some of his major contributions, and then, finally (3) a few words intended to set the stage for the pages that follow, in which Bowersock will speak for himself. scholarly career Bowersock, as already noted, returned to Jerusalem, as Professor Emeritus of Ancient History at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, having been an active faculty member there from 1980 to 2006. The Stern lectureship is only one in a long series of distinguished academic responsibilities and invitations, which include the Jerome Lectures at Michigan and the Sather Lectures at Berkeley, to mention two of the most widely known examples, lectureships that have also yielded two of Bowersock ’s most innovative and original books, to which I will refer below. contribution In preparing this brief introduction, I read and reread any number of Bowersock’s books. While doing that, I kept being reminded of a statement of the most fundamental quality of the historian’s craft, as stated by Christopher Hill (1912–2003), one of the Foreword | ix great figures in the study of seventeenth-century England, active in the previous century. In one of his last books, The English Bible in the SeventeenthCentury Revolution (1993), p. 437, Hill wrote: “I remember being struck when I read, at an impressionable age, T. S. Eliot on the art of the poet. ‘A poet’s mind . . . is constantly amalgamating disparate experience. The ordinary man . . . falls in love, or reads Spinoza, and these two experiences have nothing to do with each other, or with the noise of the typewriter or the smell of the cooking: in the mind of the poet these experiences are always forming new wholes.’ . . . Good—imaginative—history is akin to retrospective poetry. It is about life as lived—as much of it as we can recapture.” Forming new wholes out of all sorts of seemingly disparate and endless varieties of evidence, in order to get the feel of how people lived in the past and in what ways their sensitivities differed from ours, Hill suggested, was the essence of the historian’s labors. And doing that successfully, at the highest possible level, Hill argued, required extra-ordinary skills, beginning with the widest sort of knowledge of every possible kind of relevant source. If that were not challenge enough, the historian also needed to be blessed with the touch of the poet, which would bring this information together into new wholes. My insight into Bowersock, based on Hill-Eliot, x | Foreword was then confirmed by the title of the collection of essays issued in the aftermath of the conference held to honor Bowersock’s retirement from the Institute for Advanced Study in 2006—T. Corey Brennan and Harriet I. Flower (eds.), East & West: Papers in Ancient History Presented to Glen W. Bowersock (2008)—and then especially by its introductory chapter by Aldo Schiavone. Schiavone borrowed the title of his contribution to the volume from E. M. Forster’s Howard’s End, calling it “Only Connect.” Indeed, as Schiavone elaborated, and I am happy to attest personally, Bowersock is the master of connecting scholars from all over the world with each other and with their work. As Schiavone noted, Bowersock has been an authoritative and prestigious gobetween , to whom we have been able to turn and whose help has often been crucial. But...