Paul Veyne, a new vision of the Roman Empire

On September 29, ancient historian Paul Veyne passed away at the age of 92, after a life dedicated to providing a new vision of the ancient world and, specifically, of the Roman Empire.

His work, based on a careful reading of literary and iconographic sources and the analysis of its sociopolitical context, sought to investigate at all times the evolution of mentalities and the intersections between power and the individual and society.

She belonged to a brilliant generation after which nothing was the same for ancient history: heir to the new trends in social history and the mentalities that began in the interwar period in France, the work of Paul Veyne, with many edges and interests, put on the table a combined approach, between the socioeconomic and the individual,

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“The classics taught us to ask ourselves questions”

His life and academic trajectory helps to understand his work: he studied at the École Normale Supérieure, on the Parisian street of Ulm – a refuge for the French humanistic elite, as the ENA was for politics – and the École Pratique des Hautes Etudes.

Then he also passed through Piazza Farnese, the French School of Rome, and, after his doctoral thesis, he became a professor at the University of Aix-en-Provence to finally end up taking charge, at the Collège de France, of the chair of Roman history: a brilliant career from humble origins and after a subtle political militancy —he denounced colonial torture and had a brief stint in the PCF, which he left after the Hungarian Revolution of 1956—, which reached the top thanks to his merits, oppositions and emblematic works.

His first steps have to do with theoretical history and methodology, as seen in

(1971).

This book, which grew out of the preface to his thesis, became an original stand-alone essay on theoretical history, soon reviewed by Raymond Aron in the

, opening the door to an academic career for him.

It has been published in Spain along with another essay, from 1978 entitled

(How history is written. Foucault revolutionizes history, edited by Alianza), which vindicates Foucault's thought for a new writing of history.

Veyne's method, with an eclectic approach to the historical object that

He overcomes the impossible paradox of giving life to the past, and is clearly influenced by the social history and philosophy of history of his immediate predecessors at the École pratique and the Collège de France.

The best example may be another of his early books, which includes the bulk of his thesis,

(1976), which marks the beginning of his years of work on Roman society from the point of view of daily life, leisure or eroticism.

Along these lines, one can read essays such as

(1983),

(1991) or

(2005), and a line of works that he directed as editor or co-editor.

Specifically, I am thinking of works as emblematic as the encyclopedic

published in Seuil between 1985 and 1987 under the direction of Philippe Ariès and Georges Duby, and whose volume on antiquity was coordinated by Veyne.

In this inquiry into the private life of antiquity, the trademark of that "Foucauldian ancient history" noted earlier by Veyne is noted (in 2008 he would dedicate a book to his friend and inspirer entitled

), and another great founder of modern historical studies, Peter Brown, the father of the so-called “Late Antiquity”, also participates.

To this kind of "school" we owe a unique and very interesting approach to the intersection between power structures and daily life in ancient times (see, for example,

of the cited Brown).

Veyne also looked at late antiquity and early Christianity with books such as

(2005) and

(2007).

Other more popular books devoted to Pompeii, Palmyra or Greek mythology (

1983, on truth and relativism, myth and tradition in Greece), well embody his open way of making history.

In short, a master of antiquity has left who well symbolizes the evolution of the study of the Greek and Roman world in the last half century thanks to the influx of other disciplines, such as sociology and philosophy, into the river of history.

A generation of scholars and students have drunk from those waters.

It is an absence that we will notice a lot.

David Hernández de la Fuente is a writer and Professor of Greek Philology at the UCM.

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