Next semester I will wander into the world of the unknown, teaching a class in a subject that has only tenuous connections with my dissertation topic, in that vaunted and dreaded series of classes known as Western Civilization. I am teaching the first third of this metanarrative, Ancient Civilization: some Sumeria, Egypt, formative Judaism followed by healthy doses of Greek democracy, Roman imperialism, barbarian invasions and Christian theology, hopefully reaching the point when I can drop the curtain on the western empire. Luckily I am not new to teaching Western Civ, and some of the problems are familiar through my topic (the central question to Rhenish history, no matter the period, is what is the boundary between civilizations and what does it mean.)

My biggest problem has been finding the books for the class. There are very few semester-long courses that only deal with the ancient world, so there are few textbooks for that period. Most series for Western Civ divide between the pre-modern and the modern (either 1500, 1600 or 1800). A few stop before the Renaissance. I kept asking myself how I could force students to purchase a 500-600 page book, of which they would read half, for $70. I also thought about assigning more advanced books that were actually less expensive. However, I was warned by the department head at “Higher Education U” that most students were business-minded, and although they are eager to learn, they are not attuned to the humanities. Ultimately, I found a textbook that I like.

The primary sources posed a different problem. The internet has become a vast source for public domain texts. Why should I ask them to buy a specific book when I can refer the students to something like the History Sourcebook? (Personally I would not purchase a “reader” if I could.) Most readings will appear on-line in some form or other: a little Gilgamish, Egyptian hymns, Aristotle’s writings on politics, etc.

However, I felt that I must order specific texts so that they would appear to be more important than others. Antigone is a wonderful artifact from the Peloponnesian War that deals with virtue with respect to the obligations of the citizen to the (city-)state. Tacitus’ The Germans is a personal favorite of mine (“They made a desert and called it peace” is an aphorism that I use too often). Tacitus, more than other Roman historians, examined the mission of civilization with respect to geography, pushing over the Danube into what we would currently call Europe and confronting the differences between culture and civilization. I am waffling on a late inclusion of Augsutine’s City of God as a transition from the Roman world to the medieval. I also considered ordering copies of the Bible, but I found it hypocritical for a Yid to chose between different translations of the New Testament.

So how to teach Ancient Civ? As much as historians criticize the equation of Europe with Rome, Athens, Egypt (what Braudel would see as the Mediterranean World), I cannot ignore that civilization evolved to order, control, and assimilate what we now see as a continent. Moreover, the expansion of civilization acquired a clear orientation toward the north. If the center of Western Civilization would remain in the Mediterranean for another millennium, its frontiers were in Gaul, Britain, Germany, Bohemia, eventually reaching points above Baltic Sea and across to frozen islands in the Atlantic. And even beyond the fall of the empire a “Roman framework” persisted to understand the relationship between political and ecclesiastical entities. Even the notion of a “Roman Empire” enlightened German politics in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and it has been revived in order to understand European unification and the Christian contribution to Europe.