This slim and attractive Festschrift for Fergus Millar contains nine essays of varying but generally high quality, five in French and four in English, originally delivered at a colloquium in Lille on 24–6 June 2010, shortly after Fergus Millar was knighted and immediately before his 75th birthday. The aim was to present a critical survey and an appreciation of his life's work. The volume follows the divisions of his scripta varia: (a) ‘The Roman Republic and the Augustan Revolution’ (F. Hurlet and F. Pina Polo); (b) ‘Government, Society and Culture in the Roman Empire’ (J. Ma, P. Eich and C. Ando); (c) ‘The Greek World, the Jews and the East’ (P. Blaudeau and J.-B. Yon). This reader finds the papers by Hurlet, Eich and Yon more stimulating than the others. The third section is preceded by a report by Millar on his current project and followed by a comprehensive bibliography.
The introductory essay by B. introduces speakers and themes, selected to cover the range of Millar's research. He highlights Millar's distinctive ‘method’ of approaching Roman history from sources (primarily Greek) without a priori conceptions or theoretical models, characterised by rigorous interrogation of documents (literary, epigraphic, papyrological, juridical and archaeological), and deployed in studies of the functioning of the Roman imperial power. Millar is a scholar who ‘thinks outside the box’, refusing to be confined by any traditional boundaries, especially those of ideologies. But his approach has limitations. It is not concerned, as he acknowledges, with the physical bases of human life, or economic history, or state finance, nor yet with pagan religion, magic, women's studies, gender studies, or the history of medicine. It rests on the interrogation of traditional or ‘old fashioned’ sources, essentially words, which gives his writing a unique air (noted by Yon p. 155). Nevertheless he aims to take into account all the cultures and languages of antiquity, a point which underlines how the Classical languages have confined traditional historical studies. B. also discusses the stages of Millar's career, noting the influence of ‘accidental factors’ and the importance of his study of Roman–Jewish relations, and makes a thoughtful examination of the influence of Ronald Syme.
Hurlet is concerned with the provocative thesis Millar developed in a series of JRS articles, given final shape in The Crowd in Rome in the Late Republic, that constitutionally the Republic was ‘a direct democracy’, and that contiones provided a theatre for ‘democratic’ activity. This provoked an indignant reaction, especially from German scholars led by K.-J. Hölkeskamp. Hurlet endorses many of their criticisms, and offers a sketch of how opposing positions might be reconciled. Among his points: Millar's notorious ‘Polybius was right’ (of Polyb. 6.11.18) was valid only with drastic qualification. He would have done better to have assessed the Roman constitution and the involvement of the people in ritual, not juridical terms. However the idea that political instability encouraged more active popular participation was sound. Circumstances did not make the populus Romanus into an autonomous political actor, but they did make it a political force and a significant pressure group. Millar was right to insist that at the end of the Republic the crowd had become a political actor, and not just the organ of a broken consensus. It is in this area that his contribution has been most fruitful.
Pina Polo accepts Hurlet's conclusions, and adds that it was Millar who drew attention to the importance of the contiones: they provided a theatre for the ambitious politician to advertise himself. ‘The image of an orator speaking from a tribunal to all who had decided to gather round him to listen to his words is certainly consubstantial with the Roman Republic’ (p. 58).
The second group of papers springs from the epoch-making The Emperor in the Roman World. The essay by J. Ma is the first of three about the nature of the ancient state, and Millar's revolutionary view of Roman imperial government as an entity relatively ‘passive and inert’ in its relations with the provinces (perhaps already under the Triumvirate: B., p. 11). Ma extends the debate to other examples of the ancient state, suggesting that Millar's thesis was paralleled in Bikerman's Institutions des Séleucides.
In P. Eich's essay, Millar's ‘petition-and-response model’ for administrative communication is appraised as a sociological model, in spite of Millar's explicit rejection of theoretical frameworks and all comparisons outside the study of the Roman Empire. Eich claims this model as ‘the most influential part of his work’ (p. 85): it is not without fault, but superior to all other models on offer in coherence and potential. After invoking comparisons with early modern Europe and traditional societies generally, he argues that elements of a proto-bureaucracy had emerged, not just in the fourth century, but by the commencement of the third.
C. Ando points to a blind spot in Millar's use of Greek sources: what they did not see, he does not see. Public political institutions, leges iura iudicia suffragia, are distinctively Roman, and Greeks did not recognise them. Far from lacking a conscious policy for handling subject communities, he claims, Rome was deliberately remodelling, shifting population and imposing institutions, at least in the West. Rome had no aim beyond stability, but it was achieved through Roman institutions, not merely by leaving alone.
The third section deals with Millar's works in progress and the renewal of his ideas. Millar describes his project for a study of the culture and society of the Roman East up to the Moslem conquest, proposing the use of conciliar texts, a massive underused resource, and a wide range of sources in a multiplicity of languages. Stress is laid on Syriac and Aramaic and other language sources alongside Greek, and there is pointed interest in the interaction (or non-interaction) between Greek/Syriac Christianity and rabbinic Judaism, and the contribution of Christianity and Judaism to the emergence of Islam. (Not discussed here is his thesis of a second ‘Roman revolution’ under Constantine.)
P. Blaudeau draws attention to Millar's contribution to scholarship in A Greek Roman Empire, by making conciliar sources more accessible, and pays tribute to his qualities as a friend and a fellow scholar.
Yon, concluding, strikes a sharper note. Millar's work practically stands alone in focusing on verbal evidence (manifestations verbales), in this period literature and epigraphy. His conclusions are valid, but a vital area of evidence is excluded. Millar is concerned with the official and public view, not the private, and his sources are largely Greek. He makes an artificial distinction between the Roman Near East and ‘further east’. There is another, Syrian world, of which little can be seen using his method: to him it is atomised and almost invisible. It is preferable, Yon argues, to stop seeing Greek culture and Syrian culture as mutually exclusive, since they are the result of mixture, and to accept that this was an age of multiculturalism. It is important that we pay attention to the encounter of these different traditions, and to the great variety of languages and cultures, if we are to understand the complex civilisation of this part of the world.
A review of this kind, an assessment of a life's work and of the author of a succession of books of magisterial status, is not undertaken without some sense of temerity. Blaudeau speaks for all the contributors when he describes Millar as ‘un maître dont l’étendue des connaissances n'a d’égale que l'humilité avec laquelle il avance ses propres hypothèses, ou rend homage à l'oeuvre de ses devanciers’.
