Download PDF | - A History of Private Life, Volume I: From Pagan Rome to Byzantium. Ed. Paul Veyne. Trans. Arthur Goldhammer, London 1987.
695 Pages
Foreword to A History of Private Life , Georges Duby
THE IDEA of preparing a history of private life for a broad audience came originally from Michel Winock. Philippe Ariés took it up, and it was he who initiated this undertaking. The work that we have done, with him for a number of years and then, sadly mourning his premature death, without him, is dedicated to the memory of this generous historian, who pursued his fresh and penetrating insights wherever they carried him. The boldness of his work is well-known: he was the first to illuminate what had seemed impenetrable reaches of . modern history, opening new pathways for research and inviting other pioneers to follow him in the investigation of childhood, family life, and death, in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe. That we have been able to finish this work at all we owe to Ariés’s enthusiasm— and to his boldness, wonderfully unfettered by academic routine. Without these qualities of his we might have lost heart, but guided by his judicious counsel, freely offered at planning meetings, at our medievalists’ colloquium at Sénanque in September 1981, and at the final stop on his scientific itinerary, a colloquium that he himself chaired in Berlin, we were able to carry on.
Our project was fraught with peril. The ground we hoped to explore was untouched. No one_had sifted through or even identified useful source materials, which at first glance seemed abundant but scattered. We had to clear away the brush, stake our claim, and, like archaeologists approaching a site known to contain riches too great to be systematically explored, settle for excavating a few preliminary trenches. We took our bearings without deluding ourselves into thinking that the time was ripe for a synthetic overview. Obliged to feel our way as we went, we decided from the outset that we would present our readers with a program of research rather than a finished summary. The five parts of this book ask many more questions than they answer. We hope that they will arouse curiosity and encourage other researchers. to continue our work, to explore new ground, and to dig deep where we have only scratched the surface.
We faced another, less obvious but more troublesome problem. We had decided that our research should cover all of Western history and that it should emphasize the longue durée. To a period of more than two millennia and to all of Europe, with its diversity of regional ways and customs, we would therefore be applying a concept—that of personal life—that had come into common use in certain parts of Europe only quite recently, in the nineteenth century. How should we go about writing the prehistory of such a concept? How should we define the realities that it subsumed over the ages? We needed to circumscribe the topic precisely in order to avoid wandering off into yet another investigation of “daily life.” When it came to discussing the history of residential dwellings, for example, we hoped to avoid using bedrooms and beds as a springboard for speculation about the history of individualism, or worse, of intimacy.
We started from the obvious fact that at all times and in all places a clear, commonsensical distinction has been made between the public— that which is open to the community and subject to the authority of its magistrates—and the private. In other words, a clearly defined realm is set aside for that part of existence for which every language has a word equivalent to “private,” a zone of immunity to which we may fall back or retreat, a place where we may set aside arms and armor needed in the public place, relax, take our ease, and lie about unshielded by the ostentatious carapace worn for protection in the outside world. This is the place where the family thrives, the realm of domesticity; it is also a realm of secrecy. The private realm contains our most precious possessions, which belong only to ourselves, which concern nobody else, and which may not be divulged or shown because they are so at odds with those appearances that honor demands be kept up in public.
An indoor business, a matter of events that take place behind closed doors and under lock and key, private life might seem to be walled off from prying eyes. But, on either side of that “wall,” whose integrity the bourgeois of the nineteenth century so vigorously defended, battles constantly rage. Private individuals must use what power they have to fend off the encroachment of the public authorities on their domain. And inside that domain the desire for independence must be contained within bounds, for every private dwelling shelters a group, a complex social organism, within which inequalities and contradictions present in the larger society are brought to a head. Here the clash between male and female power is fiercer than it is outside, the old and the young are locked in struggle, and overbearing masters must cope with impudent servants.
Since the Middle Ages, the tendency of our cultural development has been to sharpen this conflict. As the state grew stronger, its intrusions became more aggressive and invasive, while the launching of new economic initiatives, the declining importance of collective rituals, and the internalization of religious attitudes tended to promote and liberate the individual and increase the importance of other social centers outside the family and the home, making private life more diverse. Starting in cities and towns, the private realm came more and more to be divided into three distinct parts: the home, to which feminine existence remained confined; private places of business, such as the workshop, the commercial shop, the office, and the factory; and places for private gathering and relaxation, such as the café or club.
The aim of the volumes in this series is to make visible the changes, some rapid, others quite slow, that affected the nature and the idea of private life. For the very quality of private life was subject to constant transformation. At each stage, “some of its features originated in the very distant past,” as Philippe Ariés noted in one of the working documents he left us. Other features, “of more recent origin, are destined to evolve, either by undergoing further development or by having their evolution cut short or by changing to the point of becoming unrecognizable.” Once made aware of the inextricable connections between continuity and innovation, the reader may feel less disoriented by ongoing changes, whose accelerating pace may at times seem troubling. Space for private sociability outside the home and the workplace, for example, may be disappearing. And the distinction between masculine and feminine, which history shows to have been strongly rooted in the distinction between the outside and the inside, the public and the private, is rapidly becoming a thing of the past. There is, I think, an urgent need to protect the essence of individuality from headlong technological progress. For unless we are careful, individual men and women may soon be reduced to little more than numbers in some immense and terrifying data bank.
Introduction , Paul Veyne
ROM Caesar and Augustus to Charlemagne and even the accession of the Comnenus dynasty in Constantinople, this book spans eight and a half centuries of private life. There are, however, major gaps in what is covered—deliberate gaps. An exhaustive inventory would have held little appeal for the cultivated reader. Too many centuries are known to us from sources so impoverished as to be lifeless. The fabric of this millennium is full of holes. It is an oversized and tattered greatcoat, which we felt would prove more serviceable if we cut it up into pieces of sensible size with some life still left in them.
One piece covers the Roman Empire in pagan times. The story is told in sufficient detail to bring out the dramatic contrast with Christianization. We are grateful to that fine historian Peter Brown for having kindly consented to pour the acid that is Christianity on our Roman reagent. What emerges is a diptych that tells a dramatic story: that of the transition from “civic man” to “inward man.”
Another segment deals with the physical setting of private life. We look at housing in both pagan and Christian antiquity in great detail, not so much at its material aspects as at its functions, its art, and its life. We feel that this part of our work breaks new ground and hope that readers will agree that the considerable amount of space we have devoted to it is justified. We also felt the need to satisfy the public’s widespread interest in archaeology. It is common nowadays to see large numbers of tourists, guidebooks in hand, flocking every summer to the sites of excavations. But guidebooks do not tell all: they cannot teach us how to see, how to interpret scant remains, how to rebuild in our minds the walls, floors, and roofs of a crumbled dwelling, or how to imagine the people who once lived there, to think about what they did and how they lived, whether in isolation or intimacy.
The last two sections cover the early Middle Ages in the West and in the Byzantine East. In the fifth century a.p., the Roman Empire lost its western provinces, from which various barbarian peoples carved their kingdoms. Reduced to its eastern half, the Roman Empire endured. Byzantine civilization perpetuated Roman civilization, which was gradually transformed by the passage of time. Two portraits, in the style of the “new history,” depict the contrast between life in the Merovingian and Carolingian West and life in the Byzantine Empire under the Macedonian dynasty.
Given our avowed aims, the reader has every right to ask two questions: Why begin with the Romans? Why not the Greeks?
Why the Romans? Because their civilization is supposed to be the basis of our own? I am not convinced of that: Christianity, technology, and the rights of man are far more important than anything the Romans have left us. Nor am I quite sure what purpose the notion of a “basis of civilization” might serve, except to justify certain opinions about politics or pedagogy. In any case, historians have better things to do than to perpetuate the genealogical fantasies of parvenus. History is a journey into otherness. Surely it has as much right to help us overcome our limitations as to make us feel at home with them. The Romans were very different from us—ano less exotic than the Indians of North America or the Japanese. That is one reason for beginning with them: to bring out the contrast, not to sketch the future of Western Europe in embryo. The Roman “family,” to take just one example, has little in common with its legendary image or with what we would call a family.
Well, then, why not the Greeks? Because the Greeks are in Rome, are the essence of Rome. The Roman Empire is Hellenistic civilization brutally manhandled by a state apparatus of Italian origin. The civilization, culture, literature, art, and even religion of Rome came almost entirely from the Greeks, over a half-millennium of acculturation. From its inception, Rome, a powerful Etruscan city, was no less Hellenized than the other cities of Etruria. If the upper reaches of the state apparatus, the Emperor and the Senate, remained largely untouched by Hellenism (such was the Roman will to power), the second institutional level, that of municipal life, was entirely Greek. (The Roman Empire was like a body whose cells were thousands of autonomous cities.) Life in a city in the Latin West in the second century B.c. was identical to life in a city in the eastern half of the Empire. And for the most part it was in this municipal setting, completely Hellenized, that private life unfolded.
At the time our story begins, a universal civilization (universal for that time, at any rate) spanned the territory from Gibraltar to the Indus: Hellenistic civilization. The Romans, a marginal people managed to conquer this territory and complete their own Hellenization. Their purpose was to share in a civilization that they experienced not as alien or Greek but as civilization itself, the Greeks being merely the first to possess it. The Romans were determined not to leave a monopoly of that civilization to the Greeks. Rome adopted as its own the culture of another nation, Greece. The will to power of the Roman rulers was so great that they had no fear of “losing their national identity.” Thus, this volume begins by describing private life in the Empire that is called Roman but might just as well be called Hellenic. Such is the basis of our history: an old, abolished empire.
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