In August 2022, American Historical Association president James H. Sweet warned that historians were increasingly viewing earlier societies through today’s political debates. The column prompted a fierce argument among historians. Some historians agreed that treating earlier societies as incomplete versions of modern ones makes their actions harder to explain. Others objected that Sweet had presented politically engaged scholarship as a problem without showing that its practitioners had neglected the evidence. Sweet later apologised for how he had presented the argument, although he stood by his concern about historical method.
At the centre of that dispute was presentism, the habit of applying present-day ideas to societies that worked differently. The danger is that a historian may treat modern categories and priorities as though they also belonged to the people being studied. An Athenian assembly can begin to sound like a miniature modern parliament. A Babylonian royal inscription becomes a statute book. A Roman writer’s account of enslavement becomes an account of the experience of enslaved people themselves. These comparisons can open useful questions, but they become unreliable when they hide what the evidence actually tells us.
Every historian brings questions shaped by the world in which they live. Present-day interests influence the records historians consult, the objects they protect and the absences they try to explain. A modern concern with citizenship may lead someone to study Athenian democracy, while a concern with coercion may lead another to investigate ancient slavery. Both questions are legitimate. The mistake comes when the conclusion is settled before the research or a modern term quietly attributes an unfamiliar institution to ancient people.
Why historians disagree about presentism
Herbert Butterfield’s The Whig Interpretation of History (1931) criticised accounts that sorted historical figures according to whether they supposedly helped or hindered the rise of modern religious and constitutional arrangements. Treating the outcome as inevitable concealed the difficult choices that people faced in their own time. The reformer was important because later generations admired the reform; the opponent was backward because later generations rejected his position. The resulting account leaves unexplained why either person made the choices they did. A 2025 reassessment of Butterfield’s argument also warns against claiming Butterfield demanded completely apolitical history: he opposed narratives with their conclusions already written.
Lynn Hunt addressed the same concern in her 2002 essay, “Against Presentism”. She observed that historians were concentrating more heavily on recent events and interpreting earlier centuries through contemporary priorities. Yet Hunt also recognised that new questions can uncover experiences that previous generations overlooked. Hunt urged historians to let contemporary curiosity generate questions while allowing the unfamiliar past to challenge their expectations.
Sweet’s 2022 column brought these disagreements back into the open. His critics, including Priya Satia, argued that the history of race, gender, slavery and empire had often advanced precisely because historians questioned older narratives shaped by the political assumptions of their own authors. Claims to stand outside politics can leave the politics of older historical interpretations untouched. Sweet feared explanations driven by present-day assumptions; his critics feared that historians might preserve the politics of earlier scholars without recognising them.
David Armitage distinguishes several meanings of presentism in “In Defense of Presentism”, published online in December 2022 and included in the 2023 volume History and Human Flourishing. Presentism can mean a narrow fixation on the recent past, the use of modern concerns to select historical questions, or a philosophical claim about what exists. Those meanings need to be distinguished. In a 2024 reassessment of the Sweet controversy, Sarah Maza describes a broad professional middle ground: questions prompted by the present are legitimate, but interpretations still have to survive scrutiny of the sources. The practical question is whether a historian’s reading of antiquity would change if the surviving evidence contradicted their expectations.
The modern meanings hidden inside ancient words
Ancient words make the danger of easy modern comparisons particularly clear. The Greek word dēmokratia is ordinarily rendered “democracy”, but an Athenian of the fourth century BCE would have recognised political arrangements very different from those of a modern electoral state. Athenian citizens could attend an assembly and vote directly on the affairs of their city. Many magistracies were assigned by lot, a method intended to distribute civic service rather than to reward the people best able to win elections. Certain posts, especially military commands, were elected because specialised competence mattered. The surviving Constitution of the Athenians, chapter 43 describes the Council of five hundred selected by lot and the assembly’s regular meetings.
That constitution also makes clear how narrowly Athens defined its political community. Women could be members of citizen families but did not vote in the assembly. Resident foreigners, known as metics, paid taxes and could play important economic roles without acquiring the political rights of citizens. Enslaved people had no political membership in that citizen community. A description of Athens as a democracy is accurate if it identifies the people who possessed the kratos, or power, and the institutions through which they exercised it. The description fails when the word “democracy” leads readers to imagine modern parties, universal adult voting, elected representatives or an enforceable bill of individual rights.
Athenian democracy developed through the struggles of a Greek city-state with institutions unlike those of today’s electoral systems. Those institutions developed amid the city-state’s own political struggles: rivalry between wealthy families, military mobilisation, imperial revenues, the claims of poorer male citizens and repeated attempts to concentrate power. In The Realness of Things Past, Greg Anderson argues that the Athenian politeia should be understood as a wider civic way of life rather than squeezed into a purely modern concept of a political system. His book’s account of Athens asks historians to recover how sacred obligations, civic membership and collective life were experienced together. Anderson’s approach is one scholarly interpretation; it does not mean that all Athenians experienced civic life in an identical way.
The Latin word pietas poses a related problem for translators. Rendering it as “piety” suggests private worship, while “duty” can suggest little more than following an instruction. Roman uses included obligations to parents and kin, gods, ancestors and the wider community, though the balance varied by author and context. The family relationships discussed in research on pietas and paternal authority show why no single English equivalent can do all the work. In some passages the clearest solution is to keep the word pietas and explain the specific obligations it describes.
Greek and Latin are only two languages in which a familiar English translation can conceal an unfamiliar idea. The Egyptian ma’at may be translated as truth, justice, order or rightness, but each English word captures only part of a concept expressed in royal ideology, ritual and the maintenance of cosmic and social order. The Sumerian me, the powers or ordinances associated with aspects of civilised life in literary texts, should not be casually equated with modern laws or technologies. Each term has to be understood through the passages and images in which it appears. An English label by itself cannot convey all those meanings.
When a royal inscription is mistaken for a modern law code
Consider Hammurabi’s black stone stele, erected by the Babylonian king in the eighteenth century BCE. Its text contains hundreds of legal formulations addressing injury, debt, family relationships, property and status. The familiar name “Code of Hammurabi” may suggest a complete modern law code, a misleading expectation for this monument. The inscription opens with an account of divine authorisation and ends with praise of the king’s justice and warnings to future rulers. The relief above the text depicts Hammurabi before Shamash, the sun god associated with justice. The legal formulations and the king’s claim to divine authority stand together on the monument.
The Louvre’s object record for stele Sb 8 supplies the material, dimensions and imagery of the basalt stele, including the figures above its text. The museum explains its legal character without equating it with a modern statute book. Pamela Barmash’s study of the laws places the composition at the intersection of royal inscription and scribal legal traditions. The formulations display detailed legal reasoning. Their use by judges in actual disputes has to be established separately through contracts and records of cases. The monument remains a major source for Babylonian law and kingship, although its text alone cannot establish the practice of every court.
The stele presents divine authority as part of Hammurabi’s claim to legitimate rule. Ancient kingship, legal authority, scribal learning and religious legitimacy were entangled. In the prologue Marduk belongs to the story of Hammurabi’s royal commission, while the figure shown above the laws is Shamash. Confusing Marduk with the god depicted in the relief erases a distinction the monument itself makes. Even “law” needs context: a scribal model, a royal statement about justice and a court’s actual decision are different kinds of evidence.
The inscription ordered by Darius I at Behistun in western Iran calls for the same scrutiny. Around the beginning of his reign in 522 BCE, Darius faced rebellions and rival claimants. In his relief and inscriptions, Darius portrayed his victories as the restoration of rightful rule. The text survives in Old Persian, Elamite and Babylonian Akkadian. The three versions and the relief are invaluable evidence, but their purpose was to defend a king’s accession, not to provide an impartial account of every opponent. The UNESCO description of Behistun explains its setting within the king’s early struggles and the languages in which it was written.
Comparing the three versions helps recover Darius’s words and their transmission, while leaving his accusations against rivals open to investigation. Calling a rival an impostor helped Darius defend his kingship, but historians must test that charge against other evidence. The monument offers evidence both for events in the early Achaemenid Empire and for the story the new king wanted subjects to accept. The lesson also applies to speeches made in our own time, though the history behind an ancient declaration must be established first.
Religion and economy did not follow our familiar divisions
Religion and government shared many institutions in classical Athens: festivals, sacrifices, offices and the civic calendar belonged to the same public life. The city funded rites for its gods, magistrates supervised ceremonies, and households maintained their own forms of worship. Dividing this life into private “religion” and public “politics” would impose boundaries that the Athenian institutions did not observe. A sacrifice might acknowledge a god, honour a civic obligation, bring a group together and distribute food. A ritual could fulfil all these functions at once.
That close connection between civic ritual and worship does not mean that Greeks had no religious beliefs. Greek texts contain arguments about divine justice, divine existence, impiety and the reliability of oracles. Dedications, sanctuaries, philosophical arguments and personal prayers all preserve different aspects of Greek religious life. Robert Parker’s Polytheism and Society at Athens examines festivals, priests, household worship and public argument together; his On Greek Religion explicitly considers the relationship between ritual and belief. Greek religious life included civic institutions and public argument as well as personal prayer and belief.
Historians have also questioned the modern categories applied to ancient economic activity. In The Ancient Economy (1973), Moses Finley argued against assuming that Greek and Roman people organised production, status and exchange according to the same institutions and incentives as modern capitalist economies. Land, citizenship, enslavement, elite standing, warfare and household ties could affect decisions alongside the price of a transaction. Finley’s work made the social honour attached to an elite Roman’s property as important a question as the revenue it produced.
Ancient people also traded in markets, negotiated prices and pursued profits. Merchants bargained; contracts specified payments; states collected taxes; loans and investments were made. The workings of markets varied across periods, and their scale remains the subject of archaeological and economic debate. A review of ancient economic models in the American Journal of Archaeology warns that a simple opposition between an “embedded” ancient economy and a “free” modern market can itself become a misleading typology. Both the claim that ancient economies operated like modern capitalist ones and the claim that they were entirely alien to markets require evidence.
Ancient slavery, moral judgment and historical explanation
Greek and Roman slavery is a particularly difficult subject for those who argue that the past must be understood entirely in its own terms. Slavery in Greek and Roman societies involved ownership of human beings, coerced labour, vulnerability to sale and separation from family. Enslaved people were forced into household work, workshops and agriculture, while some endured particularly brutal conditions in mines or on estates. The forms of coercion varied, but the denial of freedom was fundamental. A historian can condemn that loss of freedom while still investigating how ancient people experienced, justified and resisted the institution.
Ancient writers explained slavery in different ways, and some described tensions within its accepted legal status. Explaining those arguments is different from defending slavery itself. A Roman jurist excerpted in Justinian’s Digest 1.5.4 described slavery as an institution of the law of nations that subjected a person to another’s control contrary to nature. The passage shows that Roman legal writers possessed conceptual resources for recognising a tension between slavery and nature, even while Roman law sustained slavery as a legal status. The jurist’s statement shows that disagreement was conceivable in antiquity, but it was not an abolitionist programme of the modern kind.
The routes by which Greek and Roman societies enslaved people must also be distinguished. War captivity, trade, birth to an enslaved mother and other routes into servitude made Greek and Roman slavery unlike the later Atlantic system of hereditary racial slavery. These different routes into bondage shaped how the ancient institutions operated. It does not mean that ancient peoples lacked prejudices about ancestry, appearance or foreign origin, or that status differences were benign. The scholarly survey Greek and Roman Slaveries draws on literary, documentary, epigraphic and archaeological evidence to examine violence, escape and resistance across regions and periods. These sources sometimes recover the choices and resistance of people whose lives are otherwise described chiefly by their owners.
Many surviving literary descriptions of slavery came from owners, presenting another problem for historians. A legal rule describes what the authorities recognised, but it cannot tell us what happened in every household. Inscriptions recording manumission, petitions and documentary accounts can disclose transactions and strategies absent from elite narratives, though they too reflect the circumstances in which someone was able to leave a written trace. A defensible moral evaluation should be informed by these distinctions. Historical context neither excuses enslavement nor replaces moral judgment; it explains how the institution worked and what surviving traces disclose about the people subjected to it.
Whose version of antiquity survived?
Which ancient lives historians can reconstruct depends heavily on what has survived. Greek and Roman literary works were copied over centuries by people who valued particular genres and authors. Monumental inscriptions were often commissioned by rulers, cities and wealthy donors. The stone used for public monuments survives in conditions that destroy many wooden objects and textiles. A public decree may tell us about a city’s formal decision, while offering little about how its poorest residents experienced the policy. Modern choices about digging, conserving and publishing finds also influence the materials available for study.
Thucydides openly acknowledged a problem in reconstructing what people said. In History of the Peloponnesian War 1.22, he says that he investigated events carefully but could not reproduce speeches word for word, and therefore composed speeches intended to convey what was appropriate to each situation while remaining close to their general meaning. His history remains essential for understanding the war between Athens and Sparta, but the speeches are literary reconstructions. Quoting one of his speeches as the exact words spoken by Pericles would mistake a literary reconstruction for a transcript.
Herodotus requires readers to separate the Egyptians he describes from his own Greek perspective. His account of Egyptian customs in Histories 2.35–36 describes practices he regarded as inversions of Greek expectations, including gendered labour and modes of dress. Those passages reveal what a Greek author considered remarkable as well as what he learned, heard or misunderstood about Egypt. His remarks are not the same thing as an impartial survey of Egyptian society. The Metropolitan Museum’s record for a second-century CE portrait of Herodotus identifies a later Roman copy of an earlier Greek portrait type, itself evidence of the esteem in which later audiences held his literary achievement. The later portrait and his writings tell us about Herodotus’s reception and interests; neither gives an unfiltered view of life inside an Egyptian household.
Tax records, contracts, petitions, letters and lists written on papyrus bring different people and transactions from Roman Egypt into view. A marriage contract from Oxyrhynchus, dated to the late first century CE, shows how one particular legal arrangement was recorded. The document records one marriage rather than all Egyptian marriages. It nevertheless provides evidence of a transaction that differs markedly from an elite writer’s general claims about family life. A searchable corpus such as Papyri.info allows historians to compare similar documents, ask who was writing them and trace changes over time. Those documents are invaluable, although literacy, preservation and the needs of administration still affected whose experiences reached us.
Inscriptions, everyday objects, coins, buildings and burials can reveal aspects of ancient life that literary elites rarely described. A dedication by a craftsperson may name someone absent from political histories; a boundary stone may reveal where an institution claimed authority; a cemetery can disclose patterns of age, diet or treatment that an elite text never describes. Such evidence does not automatically correct every literary account. They also provide evidence for questions that literary sources were never written to answer. Where records disagree, historians first ask whether they concern the same people, place, period and circumstances.
Rome was not destined to rule the Mediterranean
Because Rome eventually controlled the Mediterranean, its rise can seem more certain in hindsight than it ever was for the people fighting its wars. Rome survived devastating defeats in the war against Hannibal, including Cannae in 216 BCE. Rome’s Italian allies came under severe pressure, new armies were raised at enormous cost, and the outcome depended on choices by Roman commanders, allied cities and Carthaginian leaders. A narrative that treats Roman victory as inevitable cannot adequately explain why these decisions mattered. The same hindsight can distort the late Republic, when participants could not know that imperial monarchy would emerge from their struggles.
Historians call this kind of hindsight-driven explanation teleology: the tendency to treat earlier events as steps toward an endpoint. It can produce a misleading narrative of steady progress or of a decline that supposedly could not be stopped. Ancient Romans themselves told histories of ancestral virtue and moral decay; those accounts are valuable evidence for Roman arguments about their society, not neutral measurements of an objectively declining civilisation. Historians must separate ancient accounts of improvement or decline from explanations supported by independent evidence.
Athenian democracy is vulnerable to the same backward-looking treatment. Its democracy survived neither without opposition nor in uninterrupted form. Oligarchic regimes displaced it in 411 and 404 BCE, and the restored democracy had its own institutions and conflicts. Later writers, including Plato, criticised democratic decision-making. A modern history that treats Athens as the first stage of an inevitable journey toward parliamentary government conceals those interruptions. This removes the very different trajectories of other Greek communities and understates the vulnerability of Athenian institutions. The history of Athenian democracy deserves attention as the history of a particular society, rather than merely the opening chapter of today’s constitutional democracies.
Thucydides analysed power, mistakes and consequences in his history of the Peloponnesian War. His selection and arrangement of events reflected his own historical judgments. Reading his account alongside inscriptions, archaeological findings and the testimony of later authors is more useful than simply calling him a modern political scientist born too early. He belonged to a world with its own assumptions about citizenship, honour, divination and the conduct of war. His account can still speak to modern questions without making its author into a contemporary political scientist.
The Parthenon sculptures and the uses of the ancient past
The Parthenon sculptures now stand at the centre of disputes over removal, ownership, legal authority and restitution. The dispute involves genuine questions about both ancient Athens and modern collecting practices. The circumstances of their removal under Lord Elgin, the authority claimed from Ottoman officials, and the subsequent acquisition by the British state require examination in their own right. The history of nineteenth-century collecting and present-day repatriation cannot by themselves establish what the sculptors meant in fifth-century BCE Athens.
Carved in the 440s BCE, the Parthenon frieze ran along the temple’s inner building, high inside its outer colonnade. The scenes are commonly linked to the Panathenaic festival honouring Athena, although specialists continue to dispute details and the overall reading. The Acropolis Museum’s frieze documentation brings together surviving blocks and historical drawings, allowing viewers to see their positions around the building. Its horsemen and participants in ritual scenes formed part of a continuous sculptural arrangement, far from the appearance of isolated pieces in a modern gallery.
The monument’s ancient meaning and its later treatment by collectors and museums can both be investigated, using different kinds of records. A museum display can help visitors study the carving while separating it from its architectural setting. Arguments for return must examine colonial power, heritage law and the consequences of earlier collections. The relevant evidence differs for each question: ancient construction accounts and the sculptural programme for the fifth-century monument, diplomatic and parliamentary records for nineteenth-century removal, and contemporary law and ethical argument for restitution. The related history of cultural ownership and repatriation has its own evidence and chronology, distinct from the fifth-century monument’s ancient significance.
The Parthenon has also been used to stand for a supposedly timeless Western civilisation. Calling the Parthenon an expression of timeless Western civilisation can erase the Athenian empire that financed much of the Acropolis building programme, the exclusionary limits of its citizenship, and the sanctuary’s long history as a Christian church and later a mosque. Across those centuries the building served more than one religious community and acquired different political meanings. No single modern identity can account for all those periods of the building’s history. A claim about the building must identify which period of its long history it concerns and what evidence supports that interpretation.
How to recognise presentism in an ancient source
Testing an argument for presentism begins by identifying exactly what the claim says and what evidence supports it. When a writer says Athenians “voted in a democracy”, the century, voting body, kind of decision and institution all need to be identified. If a translation calls a Roman official a “minister”, check whether the original office carried anything like the functions implied by the modern word. If a museum label describes a royal monument as “law”, ask whether the inscription, archaeological context or associated documents demonstrate legal application. Familiar words are useful only when they do not quietly carry an unexamined historical assumption into the explanation.
The purpose and circumstances of a document matter as much as its words. A royal victory inscription, courtroom speech, philosophical dialogue and tax receipt were produced for different audiences and purposes. Each can be reliable for some questions and inadequate for others. Darius’s inscription is strong evidence for his public claims to legitimacy, but the accusations against his opponents require separate investigation. Thucydides reveals his own historical approach, but the speeches he composed cannot be treated as audio recordings of events.
An ancient term should be checked in its original language where possible, or against scholarly translations where direct checking is not practical. Even familiar terms such as dēmokratia, pietas, ma’at and nomos need to be interpreted within the passage where they appear. Identify what the surrounding passage requires, then decide whether an English word will communicate that meaning. Readers need not see the untranslated term on every page, but its meaning at the first important use should be explained.
Historians can build stronger reconstructions by comparing evidence produced for different purposes and preserved in different ways. A literary account of Roman taxation may be set beside fiscal papyri, inscriptions and excavated administrative buildings. An Athenian speech about household virtue may be tested against property documents, grave monuments and evidence of women’s economic activity. Each document has limitations, and disagreement between records may be historically informative. A contradiction can reveal the gap between an ideal asserted in public and the varied circumstances of people living under it.
Explanation and ethical judgment can be distinguished without giving up either task. It is possible to describe how Athenian citizenship worked, show how its exclusions were maintained, and criticise those exclusions. One can explain the Roman legal machinery of enslavement while also condemning the institution. A strong historical argument makes clear when it moves from explaining the world of the evidence to judging that world or drawing lessons for the present. Showing where the historical account ends and an ethical conclusion begins allows readers to evaluate both on their evidence.
Presentism becomes an error when a modern assumption determines the conclusion before the ancient evidence has been examined. An ancient text can be most informative when it resists a familiar modern category. A difficult legal term or an unexpected source can force a more precise reconstruction of how people actually lived. Good historical writing takes those differences seriously before trying to explain or judge the people who lived with them.
