On Fergus Millar

My supervisor’s book had just come out and had been reviewed that week in the TLS. It had been a mixed review. The reviewer had been Fergus Millar, Professor of Ancient History and a major name in the field. Chippy Masters student that I was, I asked my supervisor what he thought of the review. Typical of the supervisor in question, whom I remember as an excellent teacher and mentor, he offered what seemed an honest response. Somewhat surprised by the question, he remarked tersely and directly: ‘Fergus doesn’t understand power’ (the book’s topic had been the workings of power in the bureaucratic class of the later Roman empire). He explained no further – and I did not ask for detail. Nearly twenty years later, I still remember this comment and I still wonder about it. Did Fergus Millar really ‘not understand power’?

There are figures in life whom we get to know well, and who touch us on a personal basis – for their kindness, for their warmth, perhaps. There are other figures who might guide or influence us professionally and have a real say over our careers – for whose input or influence we might be profoundly grateful. Fergus Millar wasn’t exactly either of these things to me – although I did indeed benefit in a small way from his kindness, and he did in some small sense have an influence on me. Or maybe, in fact, this influence wasn’t all that small.

Many people have written about Fergus Millar since he passed away in 2019. I am probably the least well-equipped to do so of anyone who has – so I should put everything I will go on to write in this post very firmly into the category of the (very) limited impressions of a passing, and very junior, acquaintance of a great scholar. And yet something compels me to write. Perhaps it can be interesting for a passing acquaintance, not just a great companion, of an interesting or important figure to set out some thoughts?

I think of Fergus Millar as someone who embodied a tradition of learning and thinking which has real intellectual integrity, depth and power. It is a sadness that this tradition is one which seems to have to struggle for air in contemporary educational institutions, even top ones – even ones which should know better. It is a tradition I try to keep in mind in what I do as a teacher, but also in how I live and respond to the world.

Mary Beard has written admiringly of how Fergus Millar, when a recent victim of a trenchant review of his largest and perhaps his boldest book, ‘The Emperor in the Roman World’, had engaged in robust conversation with his reviewer (Professor Keith Hopkins) in a memorable intellectual exchange. When it was all over, having expressed some profound disagreements, they headed to the bar together and shared a drink. What an example for the young people present (including Beard herself), she reflected. And this in spite of the fact that the review Hopkins had written had at times overcooked its pudding: it is ‘as though a sea-voyager had painfully constructed a Rolls–Royce motor car in order to cross the Atlantic Ocean’, Hopkins wrote of Millar’s modus operandi in the book. Others might have given him the cold shoulder for far less a statement than this.

An unflinching approach to intellectual exchange, combined with a respect for those with whom you argue (so long as they do indeed wish to argue, rather than assert or crush), even as you maintain, refine and negotiate your position, is indeed an attractive modus operandi. In the world at large, conversational exchange doesn’t always function like this (to say the least): considerations of power, wealth, status, etiquette and other things (no doubt) do crush out of the picture the possibility of robust yet fruitful conversation on an interpersonal level all too often. Often it is just too awkward or dangerous to deal, straightforwardly, with the true facts of a situation – and so we resort to deal only with what is ‘sayable’. Real intellectual exchange can’t function like this, though: it relies on brute honesty, brute statement of issues. Maybe we could do more to integrate real intellectual exchange of this nature into our human affairs in general?

Everything I saw in Fergus Millar’s activities at seminars I attended where he was a regular fixture suggested his clear commitment to a readily identifiable sort of deep intellectual honesty. I remember his frustration at a visiting speaker’s clumsy handling of ancient Biblical evidence in a seminar on Green’ and environmental issues (as these were labelled) in the Bible at the Oxford Oriental Studies faculty. I remember his desire to flesh out – and frustration with – the problems with the Gospel of Matthew’s (to his mind clearly unhistorical) presentation of ‘scribes and Pharisees’ as though these represented a single category of person in the Biblical text itself. He was impatient of inexactness and clumsiness both in modern contexts and in ancient ones. Perhaps this could all be seen as just a case of a typically scrupulous Classicist in action, but Millar was obviously an unusually formidable case study of the type.

Outside of the seminar room, in coffee in the downstairs cafeteria, he was genteel to a fault – and I noticed how he had no affectation at all (in common, in fact, with many of his academic colleagues). He would sit and talk quietly with colleagues, visiting speakers and students alike – and all the time it would be plain that he would soon be back to work, compiling materials for his next article or book. There was no sense of holding court or being the centre of attention. The whole approach was to model something quite different. Others have written of how Millar was an incredibly industrious reader and writer, and this much was plain from only limited time in his company. I warmed to the combination of modesty, lack of pretension, thoroughness and lightly worn industry. It offered a clear if implicit rejection of ostentation, with a heavy emphasis on substance over style (which is not to say that Millar lacked style, only that it clearly wasn’t a preoccupation of his). Unlike some I came across in the university world, Millar was plainly not into the self-promotion business.

A big moment for me came when Millar came to hear me speak at an Oriental Studies faculty seminar (to a grand audience of just 5), listening to me talk on Eusebius and his late antique continuators for 45 minutes or so, before offering 10 or 15 minutes worth of thoughts and questions at the end. I do not remember having any nerves during the exchange, and partly, or mainly, this must have been a function (again) of Millar’s warm and encouraging approach. He simply wanted to encourage people to get on and say and write sensible things about important topics. I remember his mentioning to me at the end that no one had really done very much at all on the details of a couple of Eusebius’ writings, and perhaps a project worth thinking about would be to write a commentary on them. It was a small thought but one which gave me a great sense of confidence – though my commentary on a Eusebian text remains to be written, even now, many years later. Be fruitful, get on with it, let the work speak for itself. That seemed to be the idea.

Fergus Millar’s own writing itself offered an interesting sort of inspiration. He was what one might call an omnivorous historian – keen to write on politics, the military, religion, culture, literature and much else in between. He didn’t delve much into the world of the ancient Greeks, except to consider Greeks living under Rome, but as far as Rome itself was concerned he cast his net extremely wide – writing on everything from the Roman Republic up until the Arab conquests. A big theme of his writing was the interconnectedness of different groups and ethnicities, of cultural variety and exchange, of surprising cross-fertilisations and of the sense of the big picture across the vast expanse of territory which could be called ‘Roman’. I remember him commenting to me outside one seminar I attended that ‘still no one has really explained the origins of Islam properly’. He seemed to believe a yet more brilliant work of historical writing might lie just around the corner which might do this. I was not sure at the time that I shared what I took to be Millar’s optimism, but I did notice – and like – his sense of excitement about the prospect of what a future piece of historical writing might yet achieve.

The omnivorous streak in Millar manifested itself not just in choice of subject matter but in the way he presented his material. The Emperor in the Roman World, for instance, is a vast compendium of source materials, a huge synthesis of learning, bringing together insights but also masses of documentation on the activity of the emperors across more than 3 centuries. Another of Millar’s books, Religion and Community in the Roman Near East, spends many pages setting out and exploring the state of our surviving evidence for different religious communities and groups. In a great deal of Millar’s writing, the preoccupation is with showing readers what the evidence is, and what the shape of it looks like, so that a clear picture of what we can and can’t say is achieved. This does not always make for the most scintillating prose, but it gives a real sense of the spread of what there is. So often, with other ancient historians, one simply has to follow the thread of what that historian has chosen to do with the body of evidence they have worked from, with no deep sense of what that body of evidence really looks like, and no sense of where (and whether) they might have proceeded in a different sort of way. In this sense, Millar’s writing in Religion and Community operates on a quite different level. Its approach is one that can be found also in his revision of the great work of synthesis by Schurer, The History of the Jewish People in the Age of Jesus Christ, which Millar co-produced alongside several colleagues. This monumental study itself aims to set out and clarify what a big body of evidence looks like, and to show what can and can’t be said on all sorts of topics – evidential, geographic, demographic and, of course, in terms of events.

One characteristic of Millar’s approach was to place clear and deep familiarity with primary reading of sources ‘front and centre’ of his work as a historian. One does not read Millar’s writing with any sense that he is letting his imagination roam very free, or that he is sticking only loosely to a source, or to a limited subset of evidence. An empiricist, he wants to study all of the evidence carefully and follow it ‘where it leads’. But he knows this is often hard – and the struggle to do it is one he wants to try to convey to the reader. To put the point another way: some facts which matter are easy to come by; others which matter require close discussion, and even then we may not be in a position to know them.

One result of Millar’s omnivorous appetite, and indeed his panoptic way of seeing things, is that a rich and compelling picture can emerge where a different sort of writer would have produced a more narrowly focussed, if possibly more tightly argued, sort of account. Millar wants also to let complexity, ambiguity, and holes in the evidence speak clearly for themselves, and to do so without the guiding hand of any jargon, or of any overarching theory – whether implicitly held or explicitly stated. ‘But all writers cleave on some level to a theory’, goes the inevitable retort. Well, yes, but that doesn’t mean that this is what matters most, or deserves heavy articulation in a piece of scholarship. Some assumptions can be left unstated or unexplored, surely, especially if the aim of a piece of work is the rather defensible one of building up a thorough and intellectually honest picture of a topic or time period in plain language.

Millar worked, like my father did, in a university system which was becoming less and less able to sustain scholarly values in a thoroughgoing way, and more and more spartan and dominated by the diktats of the market and a growing bureaucracy. This clearly distressed and unsettled him, and I remember noticing how a few letters he penned found their way into the press to express discontent about the general direction of travel in the university sector. A determined democrat within the very democratic Oxford system, and (I believe) an opponent of the tendency of the ‘modernisers’ to build power and hierarchy at the centre of the university, he was a regular attendee at meetings of the university congregation. I remember seeing him excitedly heading off to a vote at one such meeting after one seminar I attended. The chance to speak in opposition to some damaging measure was clearly animating him.

Millar’s whole mode of approach – as scholarly democrat, as denizen of a community where simple human decency undergirded what intellectual life was about – was transparent in all of my limited interactions with him. We never so much as exchanged an email, and I doubt he would have remembered my name after I left the university. But he was an example of a great person I have come across who really did live up to expectations – and more. And in the end, what mattered was not just Millar’s approach to his work, but the clarity with which his approach to scholarhip (robustness, intellectual honesty, clarity, omnivorous interests with a panoptic sense of perspective, a sense of excitement about what still might be possible) was espoused, and the sense of excitement which flowed (to me, and to others) from it. It had a huge influence, and it is something I try to convey to my own students at school level, and in my writing too.

I knew Millar briefly when he was in his 70s. I have no idea whether the character I saw at this stage of his life had been the same as that of his younger years. But it seemed to me to bespeak a tradition of university learning which had had every reason to value dearly the things Millar himself had stood for. This tradition of learning had come to value thoroughness and fact-finding empiricism because it had known firsthand the profound dangers of lies and confusions, and the devastation these had caused. Humane scholarship would have to stand for the truth of things, and to have the sense of overview, as well as the mastery of detail, that would enable – where relevant – sloppiness, and indeed charlatans, to be exposed. Intellectual frauds, including those of the politically dangerous sort, love to make use of detail, just as they love to make sweeping claims, after all. The old school don in Millar would have specialised in spotting and confuting nonsense, and his style would have been to do this with understatement yet with piercing effect. The message of his writing is to let others see things, in the big picture, for themselves, and to show them how the big picture gets created through the available evidence – so that they can doubt, and follow their doubts, if they wish to. It is a deeply democratic project, but one which grants a very great measure of respect to the individual reader – or, to put it more grandly, to the individual human mind.