Gabriel Herman

Historians should, in his view, keep track of the insights achieved in these fields and apply them to the analysis of the past societies that are the objects of their studies.

With a view to developing analytical tools capable of tackling problems that could not be satisfactorily resolved using the historian's traditional analytical apparatus alone, Herman has been involved over the past year in initiating the production of a multi-authored synoptic guide to ancient Greece and Rome, guided by a novel conception of environment, economy, society, politics, and culture.

[3] Having identified this bond as a sort of quasi-kinship that has also been observed by social scientists in more recent cultures,[4] he followed up its implications for Greek histoire événementielle by examining how xenia/hospitium functioned in three largely dissimilar social settings: the hierarchical, individualistic world of petty rulers reflected in the Homeric poems, the egalitarian (at the elite level, at least), collectivistic world of the classical and Hellenistic city-state, reflected in classical Greek literature, and the huge upper-class power networks of the late (by then Christian) Roman Empire, reflected in the Greek and Latin literature of the late Roman and early medieval periods.

In 'Rituals of evasion in ancient Greece' Herman describes a kind of ritual that has survived into the world of the Greek city states from that early stage of human existence during which societal norms had not as yet been internalised, and no sense of guilt had yet been formed.

The idea of writing a social history of Athens came with the realisation that there were serious flaws in the then widely practised (and largely unchallenged) way of reading and interpreting the Attic Orators; and that in consequence, the entire moral image assigned to the Athenian democracy by modern writers must be regarded as questionable, if not distorted.

He characterises as exceptional the strategy of inter-personal interaction that the Athenian democrats developed to resolve conflict, increase co-operation and achieve collective objectives.

The third man factor thus offers an important clue for unravelling the mental processes that gave rise to the epiphanies in ancient Greek culture.