Herman's research has been motivated by three interrelated questions from the start. First, how do
social institutions,
values,
norms, customs, laws,
ideologies,
sentiments, and
drives, whether recognised or
subconscious, affect
human behaviour in general, and how did they affect the behaviour of the
ancient Greeks and
Romans in particular? Second, how do these factors interact in the formation of societies and groups characterised by that unique combination of customs, actions and outlooks that goes under the name of culture? Third, what drives a historical narrative and/or motivates the historical process? Herman advocates a closer interaction between
ancient history and the social, behavioural and
life sciences. 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. Herman's published works may be divided into three categories:
Ritual and social structure The first category includes contributions to the study of
friendship,
kinship,
social structure, politics and
international relations in ancient Greece: a three-dimensional view of a bond that, though ubiquitous in the Greek and Roman world, had previously been poorly understood by modern writers. This is the relationship known to the Greeks as
xenia and to the Romans as
hospitium. Having identified this bond as a sort of quasi-kinship that has also been observed by
social scientists in more recent cultures, 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 Athenian democracy The second category of studies is centred on the
Athenian democracy. 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. Herman proceeded to test his ideas through a wide variety of sources, with regard to politics,
land tenure, the employment of
slaves, interpersonal and class relations,
conflict resolution,
state power, the army,
foreign relations, religion and the economy. In his book Morality and Behaviour in Democratic Athens (2006), Herman offers a description of
ancient Athens, perhaps for the first time, as an integrated social system, and introduces a radical re-interpretation of the Athenian democracy. 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. . In a recent article Herman offers a solution to the long-standing question of how a
direct democracy run by
masses could have functioned at all.
The mainsprings of the historical process The third category of studies in which Herman has a particular interest concerns the mainsprings of
human behaviour. The argument of the book that he is working on – Causation, Genes and History – is that if we combine history with the insights of modern
genetics, introducing into our customary list of historical causes (economic,
psychological, etc.) one that precedes most other causes – to wit, human nature – and then the cause of this cause itself – genes or
DNA – we obtain a new theory of historical causation. Human genes are a far more objective and easily ascertainable cause than most proximate causes adduced by historians. In a sense, they might be conceived of as the ultimate cause, or the first principle, of the historical process. In 'Greek
epiphanies and the sensed presence' Herman argues that the circumstances similar to those described by
John Geiger with regard to modern
visions dubbed in research as 'the
Third Man factor' (a life-threatening
trauma and/or a state of severe existential
distress) also prevailed in connection with the Greek epiphanies. The third man factor thus offers an important clue for unravelling the mental processes that gave rise to the epiphanies in ancient Greek culture. ==Selected publications==