Gabriel Herman

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.[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.[5]

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.[6]

The third category of studies in which Herman has a particular interest concerns the mainsprings of human behaviour.[7][8]

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)[9] 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.[10]