ABSTRACT
Periodization distorts. That much everyone would agree on: when we draw lines through time, artificially dividing the continuous flow of lived experience, we may obscure as much as we reveal. So why do we do it? The obvious, but facile, answer is that it makes the practice of history easier. It gives us a shorthand: everyone knows what we mean when we talk about archaic and classical, or early, middle, and late, or phases I, II, and III. But there is more to it than that. Periodization is also characterization – it is a basic part of the process of historical understanding, which requires us to draw lines, to say that some common thread unites a block of human experience, and that this block is qualitatively different from other blocks of time that can be identified before and after it. Stanley Fish has rightly argued that ‘you cannot not forget; you cannot not exclude; you cannot refuse boundaries and distinctions’ (Fish 1989: 311). Periodization constrains thought about the past, but also enables it.
