I teach ancient Greek and Latin at a university in the interior of the USA. I’ve often given a course on the ancient Mediterranean world in general, a core curriculum class that draws a cross-section of the undergraduate student body. When I first taught it, I was required to use a textbook by D. Brendan Nagle, called The Ancient World: A Social and Cultural History.

Teaching from that book, I spent a good deal of time talking and thinking about things that were outside my scholarly emphasis. For example, Nagle puts heavy emphasis on Athens’ relative prosperity in the immediate aftermath of the Bronze Age and its conservatism in the centuries that followed. That led me to wonder if the two were related- perhaps the Athenians so prided themselves on the advantages they once enjoyed over their neighbors that they couldn’t imagine having anything to learn from them, and so ended up as quite an old-fashioned place before their age of reform started in the seventh century BCE.

If that was what happened, it would be an example of what I sometimes think of as “The Heyday Effect.” This effect can be seen, not only in sovereign states like ancient Athens, but any group that gives its members one of the major focal points of their identities- political parties, religious traditions, families, professions, etc. When members look back on a specific period in the past and see their group doing what they think it could and should be doing now, they will tend to attach themselves to everything associated with that period.

I say “When members look back… and see” because the Heyday Effect can operate regardless of the historical facts about the period- the heyday might not in fact have been so great, indeed it may be entirely fictional, but what governs people’s current behavior is their belief that it was real. That’s just W. I. Thomas’ “definition of the situation”- situations defined as real are real in their consequences.

I say “what they think it can and should be doing now” because I acknowledge that a Heyday Effect doesn’t pop up out of thin air- it is rooted in the material interests people currently have, in what they want to keep and what they want to gain, even as it influences the way they evaluate those interests.

I say “everything associated with that period” because a Heyday Effect is not a product of sustained rational calculation. It doesn’t apply just to the practices and institutions that actually contributed to whatever success the group had in its heyday, or that could have been expected to contribute to the successes ascribed to imaginary heydays. Everything left over that reminds people of the heyday becomes precious. If it is positively destructive of the current interests of the people who look back on the heyday, they will sooner or later let it go, but they will be so reluctant to do so that they will likely spend a great deal of time trying to convince themselves and anyone who tries to reason with them that it is somehow worth keeping.