ABSTRACT
A professor once declared that I might consider myself to have mastered the discipline of Classical archaeology when I could make sense of PaulyWissowa. Paulys Realencyclopädie der classischen Altertumswissenschaft (l893-) is a colossal encyclopaedia of Altertumswissenschaft, the positive science of antiquity. Closely argued and enormously documented entries fill the pages of its many volumes. There are no plates. It keeps going. It is meant to be complete and definitive. It is a monument to German nineteenth-century scholarship. The point the professor was making is to do with an experience many have upon encountering Classics and Classical archaeology, though less often now in such an extreme form perhaps than in the past. An interest in Classical antiquity may animate you, but the discipline somehow gets in the way and has to be dealt with first. Skills need to be acquired to decipher the very texts which are meant to take you to where your interest lies. The point is not that this is wrong; it is that disciplines are as much about their practices and conventions as they are about their object.
