Antiquity has a lot to say to the present day: when the Homeric epics were written, around 700 BC, the Mediterranean was an area that its inhabitants were only just beginning to explore. 1000 years later, the Roman Empire provided a framework for the almost unhindered mobility of people, goods and ideas. What's more, the Mediterranean basin was linked to other Eurasian centres of civilisation through long-distance trade and the exchange of knowledge: Persia, India and, at least indirectly, China.

The process between 700 BC and 300 AD could be described as "minor" globalisation: many things developed in a similar way to the "major" globalisation from around 1300 (increasing networking, emergence of large, economically, socially, legally and politically integrated areas), but some things also developed differently (no dynamics leading to industrialisation).

The research topics of the department explore the small-scale globalisation of antiquity along different axes: in terms of the history of mentalities, economics, social and institutional history, but also with a focus on specific regions (Eastern Mediterranean) and epochs (Roman Republic, Roman Imperial period to Late Antiquity) - or selected source genres (historiography, material culture).

The deliberately global and universal historical approach to antiquity contributes to overcoming the Eurocentric, classicist constrictions of classical studies and, in the sense of a hermeneutic approach to history, lays the foundations for understanding modernity and its genesis.