Zócalo Public Square

Much like our 21-century global village, the ancient world wrestled over issues of free trade, self-aggrandizing elites, destabilizing religious conflict, and how to treat refugees fleeing wars and unstable environments. What can antique societies teach us today about how to cope with such challenges? This was the fundamental question in a lively Zócalo/ Getty “Open Art” event titled “What Can the Ancient World Teach Us About Globalization?” Moderator Margot Roosevelt, economy reporter for the Orange County Register, was joined by Roger Bagnall, a classics scholar at New York University, Grant Parker, a classical philologist at Stanford University, and Jan Nederveen Pieterse, a scholar of globalization, development and cultural anthropology at the University of California Santa Barbara, to discuss globalization’s benefits and discontents, in the distant past and in our own pressing time.