Vox Populi E-Book

Peter Jones

• Herausgeber: Atlantic Books
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 400

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Beschreibung

In this compelling tour of the classical world, Peter Jones reveals how it is the power, scope and fascination of their ideas that makes the Ancient Greeks and Romans so important and influential today. For over 2,000 years these ideas have gripped Western imagination and been instrumental in the way we think about the world. Covering everything from philosophy, history and architecture to language and grammar, Jones uncovers their astonishing intellectual, political and literary achievements. First published twenty years ago, this fully updated and revised edition is a must-read for anyone who wishes to know more about the classics - and where they came from.

Leseprobe

VOXPOPULI

Also by Peter Jones

Vote for Caesar

Learn Latin: The Book of the Daily Telegraph QED series

Veni Vidi Vici

Eureka!

Quid Pro Quo

Memento Mori

First published in hardback in Great Britain in 2019 by Atlantic Books, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

Portions of this book first appeared in An Intelligent Person’s Guide to the Classics, which was published in Great Britain in 1999 by Gerald Duckworth & Co. Ltd.

Copyright © Peter Jones, 1999, 2019

The moral right of Peter Jones to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

Every effort has been made to trace or contact all copyright holders. The publishers will be pleased to make good any omissions or rectify any mistakes brought to their attention at the earliest opportunity.

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Hardback ISBN: 978-1-78649-895-3

E-book ISBN: 978-1-78649-893-9

Paperback ISBN: 978-1-78649-894-6

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Map artwork by Jeff Edwards

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CONTENTS

Preface

Maps

Timeline

Introduction

1 Classical Connections: 700 BC to AD 500

2 The Survival of Ancient Literature

3 Excavating the Past: Ephesus and the Temple of Artemis

4 Democracy’s Brief Day

5 Men on Women

6 Emperor and Empire

7 The City of Lepcis Magna

8 The English Vocabulary

9 The Language of Grammar

10 Stoics and Epicureans

11 Breaking the Ancient Stranglehold

Appendix: The Pronunciation of Latin

Further Reading

Index

PREFACE

This is the only book ever published whose author may well agree with the critic who says he should have written a different one. But I probably could not have written it.

The first edition of this book was entitled An Intelligent Person’s Guide to Classics (Duckworth 1999). Chapters 3–6 and 8–11, with some additions and adaptations, remain from it. Its aim remains the same: to explain how the literature and physical remains of the ancient world have been preserved; to provide a broad outline history of the period traditionally covered by the term ‘Classics’ (roughly 700 BC–AD 500); and to eludicate certain aspects of Greek and Roman life and thought that I hope will strike the reader as interesting. I am especially grateful to Jeannie Cohen for her close scrutiny of a number of the new chapters.

Those who value their families will know what I owe to Lindsay, our children and grandchildren.

Peter JonesJuly 2019Newcastle upon Tyne

Note: If you would like to see access to the languages, history and culture of the ancient Greek and Roman worlds extended across all our schools, please visit the website of the inspirational charity Classics for All: https://classicsforall.org.uk/

TIMELINE

ROMANS

1000 BC

Continuous occupation of hill-town Rome

753 BC

Rome founded: Romulus Rome’s first king

750 BC

Etruscan city-states dominant in northern and western Italy

509 BC

Rape of Lucretia: Rome’s last king Tarquinius expelled: foundation of the republic

First trade treaty with Carthage (of, eventually, four)

280–275 BC

Romans drive Greek Pyrrhus out of Italy

270 BC

Rome master of Italy

264–241 BC

First (Punic) War against Carthage: Sicily and Sardinia made provinces

C. 240 BC

Livius Andronicus translates the Odyssey into Latin

218–204 BC

Second Punic War: Spain and North Africa made provinces

211–148 BC

Rome’s four wars vs Macedon; Macedon and Greece made a province. Rome culturally ‘captured’ by Greeks

C. 180 BC

Greek-based comedies of Plautus and Terence

149–146 BC

Third Punic War: Carthage razed to the ground North Africa and Spain become provinces

133 BC

Tiberius Gracchus’ land reforms

129 BC

Pergamum becomes Roman province

111–81 BC

Marius and Sulla bring civil war to Rome

100 BC–AD 100

Rome’s ‘classical’ period: Lucretius (d. c. 55 BC), Catullus (d. c. 54 BC), Cicero (d. 43 BC), Virgil (d. 19 BC), Horace (d. 8 BC), Ovid (d. AD 17), Livy (d. c. AD 17), Martial (d. AD 104), Tacitus (d. AD 120), Juvenal (d. AD 120)

66–63 BC

Pompey brings Asia Minor into Roman orbit

59–50 BC

Caesar makes Gaul a province

56–55 BC

Caesar invades Britain

53 BC

Crassus killed in Parthia

49–46 BC

Caesar defeats Pompey in civil war

44 BC

Caesar assassinated

39 BC

First public library in Rome

31 BC

Octavian defeats Marc Antony in civil war

27 BC

Octavian becomes Emperor Augustus

27 BC–AD 1453

Roman Empire

C. AD 40

Remmius Palaemon, grammarian

AD 43

Claudius brings Britain into the Empire

AD 68

Death of Nero

AD 79

Vesuvius erupts

C. AD 85

Martial publishes poems in codex form

AD 117

Trajan emperor extends empire into Armenia

AD 284

Diocletian creates an Emperor for the Eastern Empire

AD 312–337

Constantine Emperor: Christianity becomes the dominant state religion

AD 325

Byzantium becomes Constantinople, capital of the Eastern Empire

AD 365

Hun-driven Germanic invasion into the Empire

AD 391

Theodosius bans all other religions

AD 395

Empire splits into autonomous Western and Eastern halves

AD 404

Jerome’s Vulgate

AD 410

Roman legions leave Britain

AD 476

Roman Empire ends in the West

AD 525

Denis the Small invents BC/AD distinction

AD 632–900

Spread of Islam east into Syria and India and west into Africa and Spain

AD 800

Charlemagne becomes ‘Holy Roman Emperor’

AD 1100–1300

Arrival of Seljuk Turks and from 1400 Ottoman Turks into Near East

AD 1423

Aurispa arrives in Venice with 238 Greek manuscripts

AD 1453

Roman Empire ends in the East

GREEKS

1600–1100 BC

Bronze Age and palace culture; economic records kept in Linear B

1150 BC

Homer’s imagined ‘Troy’

1100 BC

Greek migration to Aegean islands and western Turkey

800–580 BC

Greek settlements established around the Mediterranean and Black Sea

776 BC

First Greek Olympic Games

750 BC

First Greek settlements in S. Italy and Sicily

C. 700 BC

Homer composes Iliad and Odyssey

C. 600 BC

Sappho, lyric poetess from Lesbos

594 BC

Solon’s reforms begin to break aristocratic control

FL. C. 580 BC

Thales

509 BC

Cleisthenes invents democracy

FL. C. 500 BC

Heraclitus, Parmenides

491 BC

Persians defeated at Marathon

480–323 BC

‘Classical Age’ of Greece Aeschylus (d. 456 BC), Parthenon built 432 BC, Herodotus (d. c.425 BC), Phidias (fl. 430 BC), Protagoras (d. c. 420 BC), Sophocles (d. 406 BC), Euripides (d. 406 BC), Thucydides (d. c. 400 BC), Socrates (d. 399 BC), Aristophanes (d. 386 BC), Plato (d. 347 BC), Aristotle (d. 322 BC)

480–479 BC

Persian invaders defeated at Thermopylae, Salamis and Plataea

480 BC

Greeks in Sicily vs Carthaginians (battle of Himera)

450–429 BC

Pericles dominates Athenian Assembly

431–404 BC

Athens vs Sparta (‘Peloponnesian War’)

399 BC

Socrates executed

350 BC

Rise of Macedon under Philip II

347 BC

Death of Plato

338 BC

Greek city-states defeated by Philip II

336 BC

Philip assassinated; his son Alexander (the Great) takes over

334–323 BC

Alexander’s army reaches India; Alexander dies

323–31 BC

‘Hellenistic Age’

322 BC

Death of Aristotle

300 BC

Zeno (from Cyprus) invents Stoicism

280 BC

Epicurus invents Epicureanism

C. 280 BC

Alexandrian Library and Museum built under Ptolemy II

260 BC

Alexander’s ‘Empire’ resolved into four main Greek regimes: Egypt, under Ptolemy; all Asia under Seleucus/Antiochus; Pergamum (from 241 BC) under Attalus; and Macedon under Antigonus II

215 BC

Philip V of Macedon allies with Carthage against Rome

C. 200 BC

Aristophanes of Byzantium, textual editor

C. 170 BC

Dionysius Thrax, grammarian

148 BC

Greece becomes Roman province

C. AD 130

Apollonius Dyscolus, grammarian

4TH CENTURY AD

Dositheus, grammarian

INTRODUCTION

In traditional classics, language and literature reign supreme. To the question ‘Who came first, the Greeks or the Romans?’, the literary answer is the Greeks, because Greek literature antedated Roman by about four hundred years. Greek literature – indeed, Western literature – began with Homer’s unmatched epics the Iliad and Odyssey, produced somewhere near the coast of western Turkey, usually dated to c. 700 BC. It flowered through the archaic age (700– 500 BC), with early philosophers such as Thales and lyric poets such as Sappho; and through the classical period (500–323 BC), with all the great names, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, Herodotus, Thucydides, Plato and Aristotle.

Roman literature, however, did not became a potent force till the second century BC with the comic playwright Plautus; and after that little survived until the Roman classical period, the ‘golden’ first century BC during republican times (Lucretius, Catullus, Caesar, Horace, Virgil, Livy, Cicero) and ‘silver’ first century AD when the Empire had begun (Ovid, Pliny, Seneca, Martial, Tacitus, Juvenal). It was the Roman Empire and Christian missionaries that introduced Europe to the concept of literacy.

What most people today still mean by ‘classics’ is learning the language and studying the literature of classical Greece in the fifth and, to a lesser extent, fourth century BC (with eighth-century Homer) and of classical Rome in the first century BC and first century AD. Classics, like any discipline, is a matter of human choice (‘a cultural construct’ is a more pompous way of putting it), and what we know as classical Greek and Latin literature consists largely of what the ancients themselves thought were the best bits. Obviously, what they thought was good had a serious chance of surviving.

Classics today no longer respects the ancient boundaries. The school study of Graeco-Roman language, culture and history (the last two in translation) does, it is true, stick mainly with the classical periods. In universities, however, courses in the languages and in translation extend well beyond them. They span over two thousand years, from the prehistoric Greece of the Mycenaeans and Minoans (c. 1600–1100 BC) with their early form of Greek known as Linear B, to the end of the Roman Empire in the West in the fifth century AD and the beginnings of its continuation in the Greek East (the Byzantine period) in the sixth century AD.

Classicists, in other words, define their subject these days far more broadly that it was ever defined by Greeks and Romans. The texts, whether in the original or in translation, are also read with much more emphasis on their cultural context, in tune with the demands of our fast-expanding world. Finally, ‘classical reception studies’ take the subject into today’s world by examining how modern writers, especially novelists, poets and dramatists, make use of ancient characters and themes (especially mythical ones) for their own particular literary purposes, paying little or no attention to the historical context of the ancient works in question. Nothing new there: Shakespeare did exactly the same.

Classicists, as ever, respond to the world about them and cut their cloth appropriately.

CLASSICS: THE DERIVATION

‘Classicist’ is a term first applied (as we understand it today) in the 1860s, to distinguish a specialist in classics from one in, for example, mathematics. The term ‘classics’ derives from the Latin word classis. This word was used to mean one of the five property groups into which Servius Tullius, the sixth king of Rome (reigned 578–535 BC), divided the Roman people for tax purposes; then a body of citizens summoned for military purposes, a levy; and then the specialization of this usage into the most common meaning, ‘fleet’. Classicus meant ‘belonging to the highest class’; in Aulus Gellius’ Attic Nights (c. AD 180, a random collection of notes and observations on everything from philosophy and history to grammar and geometry), it was used for the first time of literature, referring to a scriptor adsiduus, ‘an authoritative writer’, who was an orator or a poet, and e cohorte illa antiquiore ‘from that earlier cohort [of such writers]’. The scriptor classicus was contrasted with a scriptor proletarius.

In the modern world there has been a lot of class in classics. But ‘class’ is a double-edged sword, and classics has been on the receiving end of the sharp edge of that sword for too long.

MISUNDERSTANDING THE ANCIENT WORLD

In Four Lectures on the Advantages of a Classical Education as an Auxiliary to a Commercial Education (1846), Andrew Amos quoted a physician, a Dr Armstrong, who ‘recommends reciting Greek as an excellent mode of strengthening the chest’. He wrote:

Read aloud resounding Homer’s strains

And wield the thunder of Demosthenes.

The chest so exercised improves its strength

And quick vibrations through the bowels drive

The restless blood, which in inactive days

Would loiter else in unelastic tubes.

Well, perhaps. Is that really what a classical education does for you?

Here is another take on the subject. The British historian and politician Lord Macaulay recorded that in India in 1835 he read:

Aeschylus twice; Sophocles twice; Euripides once; Pindar twice; Callimachus; Apollonius Rhodius; Quintus Calaber; Theocritus twice; Herodotus; Thucydides; almost all Xenophon’s works; almost all Plato; Aristotle’s Politics, and a good deal of his Organon, besides dipping elsewhere in him; the whole of Plutarch’s Lives; about half of Lucian; two or three books of Athenaeus; Plautus twice; Terence twice; Lucretius twice; Catullus; Tibullus; Propertius; Lucan; Statius; Silius Italicus; Livy; Velleius Paterculus; Sallust; Caesar; and lastly Cicero. I have, indeed, a little of Cicero left; but I shall finish him in a few days. I am now deep in Aristophanes and Lucian.

Yet what sense did he make of this extraordinarily voracious reading? Not much. Here, in an essay on the Athenian orators, Macaulay took us back to Athens in the ‘time of its power and glory’:

A crowd is assembled round a portico. All are gazing with delight at the entablature: for Phidias is putting up the frieze. We turn into another street: a rhapsodist is reciting there: men, women and children are thronging round him; the tears are running down their cheeks; their eyes are fixed; their very breath is still; for he is telling how Priam fell at the feet of Achilles and kissed those hands – the terrible, the murderous – which had slain so many of his sons. We enter the public place: there is a ring of youths, all leaning forward, with sparkling eyes, and gestures of expectation. Socrates is pitted against the famous atheist from Ionia, and had just brought him to a contradiction in terms. But we are interrupted. ‘Room for the Prytanes.’ The general assembly is to meet. The people are swarming in on every side. Proclamation is made: ‘Who wishes to speak?’ There is a shout and clapping of hands: Pericles is mounting the stand. Then for a play of Sophocles: and away to sup with Aspasia. I know of no modern university which has so excellent a system of education.

At any moment one expects an invasion of Spartans led by Julius Caesar to save the Roman Empire from the Vikings (‘Gee, Marco Polo,’ said Charlemagne…). It is gibberish. Phidias was a sculptor, not a builder. Rhapsodists no more sang in the street then than opera singers do now. The philosopher Socrates appears to be an evangelist, though there was no category of ‘atheist’ in fifth-century Athens and no dialogue in which Socrates debated the existence of the gods. The Assembly appears to be meeting when a drama festival is on, and a play by Sophocles seems to be on in the evening, as if we were in Drury Lane (plays were put on once, in competition, three tragedies and a satyr play, during the day). Sup with Aspasia and you had better make sure her partner, Pericles, a prominent Athenian, is there too or risk a thick ear: unless Macaulay is referring to Aspasia when she was (rumour had it) a prostitute.

PREJUDICE

There is no doubt that absurd claims have been made for education in classics, resulting in the sort of quasi-mystical, ahistorical tosh that Dr Armstrong and Lord Macaulay came up with. But that world is long dead, and I get rather tired when it is resurrected and used to belabour the study of the classical past.

There is another issue here. Since we have so much ancient literature, and it was the first literature of the West, some people are tempted to hold the ancient world responsible if they find in it ideas, behaviours or institutions of which they disapprove recurring in the modern world. But people do not need books, let alone ancient ones, to find out how to behave badly, and if they do turn to the ancients to justify anti-social ends, that is their decision. A good example is imperialism, for which the ancients are routinely castigated. But the Roman did not imperialize in the modern sense; and when the Romans ran provinces, they could do so honourably (as Cicero recommended; see p. 165) or criminally (as Gaius Verres, governor of Sicily, did).

It is in fact strange how good models of behaviour from the ancient world are rarely mentioned. You could in fact blame, or praise, the ancient world for any of the consequences that may be thought to ensue from the following random list of topics you will meet in the West’s first literature. It could be multiplied many times over: academics, the afterlife, agriculture, altruism, ambition, anarchy, ancestors, animals, architecture, art collection, the arts, asceticism, astrology, astronomy, athletics, atomic theory, biology, bores, citizenship (local and global), class, comedy, commerce, corruption, crime, culpability (Aristotle: since we have control over the decision whether to be good or bad, it follows that both virtue and vice spring from the same source: ourselves. So any argument: ‘that absolves bad men of responsibility for wickedness would also deprive good men of responsibility for virtue’), custom, cynicism, dance, death, democracy, diet (yes, Hippocrates is personally to blame for all modern slimming fads), drunkenness, education (Plutarch on lectures: ‘So sit upright, do not sprawl, pay close attention; do not frown, writhe about, doze, whisper to chums’), emotions, encyclopaedias, end of the world, the environment, equality, ethnicity, extravagance, family, farming, feasting, fish, foreigners, forgiveness, fortune, free will, freedom, friendship, the future, games, geometry, ghosts, globalism, gods, the good life, grammar, habit, heaven, hedonism, hell, heredity, heroism, history, honour, the just war, law-making, literary criticism, literature, logic, love, lunatics, magic, marriage, mathematics, medicine, metaphysics, monarchy, myth, nature, obesity, old age, oligarchy, paedophiles, patriotism, peace, philosophy (natural and moral), plants, pleasure, poetry, poets, politics, poverty, power, prejudice, property rights, prostitution, public funding of services, punishment theory, rape, rational thought (however much based on totally wrong premises), religion, republicanism, revenge, rhetoric, same-sex relationships, schoolmasters, the sea, sex, slavery, society, song, the state, status, suicide, taxation, teaching, tolerance, trade, tragedy, treason, tyranny, usefulness, uses of power, war, water, xenophobia, youth.

There are few signs of Marxism, socialism, capitalism, victimhood, identity concerns, transgender issues, racism, nationalism, human rights, genocide and other contemporary concerns. It is, of course, accurate to say that, by our standards, Greeks and Romans committed genocide. But the historian knows that Julius Caesar, the Spartans or any other ancient people would not turn a hair at the accusation. By the same token, ancients would have found it incomprehensible that modern women engage in politics, freely mingle with males in the street by day and night, and decide whether they want children or not. How would we argue the case with ancient men and women to help them understand our position?

The point is that praising and blaming do not cast any light on the ancient or modern world: they are simply normal human reactions to learning about the past. The miracle is that all this material from the past is there in front of us, and in the original languages too – all this evidence of the West’s first appreciation of humanity and its passions, triumphs, hopes, fears, rights and wrongs, weaknesses and strengths from thousands of years ago.

If we wish to accuse that particular past of getting things wrong, or of somehow being responsible for perceived human failures in the present, the only question is whether the evidence will take the strain. And if it does, what then? Sanctimonious self-congratulation that we are not as other men? Again, it is commonplace to tut-tut about the ancient proclivity for war. But the ancients are not unique in that respect. The fact that war is one of the most powerful, universal forces to have been shaping our lives over thousands of years. The phenomenon demands our attention.

None of that prevents us from critically disagreeing with the ancients’ views of the world. What is important is to try to see the world through their eyes: indeed, that is the job of the historian. Here knowing the languages, a major piece of evidence for mentalité, is of crucial importance.

All that said, using the ancients at least as a means of reflecting on the present – could modern nations be run like a fifth-century BC Athenian democracy? – can be thought-provoking. Since 1991 I have been speculating almost every week (currently in the Spectator) as accurately as I can in 380 words on how ancients might have understood, reacted to or dealt with current problems. Whether readers have been informed, educated, entertained or appalled, I have no idea. But the earth has not noticeably shifted on its axis.

An academic discipline cannot be ‘good’ or ‘bad’ per se: only humans can make it that. One does not condemn medicine because Dr Mengele studied it. What a discipline offers is the potential for broad personal, especially intellectual, development. When it comes to Latin and Greek, there are as many reasons for wanting and not wanting to learn it as there are (non) learners. I had over a thousand letters from those who used the ‘QED: Learn Latin’ and ‘Eureka: Learn Ancient Greek’ courses I devised in the late 1990s for the Sunday Telegraph and the Daily Telegraph (see Further Reading), explaining what the languages have meant to them. ‘Improving my English’ or ‘learning more about words’ are not arguments I would use to justify the teaching of Latin, but there is no ‘correct’ argument. That is what these readers have got out of Latin and Greek. Take it or leave it.

What really get up classicists’ noses, however, are bad arguments for not studying the subject. One is that it is élitist. But a subject cannot be élitist. ‘Irrelevance’ is another. ‘Irrelevance’ to what? If ‘the past’ is irrelevant, then farewell history and every other humanities’ discipline. ‘But they are dead languages’ is another. No, merely immortal. And they are not dead, just not spoken. That does not make them dead, any more than the literature of Chaucer or Shakespeare is dead. ‘They take too long to learn’ is another. That all depends on what you mean by ‘learn’. How long does it take to ‘learn’ physics? One can spend a lifetime on physics, as one can on Greek. Or one can spend two weeks on Greek at an intensive summer school and start battling through the Greek New Testament.

These claims, in fact, are all enormously feeble, almost dishonest, excuses. I much prefer straight assertions like ‘I can’t see the point’, ‘I have better things to do’, ‘Languages bore me’, ‘I am no good at languages’ and ‘I do not care about history’.

We are past the days when it was assumed that you could become a multi-millionaire or a prime minister by learning to write Greek verse on the theme of Gladstone’s view of Home Rule for Ireland. We do not appear to be past the days, however, when the sort of prejudice that led to the execution of the Greek philosopher Socrates (399 BC) bids fair to do for a crucial part of our intellectual and cultural history – a history that becomes more, not less, important as the years go by.

HUMAN EXPERIENCE

It is said that the great scientist Michael Faraday, having given a demonstration of electromagnetism, was asked by Gladstone, ‘But what use is it?’ Faraday replied that he did not know, but guessed that Gladstone would one day be able to tax it. Gladstone, a classicist, asked a question about use. Faraday, a scientist, could not answer it. It is a telling, historically typical exchange.

Up till the invention of a technology that could allow the researcher to see far more than he could with normal eyesight (from Galileo’s telescope to lasers), science was nearly always seen as ‘useless’. The Greek philosopher Socrates tells us that as a young man he was very excited by questions about the nature and origin of the universe, but eventually concluded they were pointless. The big question was – how should we lead our lives? Petrarch, the fourteenth-century poet, scholar and father of the Renaissance, made the same point with exquisite clarity in ridiculing a scholastic opponent:

He has much to say about animals, birds, and fishes; how many hairs there are in a lion’s mane; how many tail feathers there are in a bird; with how many arms a squid binds a ship-wrecked sailor; that elephants copulate from behind and grow for two years in the womb…What is the use, I pray you, of knowing the nature of beasts, birds, fishes and serpents, and not knowing, or spurning, the nature of man, to what end we are born, and whence and whither we pilgrimage?

Petrarch, On His Own Ignorance

However, the dichotomy Petrarch imposed is false – just because we know about beasts and birds does not prevent us also asking questions about the meaning of life. Further, science and technology have revolutionized the way we live and understand the world – there can be no question of ignoring them now. Indeed, intellectually we have never lived in more exciting times, and they are exciting precisely because the pace of change is so fast and full of promise and the problems associated with it so demanding of response, and because modern communications open up the debate, for the first time in human history, to everyone. Whatever else our society is doing, it is not intellectually stagnating.

But the ethical, philosophical and human problems arising from the intellectual revolution do not go away – they multiply – and the question about how best to live one’s life remains to be answered. And we do not have to answer it, as Petrarch did, in religious terms, or speculate about metaphysical journeys. The value of living – one’s personal richness of life and usefulness to others – is just as valid a conceptualization.

Some would argue for a moratorium on virtually all technical development (bar medical and environmental problems) while we try as humans to make up for the reaction-deficit to everything that has happened and assimilate scientific advance into our ways of thinking about human priorities. I profoundly disagree. Problems are there to be solved. We do not grow if we do not push ourselves to the limit. But while public problems require public solutions, we cannot answer questions about the value of life in any other way than privately.

Here we need all the help we can get, and it seems to me transparent that the richer our understanding of the human condition, the richer and more satisfying our lives will be. If that is right, we are mad to jettison the perspectives of the past. The Greek philosopher Plato may not solve all, or any, of our problems: if he could, with for example his utopian vision of a society divided into three rigid classes – philosopher kings, soldiers and the rest – we would be in real trouble. That does not matter. We can lead only one short life, and experience only so much in it. History offers us, on a plate, thousands of years of vicarious human experience from all literate periods and societies. All we have to do is reach out and take it.

The fifth-century Greek historian Herodotus, as usual, got it right. He prefaced his magnificent history of the wars between Greeks and Persians (490–479 BC) with the words:

Herodotus from Halicarnassus [west coast of Turkey] composed this history so that time will not obliterate men’s achievements and the great and wonderful deeds of Greeks and non-Greeks alike will not go unrecorded...

Herodotus, Histories 1.1

We cannot get too much greatness and wonder, past or present.

I

CLASSICAL CONNECTIONS

700 BC to AD 500

THE ETRUSCANS

Ancient history is normally learned in disconnected chunks. The purpose of this chapter is to tie some of the more important chunks together. It is traditional to begin with the Greeks because they ‘came first’. I shall begin with the Romans.

It is important to distinguish at the outset between the original Romans – a small and unimportant people inhabiting a town called ‘Rome’, about 25 miles up the Tiber river from the sea, in a hilly volcanic region known as Latium (whence their language, Latin) – and the other (obviously) non-Roman tribes of Italy living elsewhere. This small town would come to rule much of the known world as far east as modern Iran, and have trade links with India and China.

Among these were the Etruscans, who in the eighth century BC were by far the most powerful people in Italy; their territory spread from Salerno (south of Rome) northwards almost as far as the Alps. The Romans called these people Tusci or Etrusci (compare their region of ‘Etruria’). They had rich commercial and cultural links with the Greeks, who had already planted colonies in the south of Italy and Sicily from the eighth century BC onwards. There was clearly Etruscan political and cultural (especially religious) influence in early Rome – the name Roma is of Etruscan origin – and Rome’s early kings (from Rome’s foundation in 753 BC) probably had Etruscan associations.

THE FOUNDING OF THE REPUBLIC

Rome’s rise to power began when they threw out the Etruscan king Tarquinius Superbus (‘the arrogant’) in 509 BC after, as tradition has it, Sextus Tarquinius, son of the king, raped the Roman noblewoman Lucretia. Book 1 of the Roman historian Livy’s history of Rome is full of gripping stories of this period: the twins Romulus and Remus raised by a wolf; the rape of Lucretia; how Horatius held the bridge against the Etruscan king Lars Porsena’s attempts to restore Tarquinius; the abduction of the Sabine women from the surrounding region, and so on.

The republic (res publica ‘public property, affairs, business’) developed slowly over hundreds of years: it began (Romans believed) with top Roman tribal leaders (patricians, once consultants to the king, now forming the Senate), advising the new, top elected officials (magistratûs – consuls, etc.). The historian Livy suggested that they were not in tune with the interests of the plebs (the ordinary people), but over time full political integration was achieved: plebs had their own assemblies making laws for all Romans, could be appointed to all the executive posts, and so on.

ROMAN EXPANSION

From the fifth century BC, Rome began aggressively to expand its power outwards, south and north, making alliances with or mopping up local tribes as it went. By 270 BC it was the dominant power in Italy, and by the first century BC Latin had become the lingua franca of the whole mainland. In this period it made various alliances with, surprisingly, the North African city of Carthage, which noted Rome’s spreading power across Italy in 509 (by which time Carthage had a foothold in Sicily and Sardinia, where Greeks already had interests), 348, 306 and 279 BC. These involved mutual support, mainly to hold off Greek and Etruscan interference in maritime trade and areas like Sicily.

But it did not all go smoothly. In 390 BC Rome was sacked by the Gauls (from modern France), who had an enclave in north-eastern Italy at this time. (This much-feared tribe continued to strike fear into Romans whenever they went on the move in this region.) The Italian Samnite peoples also took a great deal of bringing to heel.

Nevertheless it was during this period that Rome developed not just a powerful citizen army but also impressive diplomatic skills in learning how to defeat peoples and then bring them onside politically, commercially and socially.

PYRRHIC VICTORIES

In 280 BC Tarentum, a Greek colony deep in south-eastern Italy, called in Greek King Pyrrhus from north-west Greece over the water to help fight Roman expansion. Pyrrhus enjoyed some success, but after one too many Pyrrhic victories (with victories like these, he lamented, who needs defeats?), he retired back to Greece. This sent out a signal that Rome was a formidable new power.

THE (PUNIC) WARS AGAINST CARTHAGE

Rome now fought the Punic Wars against Carthage in north Africa. In the course of these wars, which finished with the third war in 146 BC, Rome made its entrance onto the international stage. In modern terms, its armies had now fought in Sicily, Africa, Albania, France, Spain, Greece and Turkey and acquired its first provinces: Sicily, Sardinia, Spain and Africa. It would continue these foreign incursions over nearly two hundred more years, in the process breaking up the republic and ushering in the imperial system.

Carthage was a settlement founded by Phoenicians in the ninth century BC. The wars are called ‘Punic’, because Punici was the best Romans could do with Phoinikes, the Greek for ‘Phoenicians’. The first war was fought over possession of Sicily and won by Rome in 241 BC, Sicily becoming its first province.

It was during this war that Romans learned military mastery of the sea against a far more experienced maritime opponent. When the first Punic War broke out, Romans had very little experience of fighting at sea, particularly against Carthage’s huge oared quinqueremes, with five decks of oars either side. One of these enemy vessels ran aground and fell into Roman hands, so the Romans used this as a model to build a fleet of 100 quinqueremes and twenty triremes (three decks of oars) in an incredible sixty days (later they built a fleet of 220 ships in forty-five days!). The rowers trained on benches set out on dry land to resemble the deck. Unable to match the Carthaginians for skill, they developed a tactic of ramming the enemy ships, locking the two together with a spiked gangway rammed down into the enemy ship, allowing Roman soldiers to pour over the gangway and fight a land battle at sea.

The second Punic War began in 218 BC when the Carthaginian general Hannibal, bent on revenge, established a base in Spain and famously took his army, complete with elephants, over the Alps and down into Italy from the north. His aim was to destroy Roman power by encouraging the Italian tribes to shake off the yoke of Rome. But he could not drive home his initial stunning successes at battles like Trasimene (217 BC) and Cannae (216 BC). The Roman general Publius Cornelius Scipio ‘Africanus’ then took the battle first to Spain and in 205 BC to Africa. Hannibal was forced to return to north Africa and was defeated at Zama in 202 BC. In 197 BC, Spain was divided into two Roman provinces.

Rome looked back on the defeat of Hannibal as its ‘finest hour’. It also learned the lesson of Hannibal. It had fielded massive citizen armies to keep Hannibal at bay, and it maintained those armies from now on as it began its rise to absolute dominance in the Mediterranean. It now turned its attention to the western Balkan area (229–219) BC, which had been interfering with Roman shipping in the Adriatic: providentially, for this area would prove useful in the ensuing war against Macedon (northern Greece), whose king, Philip V, realizing the power of Rome on his doorstep, had been an enthusiastic supporter of Hannibal. The Roman emperor Trajan would complete the job in the Balkans AD 109.

Here one point is worth making: Rome had a reputation for utter ruthlessness in battle, and that was the key to its success. But there was nothing pathological about it. Every enemy it met brought exactly the same mentality into battle. The Romans’ success was down to the experience of their army, the sheer numbers they could call on and the loyalty of their allied states, who knew a winner when they saw one. Inflict a massive defeat on Rome, and you would guarantee a massive response.

Our narrative now turns to early Greece.

PRE-ROMAN GREECE: COLONIZING THE MEDITERRANEAN

The Bronze Age Greek world was a palace civilization, with well-walled cities and powerful strongholds like Mycenae and Pylos. It ended, for reasons still not fully understood, c. 1100 BC. Around that time, many Greeks migrated eastwards from the mainland to the Aegean islands and the west coast of Asia Minor (modern Turkey).

Then in the eighth century BC migration from the Greek mainland spread Greek speakers westwards: first to Corcyra (Corfu), then on to the south of Italy starting around Naples and down to Sicily (where, as we have seen, Carthage already had a foothold). Land shortage or a desire to set up trading posts or find better agricultural land might have been among the reasons. Later, this whole area was known as Magna Graecia (‘Great Greece’). In about 700 BC the poet Homer composed his mighty epics of a Trojan War (Iliad) and Odysseus’ return to his homeland after it (Odyssey), both looking back to that ‘palace’ civilization half a millennium earlier, though with what historical accuracy it is very hard to tell.

About 630 BC Greeks migrated to Cyrene in North Africa, and from 600 BC onwards to Marseille (Massilia) in modern France and Emporiae (‘Tradersville’) in north-eastern Spain. Slightly later, existing Greek settlements in Asia Minor sent out settlements north to Byzantium and on through the Dardanelles strait into the Black Sea (Crimea in the north and Trebizond in the south). So by 580 BC, there were Greek speakers all round the Mediterranean and Black Sea, ‘like frogs around a pond’, in Plato’s vivid phrase.

THE NEAR EAST AND THE GREEK ACHIEVEMENT

During this period, the foundations of the Greek intellectual, artistic and literary achievement were laid – not on the Greek mainland so much as around the Aegean Sea on the Greek-occupied islands and the coast of Asia Minor, and Magna Graecia. Homer (c. 700 BC) came from the coastal region of western Asia Minor, and the poet Sappho (c. 600 BC) from the island of Lesbos. Of the philosophers, Thales (c. 585 BC) came from Miletus on the western coast of modern Turkey; Heraclitus (c. 500 BC) from Ephesus, also on the west coast of Turkey; Pythagoras (c. 510 BC) from the island of Samos; Parmenides (c. 460 BC) and Zeno (c. 450 BC) from Elea (southern Italy); Empedocles from Acragas (c. 450 BC), modern Agrigento in Sicily, and so on.

It cannot be insignificant that the great civilizations of the Near East exerted a strong influence on the thinking of these Eastern Greeks. Indeed, in the eighth century BC the Greeks developed from the Phoenicians (inhabiting roughly modern Lebanon) the world’s first vowel and consonant alphabet, from which the Latin alphabet, and so the English alphabet and most of the world’s alphabets, are derived. This enabled the Homeric epics to be written down and the West’s first lyric poetry – Sappho, in particular – to be recorded: a moment of enormous significance.

Further, there are literary as well as philosophical connections between Greece and the East at this time (see M.L. West’s monumental work on the subject, The East Face of Helicon). The associations between the epic of the ancient Mesopotamian king Gilgamesh (c. 2600 BC) and Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey are well documented. One of Sappho’s most famous poems is the one in which she listed the physical symptoms she experienced when she looked at a certain woman:

Speech fails me,

my tongue is crippled, a subtle fire

is straightway running beneath my skin,

with my eyes I see nothing, and my ears buzz,

the sweat pours down me, a trembling

seizes my whole body, I am greener

than grass; I seem to myself little short of dead.

Sappho, 31.7–16

Here is a Babylonian poem in which the speaker prays for deliverance from an evil demon:

My eyes bulge but see not, my ears are open but hear not;

my whole body has been gripped by weakness,

a stroke has fallen upon my flesh;

stiffness has seized my arms, debility has fallen upon my knees;

my feet have forgotten how to move;

[a seiz]ure has overtaken me, I suffocate in a collapsed state:

signs of death have clouded my face.

M.L. West, The East Face of Helicon, p. 527

Is the similarity mere coincidence? West commented, ‘Half a dozen similar passages could be quoted.’

CITY-STATES AND ‘CLASSICAL’ GREECE

It is important to emphasize that at this period Greece was never a political unity: the individual city-states that developed out of the aristocracies of eighth century BC such as Athens, Sparta, Corinth, Thebes, etc. were free, proud, autonomous, highly competitive and rarely stopped squabbling. They were united only in that they all spoke dialects of Greek and worshipped many of the same gods.

Again, owing to the survival of so much of its literature, what we know specifically as ‘classical Greece’ is in fact not Greece at all but the city-state of Athens. Athens was the home of the great fifth- to fourth-century cultural leap, a creative and refining development of the work of earlier Greek thinkers and artists of the East.

Some of the names to conjure with are Herodotus (from Bodrum

– Greek Ionia – in western Turkey, and a great admirer of Egypt), Aeschylus, Sophocles, Thucydides, Euripides and Hippocrates (from Cos), Socrates, Phidias, Plato and Aristotle (from Stagira in northern Greece). But whatever its ultimate explanation, this ‘leap’ was surely given impetus by the Athenian Cleisthenes’ invention of radical democracy in 508 BC (see Chapter 4) and the defeat of the invading Persians (in the Persian Wars) in 490–479 BC, in which Athens played a leading part – an event whose cultural significance has been likened to the defeat of the Spanish Armada. It was now that Athens began to develop as a marine superpower, building up a fleet to control an Aegean Empire that would bring them great wealth and prestige. One of the results was the Parthenon, built to replace the earlier temple burnt down by the Persians during their attack on Athens.

Between 480 and 276 BC, there were no fewer than eight conflicts between Greeks and Carthaginians over control of Sicily. The first (the battle of Himera) was said to have taken place on the same day as the battle of either Thermopylae or Salamis in 480 BC.

FROM SPARTA TO ALEXANDER THE GREAT

But Athens’ glory years were not to last. In 431 BC a conflict that would last twenty-seven years broke out with Sparta, described by the contemporary historian Thucydides in his magnificent History of the Peloponnesian War. It included a failed attempt by Athens to restore its financial situation by taking Sicily, and ended with Athens’ defeat in 404 BC. A period of further inter-city-state fighting across Greece ensued, with the Persians regularly invited in to hold the balance of power.

That was all to come to an end when Philip II, king of Macedon, set out to conquer his neighbour to the south with his new-style, highly mobile, essentially professional army. In 338 BC he defeated the free Greek states to become master of the Greek mainland, which he controlled with his own viceroys and the help of friendly regimes.

He now set his eyes on Persia (modern Iran), under the pretence of revenge for the Persian wars of 490–479 BC, and demanded that the Greek states join him in this campaign. He had even sent a mission across the Dardanelles strait into Persian territory, but he was assassinated in 336 BC. His son, Alexander the Great (then aged 20), decided to finish the job.

ALEXANDER’S CONQUESTS

Though many Greeks regarded Macedonians as uncultured oiks, Alexander was determined to show just how good a Greek he was (after all, his hero was Homer’s Achilles and he had been taught for a while by none other than Aristotle). Picking up the flag of his father’s campaign of revenge, he set out in 334 BC and, sweeping all before him, marched into Egypt and across Turkey, Iraq and Iran, planting Greek cities as he went. He took Greek culture – or at least a Greek army – as far as Afghanistan, Pakistan and Kashmir. In fact the ‘cities’ he planted (perhaps as few as nine, as against the seventy or so claimed by some ancient sources) were more like fortified outposts in hostile territory.

But it was a short-lived triumph. Returning from the East, and with his eyes now on the riches of Arabia, Alexander fell ill (or was poisoned?) and died in Babylon in 323 BC. This moment marks the end of the ‘classical’ age and start of the ‘Hellenistic’ age. But the main result of Alexander’s campaign was that Greeks now had interests in vast stretches of the East as far as Pakistan, all of which they gradually lost over the next three hundred years.

It was about now that the Greek Pytheas made a circumnavigation of Britain (which he called Pretannike, whence ‘Britannia’). He informs us that the south-eastern corner was called Kantion: Kent.

GAMES OF THRONES

In the course of his campaigns Alexander had left his own nominated Macedonian warlords in charge of the separate regions he had conquered. At his death in 323 BC, these warlords turned themselves into autonomous ‘successor’ (Greek diadokhoi) kings of the territories to which he had assigned them. Perhaps the best known is Ptolemaeus (Ptolemy), Alexander’s regent in Egypt, who became King Ptolemy I of Egypt, creating a line of Ptolemies of whom the last was the Cleopatra. In typically Greek fashion, the separate warlords all began fighting each other in an attempt to expand the territory they controlled.

By the third century BC, four successor-kings had established themselves fairly securely: the Ptolemies in Egypt; Seleucus, followed by his son Antiochus I, in the vast area from Asia Minor (Turkey) to central Asia; Antigonus II in Macedon/Greece from 277 BC; and the sons of Attalus (Attalids) in Pergamum (west coast of Asia Minor) from 241 BC.

THE CULTURAL CONTINUUM

But Greeks did not stop being Greeks merely because of the political upheavals of the times they lived through, whether brought about by Persians, Macedonians or (as it would turn out) Romans. The respect in which Athens was held was too great for that. They did not stop building or writing or thinking. Enormously influential philosophies were created. In Athens, for example, Stoicism was invented by Zeno (d. 263 BC) and Epicureanism by Epicurus (d. 270 BC) (see Chapter 10). The Ptolemies turned Alexandria in Egypt into a cultural centre to rival Athens, luring the best Greek literary, scientific and medical researchers in the Mediterranean with their cash and facilities to work at the magnificent museum.

This Mouseion, literally a temple to the muses, goddesses of culture, was established c. 280 BC