Recommended Reading
The Classical World - An Epic History from Homer to Hadrian (printed in The Tablet 2005)
by Robin Lane Fox (Allen Lane)
There's nothing like an Epic History for bringing on bouts of delicious lofty ennuie. Even Pyrrho who lived through one of history's most exciting chapters, the long march to the shores of the Indus with Alexander the Great, concluded as a result - or so the legend goes - that "nothing could be known at all" and so founded the school of Scepticism. He had seen too much and it made him lose his powers of assertion. The Macedonian kings had unleashed upon the world an unashamed "dynamic of glory, gain and conquest". No wonder then, that in all this turmoil when rival dynasts all claimed to be "Liberators", Epicureanism and Stoicism and were also born. Epicurus retreated into his garden. What could one do after all but "cultiver notre jardin"? Zeno of Citium took to the colonnades, (the Stoa). The only real freedom available in this storm-tossed life, he said, is mastery of oneself, or, in other words, virtue. The fatuity of freedom as a battle-cry, and the cyclical nature of political revolutions, from aristocratic clique to tyranny to oligarchy to democracy - which reverts inevitably to monarchy, was never more sonorously summed up than by Byron's Childe Harold: "Tis thus the mighty fall, There is the moral of all human tales. / 'tis but the same rehearsal of the past. First freedom and then glory; when that fails, / wealth, vice corruption, barbarism at last".
Robin Lane Fox is not inclined to be sonorous like a Gibbon or a Byron, even though he takes on the reverberating themes of Freedom, Justice and Luxury. The unfurling through history of these elusive abstract nouns sets a discursive stamp on this book. Though broadly chronological, it is not a straightforward narrative and will probably be more useful to those who already have some grip on the events described. Anecdotes are often sketched in but not fully told, which leaves a tantalizing blur and some details are perversely left out. The story, for instance, of Curius Dentatus, that parsimonious Roman exemplar, is more amusing if you include the boiled turnips he was eating when he shooed away the bribing Samnite envoys. Hence the iconic significance of this homely dish for killjoys like Cato.
However, this book offers a very beguiling overview, with reassessments of conventional opinions, up-to-date bibliographies and notes attached to each chapter, excellent maps and illuminating commentaries on well-chosen illustrations. Lane Fox writes with humour and urbanity. Aristotle's main contribution to Alexander's education was his "awful sense of geography" - the idea that the edge of the world could be seen from the Hindu Kush. Pericles was the "first" recorded man to kiss his girlfriend passionately when he left or entered the house; Pompey the "first" to leave love-bites in his mistress' flesh. Theophrastus, father of botany, was the "first" who "literally buried himself in his garden". The jokes often strike a bold contemporary note. Hadrian had a policy of "global-walling". The Arcadians dug up a dinosaur and proclaimed they had found Orestes' bones, or rather, "Orestesaurus Rex". The Macedonian generals who opposed Alexander's policy of "multiculturalism" are called "Asian-sceptics".
This is history written by a man who, famously, knows at first hand what a cavalry charge is like, and there is plenty of horse business. Lane Fox is engagingly vehement. The Aphrodite of Praxiteles set the "ideal type" of feminine beauty with her small breasts, wide hips, and " body-type which was well-covered and not a skinny modern aberration"; Alexander's most lethal troopers were his father's sexagenarian shield bearers, a pleasing "refutation of our modern ideas of old age". The Persians' habits of impaling, flaying alive, or mutilating ears and noses are "utterly beastly" and the Spartans are "detestable" with their "superb infantry" marching "in step to music, ... chanting the repulsive verses of the poet Tyrtaeus".
Cardinal moments, resonating echoes of Homer and premonitions of the future Hadrian are flagged up in helpful and thought-provoking ways. In "Alexander Homer found his most avid over-interpreter". King Pyrrhus of Epirus, the first man to introduce elephant warfare into Italy, was another such Achilles. Achilles loved Patroclus, Alexander Hephaestion, Hadrian his Antinous. One begins to realize that Achilles weeping over dead Patroclus was the ancient world's equivalent of the "Mater Dolorosa". Tears flowed in abundance over fallen friends and, of course, enemies; Caesar wept for Pompey, Octavian for Mark Antony. Hadrian, the philhellene on his grand tours of the empire in the 120s -30s shed sentimental tears on the tomb of Epaminondas the Theban and his boy lover. Less susceptible to the lacrimae rerum is the tribe of Odysseus - the talkers and wily ones who stepped adroitly in and out of camps: Themistocles, Demosthenes, Hannibal, Cicero - all more recognizably human than the great Achilles.
Whoever wilts at the contemplation of these nine hundred years of power-hungry turbulence will sympathize with those free spirits who, like Socrates, or Pyrrho, or Diogenes, nibbled at the weed of "non-attachment" and were destined - as Cyril Connolly put it - "like stumps of phosphorous in the world's wood, each to give forth his misleading radiance." Theorists were often banished from democratic cities in Greece because of their dubious connections with tyrants and their obnoxious utopias. But in the Roman Empire, they came to represent freedom in so far as a Stoic, Cynic or Epicurean was likely to be subversive. So Rome also, was regularly purged of its philosophers. Nonetheless Hadrian probably fancied himself one of those "philosopher kings". Always struggling to keep barbarism at bay, he was a classicizing, wall-building Epicurean whose villa at Tivoli was a "cultural theme park". Like Alexander he made ritual sacrifices to the Outer Ocean, not by the Indus but somewhere near Newcastle upon Tyne. Geography still had some way to go.
Noonie Minogue
Nov 2005
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