Mary Beard and Paul Cartledge are twin giants of Cambridge University classics, she bestriding Roman history, he Greek. With very different styles, they share a commitment to broadening interest in their subjects; hence the (coincidental) publication of these two volumes aimed at the non-specialist. Beard, with characteristic earthiness, even suggests that her effort might find a happy home next to the toilet
It would do both these books an injustice, though, to suggest that either presents scholarship watered-down. If they share an approach, it is one of skepticism. Both authors are keen to quash that oft-repeated canard of the lazy popularizer, that we are “just like the Greeks/Romans.” Antiquity, says Beard, is “very different in almost every possible respect” from our own times. For Cartledge it is “frankly alien, desperately foreign.” Rather, both authors want to map the gulf that separates the modern “us” from the ancient “them,” while acknowledging that “they” can illuminate our times, often by making strange our own mores.
In her volume of miniatures taken from her Times Literary Supplement blog, Beard describes giving a talk in a prison on the subject of gladiators. One of the inmates jokes that had he been an ancient Roman, he might have ended up in the arena. Which leads Beard to think about the oddness of our own modern habit, largely alien to the ancients, of imprisoning criminals, and to speculate that in 2,000 years time incarceration may look as weird as gladiatorial combat does to us. But we take prison for granted — as Pindar said: “custom is king.”
Pindar, the lyric poet born in Boeotia in around 518 BC, was commissioned by rich and famous Greeks from Thrace to Libya and from Sicily to Turkey. Cartledge’s program in his fascinating book is to press home the point that ancient Greece was not an easily definable landmass and scatter of Aegean islands, but a people spread from Spain and the south of France to the Black Sea, north Africa and the coast of Turkey, linked by language and above all by the concept of the polis, which can only clumsily be translated as “city state.” (It is the word from which our “politics” derives.) Cartledge puts attention-grabbing Athens in its place, giving it one chapter out of 11. Each focuses on a different polis, starting with Knossos, whither Greek-speakers arrived in about 1450 BC, and finishing with Byzantium, a culturally Greek city until Ottoman conquest in 1453.
There are many pleasures to be had along Cartledge’s mind-broadening route through time and space. In his chapter on Massalia (Marseilles) he argues that the Greeks brought vines to France (usually attributed to Etruria or Rome); in “Syracuse” he reminds us that here was a city astonishing in its power, size and wealth, with, for a time, a healthy democracy; by way of Alexandria he notes that the Greek polis got as far as modern Afghanistan and Iran in the wake of Alexander the Great.
The cosmopolitan mobility of these ancient Greeks may be exemplified by the so-called Vix Krater — a 1.6m-high wine-mixing bowl, probably Spartan-made, that came to France via Massalia (a polis founded by settlers from what is now Turkey) and ended up in Burgundy, buried with a Celtic princess. Cartledge also dispatches many a myth — such as the idea that the Mycenaean Greeks have much to do with the Homeric epics, a mistaken notion popularized when Heinrich Schliemann claimed to have “gazed on the face of Agamemnon” when he excavated a beautiful golden mask in a Mycenaean grave from about 1650 BC.
A modern equivalent of the “face of Agamemnon” might be the Roman sculpted head that turned up in the Rhone last year, which was widely reported as depicting Julius Caesar. (“Come off it,” countered skeptical blogger Beard.) Her collection of sharply observed, often hilarious slices of academic life (Profile) ranges from the apparently trivial (the joys of cocktail-making; why it took the fellows of Newnham College, Cambridge, three years to acquire a coffee machine) to the crucial (proto-racism in the ancient world; why Latin matters). Gamely, some of the comments in response are included, although this reader, for one, is more inclined to agree with the erudite “regulars” such as Michael Bulley and Oliver Nicholson than with the person who advised: “Stick to making jam, Mary.”
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