Tom Payne welcomes an engaging
celebration of the Greek civilisation that manages to be both an introduction
and a reassessment
By Tom Payne
Imagine if you were writing a
history of Europe over, say, the past 600 years. There would be a chapter on
Spanish domination, then French, then British, with a long, reflective look at
the land that eventually became Germany. But then imagine you wanted to
demonstrate that all these nations somehow represented a European character.
Would we seem adventure-loving? Canny? Phlegmatic? Efficient? The question
seems impossible to answer.
Edith Hall has set herself a
question that’s a little easier, but only just. Can we identify characteristics
that are quintessentially Greek, and somehow consistent from the time Mycenaean
civilisation emerged on the mainland (in the mid-16th century BC) to the point
of no return for the Christianity that had ousted the Greek gods by the end of
the fourth century AD? Yes, argues Hall, and she goes further, by offering 10
traits: these Greeks were seagoing, suspicious of authority, individualistic,
inquiring, open-minded, witty, competitive, they prized excellence, they were
articulate, and loved pleasure.
Then she gives groups of Greeks
a moment on the stage, in chronological order, and each takes it in turn to
demonstrate one of these qualities. So the Mycenaeans are the pioneering
voyagers; the Ionians are the inquirers, because quirks of their geography,
such as rivers whose silt kept changing the coastline of Asia Minor, gave them
plenty of phenomena to explain; the Spartans represent the wit; Alexander the
Great’s Macedonians, with their internecine courts and endless power struggles,
reveal the Greeks’ competitive nature; and so on. The Athenians are special, it
turns out – they demonstrate pretty much everything it means to be Greek.
She makes this new history of
ancient Greece seem like a kind of concerto for orchestra, with different
instruments picking up the big themes and handing them on to others. But Hall’s
writing is too naturally engaging for the book to be stuck for long with
essay-like treatments of sometimes arbitrary ideas. Yes, there are moments when
she needs to make digressions – for example, Aristotle has to appear among the
Macedonians, even though his writings can make him seem temperamentally
Athenian – but the reader quickly comes to appreciate the sweep and scholarship
of Hall’s project.
One thing Hall does splendidly
is introduce less appreciated Greeks, and here, the search for the right souls
to embody the characteristics can lead to rewarding shifts in emphasis. So she
gives curmudgeonly Hesiod equal space alongside Homer; she throws a spotlight
on the shrewd sceptic Xenophanes, about whom we read as much here as we do
about Plato; there are 360-degree appraisals of Pythagoras, and the geniuses
who were Eratosthenes (who was only 50 miles out when he calculated the
circumference of the Earth) and Galen. These portraits are all the richer for
the context Hall provides – it deepens like an Ionian coastal shelf throughout
the book.
So Introducing the Ancient
Greeks pulls off the trick of being at once a genuine introduction, of the sort
students will avidly welcome, while also providing timely reassessments of the Greeks
for readers who thought they knew the ancients. From the start she wants to
praise Greek achievement without making them seem like the only civilised
people in the Mediterranean world – and as the author of Inventing the
Barbarian (1989) she is quick to credit, for example, the Babylonians with
discovering Pythagoras’s theorem long before Pythagoras did.
One consequence is that the
book is less beholden than others to the notion that we owe our own
civilisation almost exclusively to the ancient Greeks. Indeed, her book closes
with lines that end up in the mouth of the Delphic oracle, as if the gods are
writing themselves out of existence: “Apollo has no chamber any more, and no
prophetic bay-leaves, / No speaking spring. The water that had so much to say
has dried up completely.”
It’s an unusual end to a book
celebrating the ancient Greeks – it makes them seem like a wonderful episode
from the past rather than pioneers who bequeathed us so much. But throughout,
Hall exemplifies her subjects’ spirit of inquiry, their originality and their
open-mindedness – she even finds good things to say about those artless
murderous bastards, the Spartans. And in doing that, when the place of classics
in our education system seems ever shakier, she reminds us of how civilising
and humanising a study of the ancients can be.
306pp, Bodley Head, Telegraph
offer price: £16.99 (PLUS £1.99 p&p) 0844 871 1515 (RRP £20, ebook £11.99).
Call 0844 871 1515 or see books.telegraph.co.uk
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