John R Hale: Lords of the Sea: The Triumph and Tragedy of Ancient Athens

From Literary Review June 2010

Paul Cartledge reviews

Lords of the Sea: The Triumph and Tragedy of Ancient Athens

By John R Hale (Gibson Square 395pp £17.99)

In June 1993, to mark the notional 2,500th anniversary of the birth of democracy, a reconstruction of an ancient Athenian warship paid a symbolic visit to the Palace of Westminster: the Mother of Democracies meets the Mother of Parliaments. Possibly. At any rate, those of us who stood that day upon Westminster Bridge could feast our eyes on an avatar of one of the ancient Greek world’s most remarkable manufactures: the trireme, or three-banked oared warship, a glorified racing eight (but with over twenty times that number of oarsmen) and guided missile ramming-machine, as reconstructed according to British plans and finance and Greek craftsmanship. It was several hundreds of these weapons, in the hands mainly of Athenian citizens, that triumphantly gored and floored a many times larger Persian fleet at Salamis in 480 BC, thereby saving a pioneer version of democracy or even, on one view, Western civilisation itself. Tragedy followed much later, in defeat at sea for Athens first by the Spartans (twice over, and with Persian money…), then by some of Athens’s own allies, and finally, decisively, by the Macedonian kingdom then ruled by the immediate successors of Alexander the Great. (The reconstructed trireme is perhaps rather humiliatingly named Olympias, after Alexander’s mother.)

Despite its rather emotive title, John Hale’s debut book is a largely even-keeled retelling of Athenian naval history from 483 to 322 BC. It is based, not always quite as solidly as the author strives to suggest, on ancient literary sources such as Thucydides (but also Cornelius Nepos), on archaeological discoveries (though not, and not for the author’s want of trying, on finds of actual preserved warships), and on surveys of the islands, coasts, channels and seas in which Athenian mariners operated and fought their battles. Those battles include Cyzicus (410 BC), Arginoussai (406 BC), and Aegospotami (405 BC), to the understanding of which Hale justly claims to have made novel and independent contributions. But his book is not strictly speaking a history of the Athenian navy during that century and a half. Rather, it a history of Athenian democracy in so far (which for Hale is very far, indeed pretty much totally) as the fate of that pioneering institution was linked to the development of Athens’s navy in the momentous era when the fast trireme was the ship of the line.

The author, who hails academically from Yale, Cambridge (England) and Louisville, has a rattling good yarn to spin and is very well qualified to tell it. Given the intrinsic importance and interest of his subject, therefore, one could only wish that his book might be recommended, with confidence, to the sort of readership the author has in mind – a general lay reading public, especially that hardcore section of it perennially fascinated by matters military, and some more professionally committed students of ancient Greek and Middle Eastern history. Members of a seagirt nation such as ours, indeed, for whom the navy is the senior service, might be expected to evince a particular interest in a work of this character. But, alas, the good ship Lords of the Sea proves to be a leaky vessel, the flaws in whose design and execution constantly threaten to hole if not capsize it.

Hale’s view of classical Greek history from the rowing bench gives us the face and very much more than that of ancient naval battle. There was no rum, some sodomy, and no lash for the average trireme oarsman; but buckets of tears, sweat, and other bodily fluids poured from him as he coped with tholepin, loom and bilge water, and he was vulnerable as few others in history have been to the pains and indignities of callused palms, blistered buttocks, even anal fistulas. Yet oddly enough all this suffering in the cause of Athenian democracy and Greek freedom from Persian domination called forth nothing but contempt from superior horsey or hoplite (heavy infantry) types like Plato. Why, trireme oarsmen backwatered away from the enemy, and so far from looking him in the eye they faced away from him, and most of them wouldn’t have been able to see the enemy anyway even if they’d been facing forward, entombed and nearly blinded as they were below decks. Moreover, ordinary Athenian sailors had this unfortunate habit of thinking and behaving democratically, acting on the conceit that all Athenian citizens were created equal and equally free. Aristophanes was as quick to join in the fun of Platonic navy-baiting as the über-democrats Pericles and Demosthenes were keen to hymn Athens’s naval might. All this and more Hale brings out very well, with admirable empathy as well as sympathy.

But these merits can’t hide the too numerous cracks and fissures in his craft. These range from mere typos, other misspellings and relatively innocuous slips and blips (for some of which the publishers must take their share of the responsibility) to numerous chronological inexactitudes and some full-on screaming howlers. I counted dozens of them, including: kratos (the ancient Greek for ‘power’) misspelled kratis; a misunderstanding of ‘avatar’; the Thebans were not Dorians; there were (reportedly) 700 Thespians at Thermopylae, not 1,000; the ancient Greek for ‘weakness’ is malakia, not malaria; it was four, not six, years after the assassination of Ephialtes that the office of archonship at Athens was opened up to hoplite citizens; Aristophanes did not only ‘rarely’ prove a favourite with Athenian audiences, nor is he known to have been convicted and fined by a jury; ‘adouring’ (for ‘adoring’); Socrates was not accused of ‘heresy’; Isocrates did not teach rhetoric at the Lyceum; Alexander died aged thirty-two, not thirty-six; the Battle of Lepanto was fought in 1571, not 1471 – and so on. And then there are the oversimplified inferences from naval to other key aspects of Greek and Athenian life, and the underplaying of the fourth century BC as opposed to the fifth – in the service presumably of a certainly often gripping narrative storyline.

In short, there is still plenty of sea room for a new one-volume history of the Athenian navy in its democratic political context from 483 to 322 BC, one that not only gets its facts right (so far as they can be ascertained) but also one that deals with the mundanities of the nautical life onshore as well as on the not normally very high seas, and that places Athenian naval matters in their more proper social and political perspective. And for the time being readers will mostly be better served by consulting a combination of Barry Strauss’s exhilarating recent account of The Battle of Salamis (‘The Naval Encounter that Saved Greece – and Western Civilization’) and the suitably three-oared The Athenian Trireme (‘The History and Reconstruction of an Ancient Greek Warship’) by J S Morrison, J F Coates and – Cambridge University Boat Club’s Oxonian nemesis – Boris Rankov.

Ferdinand Mount: FULL CIRCLE: How the Classical World Came Back to Us

TWO REVIEWS HERE:

From Literary Review, June 2010

Peter Jones reviews FULL CIRCLE: How the Classical World Came Back to Us, by Ferdinand Mount

Simon and Schuster 438pp £20

To declare an interest: for some years now I have been writing an occasional column in The Spectator whose aim is to throw ancient light on modern problems. What constantly strikes me is that, while our problems are frequently the same, the way the ancients approached them was very different. Ferdinand Mount, however, as he firmly emphasises in his introduction, finds himself impressed by the evidence for the opposite position, i.e. ‘how much we are like [the Greeks and the Romans], how in so many ways, large and small, trivial and profound, we are them and they are us’. It does not take an intellect of Aristotelian dimensions to foresee that I will broadly disagree.

Mount’s formulation of the thesis pinpoints the problem. ‘Greeks and Romans’ span for us the historical (as opposed to pre-historical) period c. 1400 BC to AD 500. If you had said to a Roman that he was a Greek, he would have thought you deranged. How we, two thousand years on, can ‘be’ either Greeks or Romans (let alone both), culturally, socially, intellectually or in any other way, defies my comprehension. After all, if it were true, Mount’s chapter on science would have to demonstrate that ‘we’ had abandoned the scientific method of testing hypotheses to demonstrate their truth by repeated experiment, let alone the technology to enable us to see what is otherwise invisible (and any other technology), and instead sat in our armchairs drawing conclusions from untested hypotheses that we had thought up using only our eyes and brains. True, Greeks invented atomism by this method, but the earth-air-fire-water theory of matter in fact ruled the roost for two thousand years (even the great Aristotle believed this lunacy). It awaited the 17thC French Jesuit Pierre Gassendi to alert contemporary thinkers to the explanatory possibilities inherent in atomism, and in 1803 John Dalton founded modern atomic theory. As for medical science, well, we would have to revert to a practice that knew nothing of germs (Pasteur 1878) or viruses (first isolated by Chamberland, 1884).

Further, Mount’s claim takes no account of small matters of politics, law, empire, education, finance, war, work, families, slavery, moral and ethical values, welfare states or revolutionary thinkers like Rousseau or Freud. Instead, he selects specific targets: the appetitive (baths, the gym, sex and food) and the cultural (science [!], religions, dialectic, fame, art and the natural world). That at least is sensible, but it rather undermines the all-inclusive thesis at the heart of the book.

So, yes, the Roman invented what has become our sauna, but in Rome it was the universal, social, leisure facility, for relaxing with chums before dinner, working out, striking deals, net-working, and so on. Whatever the modern sauna offers, it is not that. Yes, Greeks were passionate about the gym, as many men and women are today; but it was an exclusively upper-class male preoccupation, not for the purpose of body-building, let alone to feel the burn, but for social, educational and sexual purposes, and general health. Yes, the Greek cook Archestratus was a real foodie, exulting in strange and exotic recipes. But the ancients did not have the equivalent of our five-star restaurants—it was all done at home—and anyway they regarded cooks as menials. Yes, the ancients were as keen on fame as we are, but in the absence of TV, fame was dependent on actual achievement, not personality. Yes, Socrates invented dialectic, the intense exploration of ideas and search for enlightenment (if not truth) by question-and-answer in open, public debate, but today’s (and Today’s) equivalents are little but shouting matches. So even within the limited scope of Mount’s nominated targets, we are not Greeks and/or Romans, and they are certainly not us. Full stop.

So forget Mount’s thesis. Instead plunge straight into the baths in chapter one and read on, without any preconceptions about what Mount imagines he is doing. You will find a readable, stylish, expansive (sometimes, perhaps, too expansive), occasionally sharp and stimulating series of reflections raging widely over the modern world (roughly two-thirds of the book), using the ancients either as a springboard or default position. Take Mount’s chapter on religion. It consists of a swingeing attack on the evangelical atheism of Richard Dawkins and his acolytes, and a comparison with de rerum natura (‘On the Nature of the Universe’), the equally evangelical atheism of the Roman Epicurean philosopher Lucretius (1st C BC). That is a comparison well worth making, and Mount makes it very well, emphasising that what Dawkins is doing is very old hat indeed.

In fact, religion—or rather Christianity—is the insistent sub-text of the book. Time and again Mount reverts to contemplating the church in its early days, in Victorian times or in today’s world, usually in a tone of some regret about what has been lost or disfigured. That, I feel, is what the book is really about.

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From The Spectator June 5 2010
Philip Hensher reviews FULL CIRCLE, by Ferdinand Mount


Unexpected parallels between our age and another are a staple of the jobbing journalist’s trade. Usually coinciding with a major exhibition at the Royal Academy, such arguments tend to claim that there are a surprising number of similarities between, say, the Byzantine Empire and the way we live now. Despite the fact that these arguments often result from a brain-storming session round the conference table, there is usually enough there to sustain a page or so. Human nature does not change so much, and some very unexpected idiosyncrasies recur at regular intervals.

Ferdinand Mount has set himself a rather more ambitious task, and his argument is more intricate than usual. He suggests that the characteristic fads of the classical world have, in recent decades, come back to us without our recognising the fact. The Greek and Roman love of pleasure, indulgence, fantasy and opulence are recapitulated in some of the most characteristic statements of our time. Jade Goody, the ‘spa experience’, Cherie Blair’s New Age entourage and Damien Hirst all have their ancient-world originals. There is nothing new under the sun.

Some of the parallels that Mount draws are startlingly close. An ancient foodie like Archestratus, in his snobbery and his geographical precision about where to get the best fish sounds exactly like a modern magazine writer on the subject: ‘When you come to Miletus, get from the Gaeson Marsh a kephalos-type grey mullet and a sea bass . . . that is where they are best.’ The ancient obsession with tales of exotically themed dinners was revived in the 19th century by Grimod de la Reynière’s famous funerary dinner, and J. K. Huysman’s Black Dinner. Such exotic themes at the dinner table continue to this day, courtesy of Heston Blumenthal, who has indeed cooked Roman dinners on television.

Mount has no trouble in drawing parallels between the immense contemporary ‘spa’ industry, devoted, in its hideous favourite word, to ‘pampering’, and the colossal baths of antiquity. We are at least as fascinated in the fatuous cult of athletic fitness as the ancients, and to much less obvious purpose. Mount casts a beady eye over the principal revivers of physical fitness in the modern age, the militarising Germans, and then wonders what it is all for:

There is little that seems ‘bold’ and ‘merry’ about our obsession with keeping in shape. On the contrary, it seems a somewhat timorous and joyless pastime, a sign of our fear of death rather than of our readiness to confront life.

He ventures, too, into the question of sex, and discovers that the rise, since the 1960s, of casual promiscuity — the ‘zipless fuck’, the expression ‘no strings attached’ — is much more like an aspect of the ancient mindset than we usually suspect. To the question ‘Do you fancy a shag?’

Theocritus or Catullus . . . would have been quite unmoved, and responded simply: ‘Your place or mine?’ For sex is as natural as eating and drinking. Why should anyone think twice about an invitation to a decent restaurant?

Not everything goes quite so convincingly into the parallel:

Just as there is scarcely a remote pueblo or hill village that is unaware of Mick Jagger, so Mithras was a familiar cult figure to soldiers and the local natives in places as far afield as Austria and Slovenia and Caernavon and Hadrian’s Wall.

And other points in his argument are not real parallels, though often amusingly explored. It is true that hardly anybody in the ancient world read silently; when St Augustine habitually did so, it was remarkable enough to be worth commenting on. Interesting as this is, I don’t think it can really be brought into comparison with the late unlamented Labour government’s apparent policy to make public libraries as noisy as possible: ‘Learning is not all about quiet contemplation. I want to see libraries full of life, rather than quiet and sombre. Attractive buildings exuding a sense of joy’, as Andy Burnham put it. He wasn’t talking about reading out loud: he was recommending meaningless yacking.

Nevertheless, some very unexpected comparisons turn out to bear fruit. The multiplicity of spiritual choices in the Roman Empire around the time of the Antonine emperors sounds very modern:

You could believe in anything or nothing. You could put your trust in astrologers, snake-charmers, prophets and diviners and magicians; you could take your pick between half a dozen creation myths and several varieties of resurrection.

In our contemporary, think-for-yourself, spiritual supermarket, heavily influenced by an increasingly multi-cultural mix, pretty well the same is true. Apart from (as far as I know) snake-charmers.

Even the most characteristic phenomenon of our times, the descent of random and undeserved celebrity, has an exact parallel. The Emperor Hadrian met and fell in love with an obscure farmer’s son from Bithynia on the Black Sea, Antinous; when he drowned in the Nile, Hadrian ordered an empire-wide cult of his lover, and thousands of images survive. There was nothing at all remarkable about Antinous, as far as we know, apart from his beauty, but that was enough. Antinous, who became a god, would have perfectly understood the careers of Kate Moss and Jade Goody.

These parallels between the ancient world and ours are intriguing. But perhaps the richest and most suggestive part of the argument comes when Mount addresses what came between; the huge stretch of time separating the ancients from us, when the beliefs and practices of society seem extraordinarily remote from our way of thinking. One of the main claims of this book is that we have become detached from the 1500 years of Christian thinking, and the culture which succeeded the Romans is now much more peculiar to us than they are.

Certainly, the Christian attitudes to sex, to food, to questions of the body such as washing and exercise are now extremely exotic, not to say bizarre. Mount has no trouble at all finding exemplary figures of early Christian times who would now, unlike the heroes of antiquity, be treated as mentally ill. St Anthony ‘boasted that he had never washed his feet in his life,’ and most Christians believed that baptism was the only bath that mattered in their lives. As for sexual expression, ‘an Egyptian monk of the fifth century dipped his cloak into the putrefying flesh of a dead woman so that the smell might banish thought about her.’ Many early thinkers believed, like Augustine, that marital relations were a matter of ‘descending with a certain sadness’ to the act.

All this seems barking mad to us now, and modern-day attempts to reconcile our neo-Pagan practices with Christian culture have their comic side. Mount has discovered some wonderful gym-going Roman Catholics, who

pray while using the rowing machine. ‘At the rate of one word per stroke, rowing one mile on the machine takes me one Our Father and two Hail Marys.’

In a still more unlikely juxtaposition, deconsecrated chapels and churches have been turned into temples to the body cult. At Claybury, in Chigwell, the chapel of a Victorian mental asylum has been turned into a gymnasium and pool, neatly bringing together two very different sites of guilt, penance, reparation and purification.

Inevitably, the argument comes down to regret that, whether you compare us to the ancients or the Christian era, we seem somewhat lacking — the Baths of Caracalla were no doubt rather more of a contribution to civilisation than a suburban spa, and Antinous a more impressive figure than this week’s reality TV star.

Ours is classical-lite, the sensuous, this-worldly way of living without the gravitas that underpinned it. And without that underpinning, there is something a little flat about it all.

Ferdinand Mount’s ingenious polemic skewers any number of modern-day vanities, and takes us with wit and charm through many absurdities of the remote past.

Victor Hanson (ed.): MAKERS OF ANCIENT STRATEGY: From the Persian Wars to the Fall of Rome

From The Sunday Telegraph May 23 2010
Peter Jones reviews MAKERS OF ANCIENT STRATEGY: From the Persian Wars to the Fall of Rome, ed. by Victor Hanson
Princeton h/b 265pp £19.95

As one whose Vote for Caesar (Orion) argues that the classical world produced all sorts of stimulating responses to problems still with us, I strongly applaud these ten essays commissioned by Victor Hanson demonstrating how much we might still learn from ancient warfare.

Not that I agree with his central tenet that, since ‘human nature, which drives conflict, is unchanging’, new technologies have not made much difference to war as it has always been. Killing people was never a moral problem in the ancient world; these days even killing those attempting to kill you attracts in the West an orchestrated explosion of outrage that no ancient ever faced. If that is not a change in human nature, I do not know what is.

Again, there is something quite new about the calculation required in the use of a weapon so destructive (the atom bomb) that it can be deployed only against an enemy that does not have it.

But this collection does not need any over-arching theoretical justification. The essays either stand up or they do not. Those that succeed best—and there is only one obvious duffer—have something specific to say about specific conditions common to both ancient and modern warfare.

Take the unlikely topic of walls. As David Berkey points out, such ancient technology flourishes still, on the same control/protection principles: think of the security zones in Baghdad, the Israeli and Saudi walls, the USA-Mexico border, and the Gaza-Egypt underground barriers (and Berkey should have pointed out that the Israeli wall with its zoned approaches and crossing points uncannily imitates Hadrian’s).

But the big topic here is regime change, the nearest modern equivalent to ancient empire-building. Victor Hanson makes the basic point in relation to the Theban Epaminondas’s successful expulsion of Sparta from central Greece in the 4thC BC: a short, sharp, pre-emptive strike will not do the business unless you are prepared to make the lengthy post-war investment required to make it stick. Ian Worthington takes a slightly different view of Alexander’s vast, ramshackle empire. He puts its speedy collapse down to its size and cultural diversity; I would add the speed and randomness with which it was put together, and its failure to produce the sort of benefits, let alone social cohesion, that the Romans were able to generate. Susan Mattern’s essay on counter-insurgency is central on this vital issue: the Roman elites were expert at constructing economic and cultural relationships which reflected the interests, and therefore won the loyalty, of the powerful local elites in the territories they provincialised.

This is the key to preventing the urban conflict that John Lee discusses. Though ancient historians tend to concentrate on big set-piece battles or sieges, urban combat was hardly uncommon in the classical world, and is especially popular among terrorists today because it draws conventional armies into unconventional situations where non-combatants are at risk.

Lee points out that ancient theorists like Aeneas Tacticus argued that it was better to forestall urban warfare by very modern-sounding security controls: registering/confiscating weapons, identity tokens, keeping tabs on hotels and their guests, watching carefully over festivals and processions. As the ancients knew, local knowledge and awareness were crucial (remember American forces trapped in Mogadishu in 1993), and if they had to fight an urban battle, the whole population, women included, was mobilised. Likewise, as Aeneas emphasised, violent or careless mercenaries could inflame the situation; Lee tellingly cites the problems generated by private military contractors like Blackwater in Iraq.

Tom Holland strikes an equally relevant note in his beautifully written essay on the Persian empire, always the bad guy of pro-Greek western culture. In 539 BC, mighty Babylon, a city as old as time itself, fell to the upstart Persian Cyrus, who now ruled an empire extending from the Hindu Kush to the Aegean.

Cyrus’s contribution to empire-building was the insight that, after the bloody conquest, graciousness, emancipation and patronage were essential tools in persuading the conquered that their servitude was in fact a privilege. Later Persians under Darius were to add a powerful religious element to their self-image: the imperative, imposed by the god Ahura Mazda, to bring cosmic light and truth (thought not conversion) to the benighted peoples of the world. Such is the importance of imperial ideology and the place that religion might have in driving it.

At every point throughout this superb collection of essays, one cannot but reflect on Western engagements in far-off, alien places.