INVISIBLE ROMANS: Prostitutes, Outlaws, Slaves, Gladiators and Others by Robert C. Knapp

From the BBC History Magazine June 2011

INVISIBLE ROMANS: Prostitutes, Outlaws, Slaves, Gladiators and Others

By Robert C. Knapp

Profile Books h/b 320pp £20

If you like your information to come thick and fast without too much need to beetle the brow, this is the book for you. Robert Knapp, emeritus professor at Berkeley, California, has gathered together a vast amount of evidence about back-street Romans, clearly presented and well backed up with copious quotations from the sources. These feature inscriptions and letters in particular, but also folksongs, fables, books of jokes, legal digests, the Bible, novels, dream interpretations (‘to defecate in the temple, market place, public street or bath…portends the wrath of the gods, great disgrace and severe loss’) and so on.

His purpose is to get into the ‘mind-world’ of these invisible people. Taking each group in turn, he finds plenty of evidence to suggest that fear (of violence, exploitation, etc.), need (for everything from security to health), dependence (especially on family and friends) and hope (for better days) dominate their thoughts, with all the worries attendant on such concerns. The possibility that gods or fate might be on their side was a comfort, but there were no guarantees.

One can see why life was such hard going when one considers the statistics with which Knapp begins the story. In the Roman empire of 50-60 million people, there were perhaps 5,000 super-elite adult males with the wealth to qualify as Roman senators. Across the c. 300 established urban districts in the empire, there might be 30-35,000 very rich elite males. Those two groupings between them might have held 80% of the total wealth. That leaves 99.5% of the population to account for. Perhaps 25% of them could make a broadly sustainable living. They would include merchants, artisans, soldiers, peasant farmers who had done well, and those who lived off the elites, teachers, doctors, architects and so on.

Observe here that there was no prejudice against ‘work’ of the sort one finds among the leisured elites. Work was the only way to survive, and as Rome grew wealthier from its conquests, so the standard of living and the quality and range of goods rose. That needed a flexible labour-force. Knapp might have quoted the graffito ‘You’ve had any number of different job opportunities – barman, baker, farmer, at the mint, now you’re selling pots. Lick **** and you’ll have done the lot.’

Knapp has much of interest to say about women too, pointing out that, from the evidence we have (an important proviso), women do not appear to have felt themselves an oppressed class, nurturing secret aspirations for liberation. Letters from Egypt, for example, show strong-minded women fully in charge of their own business.

If the book has a weakness, it lies in the relentless piling up of examples, leading to somewhat repetitive conclusions. Some analysis of, for example, the tension between the elite’s image of a well-governed, just society and the reality of non-elite life might have been quite eye-opening: how did that affect the non-elite’s ‘mind-world’? But one certainly cannot complain about the sheer richness of the fare spread out before us.

John Timney

SONG OF WRATH by J.E.Lendon

From Literary Review March 2011

Peter Jones reviews

SONG OF WRATH: The Peloponnesian War Begins,

by J.E. Lendon

(Basic Books 566pp £25)

The ‘Peloponnesian’ War (431-404 BC) was fought between two of the most powerful of ancient Greek city-states, Athens and Sparta. In the summer of 424 BC, its contemporary historian, the Athenian Thucydides, recorded an Athenian assault on the town of Megara, a Spartan ally. It would have succeeded, had not the Spartan general Brasidas arrived. He was not allowed into the city, however, because ‘the Megarians were watching to see which side would win’. After some cavalry skirmishing, the two armies drew up for battle. Brasidas, on favourable ground, ‘did not have to run any risks ... and might win an unopposed victory.’ But neither side engaged. After a while the Athenians retreated, deciding that they ‘had achieved most of their objectives and did not want to run the risk of losing some of their best hoplites’, and Brasidas was at last welcomed into Megara.

It is with this story that Lendon begins his highly readable account of the first ten years of the Peloponnesian War down to the seven-year peace in 421 BC. Its purpose is to provide an example of the book’s thesis: that the war between Athens and Sparta was driven by—well, what? To read Thucydides’ account, one would naturally conclude ‘military self-interest’. Brasidas did not want to fight if he did not have to; the Athenians thought about it and decided it was not worth the candle. Who can blame them? The Spartans had the most fearsome land-army in the Greek world. So the Athenians came up with a baffling excuse about achieving their objectives and left. But this is not Lendon’s conclusion: he uses the incident to argue that it was honour that was at stake.

This strikes me as distinctly odd. If honour was indeed at stake, it is hard to see why the Athenians acted as they did: what on earth was honourable about slinking off? The fact that the Athenians justified their actions to themselves is neither here nor there. Honour is a matter, not of private or personal, but of public judgement, and if it was dishonourable to refuse battle, the Athenian view was irrelevant. Clearly, saving their skin came first. But there is another problem. Do we know how other Greeks viewed the Athenians’ retreat? The answer is ‘no’. They might well have thought it sensible. The Spartans were the most feared warriors of their day.

That is not to argue that Lendon is wrong in saying ancient Greeks put a very high value on ‘honour’. The Greek word, tîmê, means basically ‘evaluation’. For Homeric heroes it was the key to winning that immortal glory (kleos) that would result in their being remembered for ever. But it did not come at the price of one’s life. Only Romans and heroes of Germanic myth went in for suicidal gestures like that, unless one knew one’s time was up. The great exception is Achilles, who in the Iliad knows that, if he kills Trojan Hector (who killed his beloved Patroclus), he will die next. But that tells us everything about Achilles, nothing about other men.

Thucydides too is well aware of the importance of tîmê in Greek culture. But it is rare for him to highlight it; and when he does, it does not occur on its own as a definitive motive or explanation of events. In one important passage, for example, the Athenians explain that it was ‘fear most of all’, then tîmê and finally ‘self-interest’ that drove them to expand their empire. Tîmê, in other words, is just one of a number of reasons why men act as they do. When the Spartans sued for peace in 425 BC, they proposed an alliance, offering Athens virtually nothing but the chance to be equal with Sparta in tîmê. The Athenians rejected it. They had Sparta where they wanted it. Lendon argues that they were driven by the desire for even greater tîmê. But, to make a comparison, why does anyone want to win Wimbledon: the sheer pleasure of victory? Or of stuffing your opponent? The prize? Future earnings? Tîmê? How do you separate all this out? When the snooker player Ronnie O’Sullivan saw a chance for a maximum 147 clearance, he asked the referee if there was a prize for the feat. Informed there was not, he proceeded to clear the table, but not the final black (though he was eventually persuaded to sink it).

So the subject is not as cut and dried as Lendon often seems to make it. Nevertheless, he does admit that relations of tîmê between Greek states were not ‘neat and predictable’. Tîmê could not be measured precisely, not could one forecast what action by an enemy could be seen to threaten it and so invite a vengeful response. He agrees that Athens sometimes had more important things on its mind than how it looked to others.

After reviewing a Cambridge reprint of A.B. Cook’s monumental Zeus (1914-1940), Professor Colin Leach commented to me ‘one could disagree with every single one of his conclusions without in any way lessening the utility of the work’. That seems to me a judgement that could be well applied to Lendon. There is more to battle than strategy, technology and tactics. By foregrounding the cultural values that underpinned an ancient Greek’s mentality, Lendon offers an imaginative tool with which to examine Thucydides’ explanations for events and see whether they could not make better sense in a wider context. After all, as he points out, it was an analysis which a much later historian, the first century BC Sicilian Diodorus, deployed to explain Athens’ behaviour. It adds considerably to the value of Lendon’s account that he writes with persuasive clarity, tells a cracking story, makes some stimulating comparisons with current international politics and provides excellent glossaries, appendices and notes. So even if one has doubts about the overall thesis, this is still a book that is well worth reading and will provide a good deal of food for thought.

The Ancient Guide to Modern Life by Natalie Haynes

From The Guardian January 1 2011

Charlotte Higgins on what the Greeks and Romans did and didn’t do for us

When Natalie Haynes was a teenager, her head was turned. She read the second book of Virgil’s Aeneid, the Roman poet’s astonishing account of the fall of Troy. Instead of taking science A-levels and becoming a vet, she studied Latin, Greek and ancient history and took a degree in classics. Her passion for Virgil is still ardent. You should read Aeneid book four (the tale of Queen Dido’s fall) because, she exhorts in The Ancient Guide to Modern Life, it "is the most brilliant book of verse ever written, and it’s your own time you’re wasting if you decide to read something else instead".

But Haynes has more than enthusiasm to offer. As the title of her book implies, she wants to show what the ancient world has to offer us as a guide to living now. This is tricky territory. The ancient world looks as if it is populated by people "just like us", not least because it is the great minds of the classical world – Virgil, Homer, Plato, Cicero and the rest – who have informed so much of our intellectual inheritance, from the humanists onwards. Read certain love poems by the Roman writer Catullus, and you can almost hear him breathing, so close and immediate do the emotions that flood out of those words appear to be. But the worlds of classical Greece and ancient Rome are also irretrievably alien, separated from us by thousands of years, utterly foreign by way of everything from religion and ritual to their universal acceptance of a slave-based economy (even Spartacus believed in slavery, he just didn’t want to be one).

Haynes gets this, and writes rather well about the trap of seeing "ancient Rome as a toga party to which our invitation went astray". Recalling the opening sentence of LP Hartley’s The Go-Between ("The past is a foreign country"), she writes: "We tend to view Rome as though it were topographically, rather than temporally, separate from our world."

Unfortunately her awareness of the trap does not stop her from tripping into it from time to time. Ancient Athenian democracy, for example, had very little to do with our modern political system in Britain: the problem is that we have inherited the Greek word (the original meaning is "grip of the people", so it’s an idea with an inbuilt critique). Haynes seems to me to be too enthusiastic about Athenian democracy, which – even if it was retrospectively glorified in texts such as Pericles’s Funeral Oration– began as a pragmatic solution to a very real set of political problems that just happened to work out rather well for the family of its founding father. (The statesman Pericles and the gorgeous Alcibiades were both of the same family as Cleisthenes, the aristocrat credited with Athens’s democratic reforms.)

Sometimes the conclusions for modern life that Haynes draws from the ancient world can seem rather banal. Does the fact that Greek officials were paid a workman’s wage mean that modern politicians could usefully take a pay-cut? Will thinking about Plato’s theory of forms really make us hesitate when considering the purchase of a new electronic gadget? Does the fact that the emperor Caligula died at the hand of the head of the Praetorian Guard really teach us not to tease policemen? (Surely Haynes has her tongue in her cheek with that last one.)

For all that, as you’d expect from someone who made a career in stand-up comedy, Haynes is brilliant on writers such as Aristophanes and Juvenal. The Greek comic playwright’s most obvious successor, she reckons, is The Simpsons – "anarchic, satirical, parodic and political". The Roman satirist she unpicks with ravenous enthusiasm, loving him though he’s "dyspeptic, bigoted, racist and furious". A compelling passage describes Juvenal’s third satire, in which he dramatises his friend Umbricius’s decision to leave Rome and embrace the rural life in Cumae (not far from the ultra-fashionable seaside resort of Baiae, on the bay of Naples). The savage, witty accusations against Rome pile up: it is expensive, dangerous, there’s no work, it’s full of crooks and immigrants. So, will Juvenal move to the country too? No fear. Rome, for all its confusion and discomforts, its mess and chaos, is where Juvenal will stay. The Rome of the mind, as Haynes demonstrates, is still the place to be.

Charlotte Higgins’s It’s All Greek to Me is published by Short Books.

The Hemlock Cup: Socrates, Athens and the Search for the Good Life by Bettany Hughes

From The Independent, November 5 2010

Paul Cartledge reviews

The Hemlock Cup: Socrates, Athens and the Search for the Good Life, By Bettany Hughes

The shining names of Socrates, Plato, Aristotle and Archimedes have left a permanent mark in the annals of human civilization". These are not my words, but those of Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao, and they are unarguably persuasive. Not a bad achievement for a thinker who, in the case of Socrates, left behind not a single unquestionably self-authored word.

Bettany Hughes indeed seems irresistibly drawn to ancient-world characters who when – and if - not frankly mythical are deeply, irretrievably mythicised. Her earlier quest for an at least partly historical Helen of Troy (and Sparta) is followed here by another, almost as chimerical perhaps, for the historical Socrates. From the ancient Greek world's most beautiful woman to one of its self-acknowledgedly ugliest men is quite a step, but one that Hughes accomplishes without breaking stride or pausing for breath.

Her enormous energy and enthusiasm are infectious. She writes up a storm. At the end of the road we may not be any closer to certainty or closure on the biggest issues of Socrates's inordinately rich life and afterlife but, as with the search for the historical Alexander or Jesus, travelling hopefully is quite possibly as good, and as much fun, as arriving. The journey is the reward.

No one before Bettany Hughes, a highly accomplished communicator, has thought to weave Socrates's examined life into quite so rich and dense a tapestry of democratic Athens's teeming high-cultural and mundane experience. Socrates was born in 469BC, too young by at least a generation to experience the highlights of Marathon and Salamis but old enough to profit from the heady intellectual and political and cultural ferment that those victories against the invading Persian empire brewed up.

Athens had become the world's first democracy (of its own unique sort) in around 500; 50 years on, by the time Socrates came of age (officially in 451), the Athenian citizen masses had gained the confidence and had the wit to accept advice from Pericles and many other lesser mortals. They voted funds for the Parthenon and the tragic dramas of Aeschylus and Sophocles as well as for a virtually non-stop, and mostly successful, series of campaigns on land and sea against Greeks and non-Greeks alike.

Readers will be drawn by Hughes's beguiling prose into exploring the highways and byways of Athens's topography. She begins programmatically with "Athena's City", and Socrates was nothing if not a denizen of the urban jungle. Archaeology has always been a strong suit of the author. Recent excavations in advance of building Athens's rather charming underground rapid-transit system are properly laid under contribution - especially the plague pits of the early 420s that, as contemporary historian Thucydides unforgettably recorded, threatened to subvert the most fundamental norms of civilised Athenian life.

She is also particularly illuminating on the devices and desires of the world's first democratic regime, towards which Socrates maintained an unfortunately ambivalent stance. On the one hand, he seems to have participated in at least some aspects of the daily round of democratic life, such as being chosen by lot to serve for one year on the 500-strong administrative Council. On the other hand, he must surely have shared to the hilt, if for more purely intellectual reasons, the general distaste of the Athenian elite for a political system that amounted in their eyes to the dictatorship of the (ignorant, fickle, stupid) proletariat. His personal associations with the maverick Alcibiades and, even more, with the arch-oligarch Critias did nothing to enhance his philo-democratic profile.

Hughes shows no less gusto for recalling and describing a Mediterranean world of sex, violence, carousing and great man-made beauty that Socrates sought rather to question than embrace. Who having read the Symposium – Plato's multiplex meditation on erotic desire – can ever forget naughty boy Alcibiades bursting in on the party, half-seas over, and regaling the assembled (fictional) company, including the playwright Aristophanes, with a richly comic tale of failed seduction: his, that is, of the habitually self-controlled Socrates? Yet "I cannot remember a time in my life when I was not in love with someone," Socrates is supposed to have said. Hughes rightly devotes a whole "Act" (one of the eight in her dramatised biographical reconstruction) to "Socrates and Love".

Above all, she does full justice - as perhaps the Athenian people did not - to the religious and philosophical endeavours of a unique career fatally shadowed by the ultimately disastrous Peloponnesian War against a Sparta backed decisively by Persian money (431-404 BC). In 399 Socrates, son of Sophroniscus, of the deme (ward, parish) Alopece was indicted for impiety. He was tried before a people's jury court (no judge, or rather 501 amateur citizen-judges) for inventing new gods, not duly acknowledging through worship the gods that the city of Athens did acknowledge, and corrupting key young men who would go on to become traitors and political revolutionaries thanks to – by inference – his teaching of them.

The religious charges were crucial. Athenians took their gods deadly seriously and ascribed their defeat by Sparta not least to divine displeasure caused by the presence in their midst of such an influentially bad citizen as Socrates. The combination of alleged impiety and traitorous pedagogy proved fatal for Socrates, who died a martyr to free thought, as a new kind of intellectual hero.

Or so his many fans, among whom Hughes counts herself, have fiercely believed and argued. Whatever the truth (an elusive concept, as Socrates would probably have been the first to confess), Socrates admirably enacted his own rightly famous nostrum – that "the unexamined life is not worth living for a human being". Aged 70 he died the death of a philosopher by draining the prescribed hemlock dose and facing its consequences with enviable aplomb.

All of the above – and there is a good deal more here too, including an illuminating Act entitled "Socrates the Soldier" - demands reinvestigation and reappraisal. There can probably always be found room for a new book reminding us of Socrates's continued salience in our world of alarmingly unexamined prejudice and terrifyingly blind faith. The Hemlock Cup is, moreover, beautifully produced, filled with a host of stunning illustrations and tricked out most inventively on its endpapers with a plethora of extraordinary Socratic quotations running from Montaigne and Lydia Child (both 1588) to Nelson Mandela. The good life is an elusive concept but, however defined, arguably no search for it would be dangerously impeded by buying this handsome volume and reading it through, critically, as Bettany Hughes's Socrates would have devoutly wished.

The Hemlock Cup: Socrates, Athens and the Search for the Good Life by Bettany Hughes

From The DailyTelegraph October 30 2010

Tom Payne reviews

The Hemlock Cup: Socrates, Athens and the Search for the Good Life by Bettany Hughes

There’s a charming poem by Seamus Heaney about Socrates’ last day. It expresses a brief surprise that Socrates could believe in dreams. But the poet quickly acknowledges that the philosopher did live in a dream world. Bettany Hughes’s book leaves us in no doubt.

The Hemlock Cup is a biography of Socrates, and also a lot more than that. Yes, it speculates on the walks he would have taken around the Agora in Athens (admittedly with bundles of suggestive evidence); it suggests just what the hemlock would have done to him; and it attributes Socrates’ habit of standing stock still for hours to cataleptic seizures. For all that, Hughes is more concerned with the philosopher’s time and place.

As she unfolds the tale, she brings us an edited history of fifth-century BC Athens, too. This isn’t padding, or even scene-setting (atmospheric though it always is). Without overstating the case, she shows how the city’s life runs alongside the philosopher’s, and then takes a different course.

Socrates would always warn that an acquisitive life was not worth living and that the pursuit of gold is vacuous; meanwhile Athens revelled in becoming an empire, so it conquered more and mined more and showed off more. And then there was an attempt to colonise Sicily.

Out of Athens and Socrates, the former emerges as the more tragic character, with its greed and its failure to learn from its wisest citizen until in the throes of its downfall.

Still, Athens and Socrates have this in common: that we hold both up to be supremely rational entities, yet the mysterious, even the magical, holds some allure for them both. Athens is a town of traditions, superstitions and taboo. And the Socrates Hughes portrays is attentive to his inner voice, his guiding spirit, his daimon. As a result, Socrates ends up inflaming public opinion when his own instincts seem to set him against the pantheon of mischievous Olympians to whom his fellow citizens sacrificed as often as possible.

Now, to present Socrates in this way isn’t easy. It subverts his legacy as a philosopher. Hughes pleads right from the start that her book is about the busy and practical Socrates and that she is more a historian than a philosopher. So readers expecting a life of his mind, and to meet the Theory-of-Forms Socrates will be disappointed.

The author does deal with the ideas, particularly where they apply to love. Love, after all, is a real-world way of glimpsing things whose beauty is beyond this world. But she settles for a quick peek at the thinkers who, she suggests, most directly influenced Socrates: Parmenides and Zeno. The former explains the world by ascribing “being” to it; the latter formulates paradoxes that test ideas to destruction.

It’s an efficient move because it helps her persuade us that Socrates is at once a gadfly and also enlivened by the belief that things have a reality beyond our experience in this world. And it gives Hughes a chance to entertain a little gossip, and hint that Parmenides and Zeno were an item. She’s also keen to establish that there was more to the relationship between Socrates and the seductive Alcibiades than readers of the Symposium might think.

Often this is a book about gossip and quite right too. It was gossip that did for Socrates, as he told the 500 jurors who judged him. Hughes puts his fame in its Greek context, where the word’s root, pheme, means talk. Talk was everything in Athens, and Socrates was a constant topic. Why would he teach behind closed doors? Why did he hang out with the half-Spartan Alcibiades, who was so amused by the populace?

Early in Hughes’s story, we’re shown the binding nature of the blood sacrifice before the trial, and at the end, when Socrates must die, she calls him a scapegoat, while discussing the need that his execution be ritually pure.

It’s tempting to take these implications further, and see Socrates as a luminary who tickles his audience for a while and then is voted out, a sacrificial victim himself with no way back, so that Athens is too late to realise its mistake.

The author elegantly resists this and gives us a compelling study of an exceptional man’s relationship with the one community that had a hope of understanding and accepting him.

There’s some terrific and passionate writing about a philosopher whose heroism is unquestionable (though that heroism resides in a constant questioning); and as lively and learned an introduction to classical Athens as you could want.

THE BATTLE OF MARATHON, by Peter Krentz

From The Sunday Telegraph October 24 2010

Peter Jones reviews THE BATTLE OF MARATHON, by Peter Krentz (Yale 230pp £18.99)

The second couplet of the Greek tragic poet Aeschylus’ epitaph reads: ‘The grove of Marathon could tell of his famous valour, and the long-haired Mede knew it well’. Being one of the Marathonomachai of 490 BC was the one thing the man who composed the Oresteia wished to be remembered for.

He was not alone. The Persian Empire stretched from western Turkey to India. Its king, Darius, ruled some 70 million people. Athenians may have been foolish to stir to revolt some of the Greeks living under this mighty empire, but that’s the Athenians for you: a freedom-loving lot. There was now a price to pay. The Persian general Datis, the expedition leader, was under orders to bring the Athenians back in chains.

The chains remained unoccupied. On that late summer morning, 6,400 Persians were killed, and 192 Greeks. A visitor to Athens 600 years later, surveying all the monuments, commented ‘I reckon this is the victory of which the Athenians were most proud’. Some have argued it saved Western civilisation. Those who think it was not worth saving are free to try president Ahmadinejad’s vibrant alternative.

Next year we celebrate the 2,500th anniversary of this encounter, dated in our calendar to September 13th. If the American academic Peter Krentz’s is the only book published on the subject—somehow one thinks not—it will make a fitting memorial. Written with commendable clarity and good humour, it submits all the evidence to careful scrutiny, and adds a good deal more, to present a pretty convincing picture of what happened and why.

Our primary source is the Greek historian Herodotus, writing some sixty years after the event. To take a few of the problems. Herodotus says the Greeks ran 8 stadia (.9 of a mile) before attacking: the first time that had ever been done. Was it possible in full hoplite gear? Assuming with Krentz that such gear weighed c. 40 lbs (not the assumed c. 60 lbs) and that the run was a jog at 4.5mph and not the assumed 7mph—Krentz demonstrates the likelihood of both—the answer is ‘yes’.

But why did they run? Herodotus does not say. But he had said that the Persians landed at Marathon because it was wide enough to deploy their cavalry. Krentz shows that the Greeks attacked at speed in order to anticipate that deployment, adding that, had it been the Persian archers they were worried about, running the last stadion would have sufficed.

Herodotus says the Greek centre was driven back, but the wings won and turned round to attack the Persians from the rear. Some have argued this was too sophisticated a manoeuvre. But it was surely an entirely natural thing to do, even if, as Krentz argues, it was not in strict phalanx formation.

And what about those famous ‘Marathons’, first (to no avail) to get Spartan help, and then to announce the victory, run by Philippides, or was it Pheidippides, or, er, Eukles or perhaps, um, Thersippos? Read this compelling book and find out.

The Hemlock Cup: Socrates, Athens and the Search for the Good Life by Bettany Hughes

From The BBC History Magazine, October 2010

Michael Scott reviews

The Hemlock Cup: Socrates, Athens and the Search for the Good life

The Hemlock Cup is another vibrant and atmospheric work from this well-known promoter of the ancient world.

Bettany Hughes has taken one of history’s great enigmatic figures, the philosopher Socrates, and made him her guide to one of the world’s most interesting and important cities, Athens, during a glorious and yet highly turbulent periods of its history.

As Hughes makes clear in her introduction to the book, to write about Socrates is to rely on second-hand accounts, which need careful sifting and weighing to generate a reliable picture of the man and his world. This Hughes enhances with her welcome vivid descriptiveness (“Athens is a kingfisher’s whisper from the sea”; “they were lines of snails in an electric storm”) and her fast-paced narrative.

The book starts at close zoom on Socrates’s day of judgment. It then pulls back to examine Athens during his early life, his career as a soldier, his time as a middle-aged man, and as a lover, before finally returning to a dramatic retelling of his condemnation and execution.

By following Socrates in this manner, Hughes combines the difficult literary evidence with the archaeological remains to produce an enjoyable and thought-provoking tour through Athens’s major physical, historical and cultural landmarks and flash-points of the fifth and early fourth centuries BC.

Within such a rich text, there are only a few points that give pause. The focus on talking only about locations and themes that can be tied in some way to Socrates’s life means that Hughes misses out on some key features of Athens and her empire. It is difficult to understand the statesman Pericles’s building programme without thinking about its vast Attica-wide geographical scope, with buildings at Eleusis, Sounion and Rhamnous for example.

The footnotes to fantastic insights (particularly from the archaeological evidence) also sometimes frustrate you when trying to follow them to learn more (there are no references to the excavation publications of the Kerameikos, for example, in chapter ten on

the Kerameikos cemetery).

Perhaps the most difficult to swallow, though, are the headline-grabbing statements about Socrates himself: “He is hailed as humanity’s first-recorded ideological martyr” (without any footnotes to articulate the claim) and “the first man for whom we have an extant record who explores how we should all live in the world”.

Such phrases not only do an injustice to the balanced tenor of the rest of the book, but give a picture of ancient Greece isolated from other important ancient civilisations that surrounded and preceded it.

Despite these points, this is an exciting book that puts the reader into the footsteps of Athenians of the fifth century BC. It documents the slide from empire to defeat and political instability with passion and imagination, complemented by pull-no-punches descriptions of the modern landscape of Athens.