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.

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

From the Observer, October 24 2010

Tom Holland reviews

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

Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure does not tend to be rated as one of cinema's profounder treatments of the relationship between present and past. The story of two Californian slackers with a time machine who, for complicated reasons, have to assemble assorted celebrities from history in order to pass a high-school project, it is chiefly remembered for bringing Keanu Reeves to the attention of a mass audience. Classicists, however, will always cherish it as the only film ever to combine the music of Van Halen with Greek philosophy. When Bill and Ted embark on their quest, what should be their first destination if not classical Athens, and who should be the very first "historical dude" bundled into their time machine if not a bald-headed man in a sheet whom they persist in calling "Soh-kraytz "?

Even to metalheads, then, the philosophy of ancient Greece serves as something that is both primal and emblematic of civilisation as a whole. Socrates, in particular, the "lover of wisdom" who insisted that the most fundamental presumptions of his countrymen should be subjected to experimental investigation, and who ended up being made to drink hemlock for his pains, has always been admired as the very fountainhead of rationalism. Yet when it comes to identifying what he taught and believed, there is a problem, on which Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure, rather unexpectedly, puts its finger. Socrates, transplanted to 1980s California, can only communicate with his abductors by gesturing and gurning – since Bill and Ted, it goes without saying, speak not a word of ancient Greek. Even the miracle of time travel, it appears, cannot serve to alter what is, for any historian, a most awkward fact: that it is impossible to be certain of what Socrates actually said.

Like Jesus and, according to Muslim tradition, Muhammad, he never wrote down a word. As a result, it is exceedingly difficult to know anything definite about Socrates as a historical figure. True, we have extensive accounts of what he said and did, and granted, these were composed much closer in time to his execution than were the gospels to the crucifixion, or the first biographies of Muhammad to the death of the prophet. Proximity, however, does not necessarily spell transparency. No matter that the historical Socrates does indeed seem to have patented the dialogue as a form of philosophical inquiry, the surviving accounts of his conversation are very far from being a documentary record. Most of them – perhaps regrettably, from the biographer's point of view – were composed by a man who just happened to be the most influential philosopher of all time, and a supreme literary artist to boot. Write about Socrates with the aim of disentangling the man from the myth, and it is almost impossible to tell where Socrates ends and Plato begins.

This, then, is the treacherous bog into which Bettany Hughes, with her new biography of the snub-nosed philosopher, has fearlessly plunged. She writes as a historian, and her focus, as she is careful to make explicit, is not Socrates's philosophy, but rather how it "evolved in his time and his place". So it is that the life of her hero becomes a peg from which to hang a vivid depiction of Athens in its golden age, from the pinnacle of its greatness to the abyss of its ultimate defeat. To this end, all the talents honed by years of making high-class documentaries about the ancient world are formidably on display. Hughes's prose is the literary equivalent of CGI, re-creating for the reader a sense of the clamour and dazzle of the classical city that has rarely been bettered. Not only that, she is expert in knowing when to alter and vary her focus. Sometimes we are led by her through the streets of modern Athens, sometimes across an archaeological site, and sometimes down into the basement of a provincial museum, where rare treasures lie hidden. She spares no effort in bringing the world of Socrates alive. Describing Athens amid the death-agonies of the Peloponnesian war, Hughes comments that it "must have been reminiscent of Kabul 2002-10: ragged, war-torn, veiled women in the streets with no husbands, brothers or sons". Hers is an ancient Greece that is authentically cutting-edge.

All of which only serves to emphasise the degree to which her book is frustratingly like Hamlet without the Prince. The skill and judiciousness with which Hughes puts together assorted fragments of evidence when writing about Athens is bewilderingly absent from her portrait of the man who is ostensibly her subject. To include great chunks of Plato's dialogues as though they were the ipsissima verba of Socrates himself is cavalier enough. Even more tendentious, however, is the degree to which everything quoted appears designed to make him acceptable to the sensibilities of her readers. That Socrates was a great man is not in doubt; but he was not a great man because he valued women, had his doubts about slavery, or believed in the redemptive power of love. Just as Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure shows Socrates enjoying the local mall like any west coast teenager, so The Hemlock Cup gives us a portrait of him as a liberal Observer reader. Situated as it is in the midst of such a wonderfully rich and nuanced evocation of the city in which he lived, Hughes's Socrates ends up seeming, if anything, even more anachronistic than does "Soh-kraytz".

Literary Review, October 2010

Peter Jones reviews THE HEMLOCK CUP: Socrates, Athens and the Search for the Good Life, by Bettany Hughes

Athens in the fifth century BC was a place electric with intellectual energy and excitement. It was the perfect setting for the Athenian self-professed gadfly Socrates (469-399 BC), about whom three things stand out. He irritated a large number of people with his insistent questioning about their beliefs, especially what ‘goodness’ meant; he was executed for refusing to recognise the state's gods, introducing new gods and corrupting the young; and he never wrote a word.

His contemporaries Plato and the soldier-essayist Xenophon hero-worshipped him, while the comedian Aristophanes travestied him for laughs. His near contemporary Aristotle—born 384 BC and no admirer of Plato—went clinically to the heart of what he achieved philosophically: Socrates concerned himself solely with ethics, and we should ascribe to him ‘inductive argument and general definition’. Not that Aristotle was arguing that Socrates *invented* inductive reasoning; rather, that he was the first person to recognise its importance and use it systematically. But where do ethics come in?

To generalise: philosophers before Socrates were mainly interested in what we would call natural science, the origins and workings of the cosmos. Socrates was not. He thought it much more important to ask what humans beings were for and what made a good (i.e. moral) and therefore happy one.

He began from an analogy with experts in crafts. They have a body of knowledge with its own rules, procedures, techniques etc. that enables them to produce material goods. By the same token, Socrates argued, there must be an expert in producing moral beings. What, then, is the knowledge that such a one will possess? Here comes the induction: let us inspect individual acts that we call ‘good/moral’ and see what is common to them all. That way we will find out what goodness is (the ‘general definition’). Bingo. But once we know what goodness is, does it follow that we shall do it? Yes, claims Socrates. If we really *do* know it, we will be unable to do anything else. In a sense, then, goodness and knowledge are inseparable.

Of course, Socrates never does find out what goodness is. Nor is the method sound: for how can we know that the acts we choose to examine are in fact ‘good’, if we are examining them in the first place to discover what goodness is? But what stands out about Socrates is that he was convinced there was such an objective entity as ‘goodness’; that it was the key to human happiness; that we would find it only by abandoning any pretensions that we possessed it and looking in the right direction for it; and that it was essential for men to pursue that objective to the exclusion of everything else, and be prepared to take the consequences too, if man was to be good (and therefore happy). It is a heroically idealistic and wholly impractical vision, and it killed him. Martyred him, some would say.

In her exuberant account of Socrates’ life in Athens in the fifth century BC, Bettany Hughes, Channels Four’s favourite classicist, barely touches on any of this. To that extent, one wonders why Socrates is the central figure at all: for it is his philosophical stance that makes him significant. Without it, he is just another Athenian.

Further, her approach can lead her astray. For example, she quotes Socrates as saying in Plato’s *Symposium* ‘Love [*ta erôtika*] is the one thing in the world I understand’, and suggests he ‘promoted the unifying power of love within human society’. This is simply not true. By *ta erôtika*, Socrates meant not sexual desire (which is what it is assumed to mean in the *Symposium*), nor ‘love’ in the Christian sense (which is what she seems to be getting at), but desire for what we lack, especially knowledge of the good. Without the philosophy, it is easy to make this sort of mistake.

The proviso, then, is to check the sources that Hughes extensively quotes. One can then plunge enthusiastically into the seething world of Socrates that she creates for us, following ‘the clues in Plato, Xenophon and Aristophanes to the physical reality of fifth-century Athens and therefore the physical reality of Socrates’ life...To this end I have used the latest sources—archaeological, topographical, textual—to construct a life for a man we can all benefit from getting to know a little better.’

That, in fact, is too modest a claim. This is the grand sweep of Athenian history during its most politically inventive and culturally exciting period, and (like her *Helen of Troy*) it is history written with the rich invention of the novelist, clothing in living flesh—sweet, sweating, stinking, sensuous—the words on pages 2,500 years old. Socrates is a sort of ‘phantom’ figure, constructed out of everything contemporary sources have to say about him to guide us through the period.

This clearly creates an academic problem: where is the ‘real’ Socrates in all this? In a venture of this sort, Hughes is right to bat it away. She concentrates instead on what people made of Socrates. However different a picture of Socrates Xenophon may paint from Plato’s, Xenophon’s view is still history: a history of his feelings about and reaction to the man. Indeed, one could argue that other people’s reactions to Socrates give a far more instructive a picture of the man than any self-serving autobiography ever could.

It all makes for a rich mixture: Socrates’ early days as a keen natural scientist, his military career, his growing sense of what is important in life, his political scrapes, his trial and execution are played out in the company of Plato, Xenophon, Pericles, Alcibiades, Aristophanes, Aspasia, free and slave, shoemaker and sculptor, intellectual and thug—a cast of millions—against the setting of fifth-century Athens with its markets, back-streets, gymnasia, temples and rivers, its political battles, military engagements, theatrical performances, plague, triumph and disaster. Channel Four must be licking its lips. It will make irresistible television.

Michael Scott: FROM DEMOCRATS TO KINGS

From The BBC History Magazine, September 2010

Peter Jones reviews

FROM DEMOCRATS TO KINGS, by Michael Scott

Icon Books p/b 294pp £8.99

When the Spartans in 404 BC finally defeated Athens after a war lasting more than a quarter of a century, they destroyed its Long Walls and installed an oligarchic government (‘The Thirty’). It was now a fair bet that the Athenian democratic experiment would come to an end. But Athenians were made of tougher stuff. Within a year The Thirty were out, and the democracy restored.

This tells one as much about Sparta as Athens. Already Sparta’s allies in the war—like Thebes—were getting as restless with Spartan imperialism as they had with Athenian, and always there was Persia in the background, ready to make deals with anyone to maintain its power in Asia Minor, where so many Greek cities had earlier been founded. Indeed, Sparta had already taken Persian money to help it win the war against Athens.

The result was a renewal of normal service in the competitive, self-assertive, always suspicious Greek world: chaotic inter-state strife, with occasional pauses for breath, Thebes, Athens, Sparta and Persia being the main players.

It was left to the gathering force of Macedon in the north, under its brilliant, ruthless king Philip II, to impose order. By 338 he had mastered Greece, and in 322 Macedonians brought the democratic experiment to an end. Enter the kings.

Scott sensibly enlivens the complexities of this rather bewildering world by portraying it through its leading personalities—Theban Epaminondas, Athenian Demosthenes, Spartan Agesilaus, Plato and others. His efforts to find parallels with the modern world do not carry much carry conviction, but this period has always lain in the shadow of the glories of fifth century Athens, and Scott is to be congratulated on bringing it to life again in vigorous, if sometimes rather hip-hop, style.

Goldsworthy, Weidenfeld and Nicolson: ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA

Peter Jones reviews
ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA,
by Adrian Goldsworthy, Weidenfeld and Nicolson 470pp £25

From The Tablet, August 14 2010

The main problem for the historian, as Goldsworthy observes, is that the story of Antony and Cleopatra is squeezed between two towering figures: Julius Caesar on the one side, and on the other, Caesar’s callow, nineteen year old successor Octavian who would, as a result of his civil war against Antony and Cleopatra, emerge as the first Roman emperor Augustus. It is easy to forget Cleopatra’s inherent problems in Egypt, and the importance of Antony himself as a major player in Roman politics.

Further, as Goldsworthy rightly insists, Octavian vs. A-C was not a case of honest, noble Roman vs. sex- and drink-crazed foreigners. Certainly, that is the way Octavian tried to spin it, significantly declaring war (when it came in 32 BC) on Cleopatra, but not Antony. But Cleopatra was in fact a loyal Roman ally, and Antony was supported—we are told—by 300 out of 1,000 senators. It was a civil, not a foreign, war.

Antony (born 83 BC) was a distant relative of Julius Caesar, and grew up at a time when the Republic was falling apart: force prevailed, it was every man for himself, the prize to the most powerful. Antony learned his lesson well. After a wild youth and some useful military service out East, Antony joined Caesar in Gaul c. 54 BC. Caesar was renowned for his generosity to his soldiers, and Antony was heavily in debt. From now on he climbed the political ladder as Caesar’s man.

Cleopatra VII, Greek through and through, was born in 69 BC into a collapsing, but still fantastically wealthy, kingdom. Her family, stretching back some 250 years when Ptolemy, one of Alexander’s generals, first took over Egypt, were incestuous autocrats, punctuating the years with spells of murderous infighting. They were never afraid to seek foreign help to retain power; indeed, Ptolemy X had already bequeathed Egypt to Rome in his will (!), but Romans had reacted cautiously. Egypt was no threat, nor on their radar. But money talks, and in 59 BC Ptolemy XII paid Pompey and Caesar the equivalent of billions to make Egypt an official ‘friend and ally’.

Cleopatra became queen at 19 in 51 BC. She too desperately needed the Roman connection even to stay alive, let alone remain in power. In 48 BC Julius Caesar arrived in Egypt in pursuit of his (already murdered) rival Pompey. Problem solved.

But not for long. When Caesar lodged her in Rome with their son Caesarion in 46 BC, she did not go down especially well (Cicero thought her a disdainful cow). After Caesar’s assassination in 44 BC, she returned to Egypt, there to reassert her authority again, partly with the judicious exterminations of rivals. But, as before, only Rome could keep her secure.

Antony, who must surely have met Cleopatra during Caesar’s dalliance, was now in the mix for power. Civil war loomed, but eventually he and Octavian reached agreement to share power. Ruthless massacres of political enemies (including Cicero) and seizure of assets to pay for the army ensued—a reign of terror—and Brutus and Cassius defeated at Philippi. After all this, the empire, especially the eastern half where much of the fighting had taken place, needed order and stability restored. Antony was delegated to the job. In 41 BC he summoned Cleopatra to do business. She knew her fate was in his hands. ‘The barge she sat in..’—and that was that.

Was it love? Lust in fancy dress? Simple expediency? Whatever it was, Antony needed Egypt’s wealth and therefore the queen’s loyalty as much she needed him. The rough, tough soldier, adored by his men, and the elegant, sophisticated queen, were now a couple, and despite Octavian’s best efforts to split them, that is how they remained.

But Antony lost it. His excessive demonstrations of political commitment to Cleopatra handed the political momentum to Octavian. Further, while Antony saw himself as a professional fighting man, in fact he was not experienced with large armies. He did not plan or prepare well, and was not quick on his feet when things went wrong. So when the break with Octavian finally occurred in 32 BC, there was to be only one winner.

After providing a clear, succinct background to events, Goldsworthy’s tactic is to weave the two stories into a single thread by moving seamlessly back and forth from Rome to Egypt. It works beautifully. His mastery of the sources is commendable, his historical judgement sure-footed and, as ever, he brings a winning lucidity to the description of often quite complex situations—the perfect accompaniment to any, especially Mediterranean, holiday.

Simon Price and Peter Thonemann: THE BIRTH OF CLASSICAL EUROPE

From The Sunday Telegraph August 8 2010

Peter Jones reviews THE BIRTH OF CLASSICAL EUROPE: A History from Troy to Augustine, By Simon Price and Peter Thonemann, Allen Lane 398pp £25

In a recent election broadcast from Arbroath in Scotland, it was pointed out that, for all its proud nationalistic history, the locals were far more interested in who would save their jobs than the fortunes of the SNP. In other words, a strong sense of history can be irrelevant to people’s sense of where their real needs and interests lie.

On the other hand, when one looks at the Israel-Palestine conflict, it is clear that no resolution will be reached until both sides agree to forget their history, both recent and ancient. Unshakeable convictions about ‘rights’ to territory, historically accurate or not, are at the very heart of the problem.

One of the major themes of Price-Thonemann’s account of the ‘birth’ of classical Europe is the extent to which these societies’ memories of their history (true or false) helped to create a ‘communal identity’. As the authors demonstrate in fascinating detail, Greek and Roman elites put an enormous amount of effort into calling up or re-inventing the past to suit the present. For example, after Cleisthenes invented democracy in Athens in 507 BC, Athenians soon began ascribing elements of it to an early (to us mythical) founding hero Theseus. In 196 BC, Lampsacus (a town near the Dardanelles) tried to strike up an alliance with Marseilles on entirely bogus claims to historical links with it (which is why historians were regularly members of diplomatic embassies). Both Greek and Roman elites were always harking back to the Trojan War. This invocation of the past is a defining feature of ancient elite mentality.

But it does raise the question how far such a ‘communal identity’ was anything more than simply an elite identity. For example, when the Persians defeated Roman armies in the 3rdC AD, they boasted that they were reliving the glories of their great kings Darius and Xerxes eight hundred years earlier. Price-Thonemann argue that this sort of political image-making ‘profoundly (my italics) shaped’ the Persian world. But in what way did it make an actual difference to anyone other than the elites who created it? Or bring classical Europe to ‘birth’?

Another major theme applies particularly to the Romans and asks how far they tried to impose their own identity on the vast empire they eventually came to control. The answer is: hardly at all.

Greek provinces in the East, rightly proud of the classical ‘glory that was Greece’, did not fully buy into the Roman way. Romans did nothing about it. They did not, for example, try to impose Latin.

In the West, provincials fell over themselves to sign up, quite unprompted, as the Latin-based Romance languages testify. When Roman moulded pottery became wildly popular, Gallic potters in a huge production centre in France started churning out imitations, signing themselves with Latin names (‘Felix’ and ‘Primus’) on their pots to prove their ‘authenticity’ when we know their Celtic names were Matugenos and Cintusmos.

The Aedui, a Gallic tribe, started Romanising their town almost immediately after Caesar’s conquest in the 50s BC. But c.15 BC they decided that was not good enough, moved twenty kilometres away to modern Autun, and constructed a complete ‘Roman’ town covering 200 hectares. No one told them to. It was their own decision.

And all the time this was going on, a sense was gradually developing of the differing identities that made the West ‘European’ but the East ‘Asian’, though in time both identities were submerged under the term ‘Roman’.

This is to scratch the surface of a book rich in illustrative details and examples of its themes from all over the ancient world, from medallions of Roman emperors excavated in the Mekong delta of south Vietnam to Danish burials full of high-class Roman imports.

But it must be stressed that it is not a text-book. While the account is told chronologically, there is little by way of strong narrative structure, and the authors seem determined to avoid the big set-pieces. There is, for example, little on Marathon or Thermopylae, the Peloponnesian War, Hannibal, or any but a handful of Roman emperors, let alone literature and the arts.

But for those who know the broad outlines of classical history, this controversial interpretation of what one might mean by the ‘birth’ of classical Europe contains much of very great interest on the themes with which it deals.

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

From The Economist, June 2010
Jun 24th 2010

Full Circle: How the Classical World Came Back to Us.

By Ferdinand Mount.

Simon & Schuster; 438 pages; £20.

FERDINAND MOUNT has enjoyed an unusually varied career—columnist, novelist and literary editor, head of Margaret Thatcher’s policy unit in Downing Street, and author of a delightful memoir entitled “Cold Cream” that was an unexpected bestseller last year. His new book, “Full Circle”, is an altogether more serious and demanding work, but it is imbued with the same wit as its predecessor and is both entertaining and thought-provoking.

Mr Mount argues that there is an “astonishing resemblance” between life in ancient Greece and Rome and the manner in which we live now. It is as though the intervening 1,500 years had never been. “We have been on a round trip…and we are back at the jetty we embarked from.” Now, as then, there is an obsession with the body. The baths and gyms of the classical world employed more people than any other institution except the army. We are hugely concerned with cleanliness and fitness. Many have personal trainers or pay inordinate sums to go to “Shangri-spa”. In our attitudes to sex and food we are much closer to the Romans than to those who lived in the Dark Ages or the Victorian era—or even the 1950s.

There has been a similar reversion in our mental attitudes. In the section on the mind Mr Mount draws some amusing, and generally convincing, comparisons. Anaximander, a pre-Socratic philosopher, was the first Darwinian. Lucretius is the Richard Dawkins of 55BC. Mithras and Mick Jagger are the god and demigod on the brink of satisfaction. Long before Jade Goody was famous for being famous the Romans were obsessed with celebrity, with the “Triumph” rather than “Big Brother” and Socratic dialogue in place of Jeremy Paxman’s “Newsnight”.

The return to the ways of ancient Rome “has closely paralleled the decline of Christianity”. The “art of religion” has been replaced by “the religion of art” and with that has come degeneracy. The fact that it has happened for a second time “suggests that we might be programmed that way”. Mr Mount mourns the fact that we live in a post-Christian society, and he excoriates the “anti-God-botherers” such as Mr Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, though he reveres Charles Darwin as the inventor of the age we live in. Richard Jefferies, a Victorian naturalist, and a German philosopher, Hans Vaihinger, are other heroes who provide grounds for optimism that a return to a concern for Mother Earth and adoption of an “as if” (the Christian religion were true) philosophy can enable us to rediscover Cicero’s vision of immortality, “Scipio’s Dream”.

Half a millennium separates the democracy of Athens, under the incorruptible Pericles, from the tyranny in Rome of the emperors Caligula and Nero; they were very different epochs and places. It is unsurprising therefore that Mr Mount has been able to select parallels between aspects of our society and some of those of the classical world, while ignoring others such as slavery (immigrant workers?) and gladiators (World Cup footballers?) that do not fit as well. However, his central premise is an arresting and disturbing one. What if our civilisation is followed by a second dark age? Will it last for 1,500 years or for ever?