Matthew Dennison: EMPRESS OF ROME

From The Tablet May 15 2010

Peter Jones reviews EMPRESS OF ROME: The Life of Livia, by Matthew Dennison

(Quercus h/b 352pp £20)

Thanks to Freud and others, we possess a psychological language of character and personality—traumas, inhibitions, repression and so forth—that encourages biographers to probe deeply into their subjects’ lives, seeking that intimate understanding that makes them unique and therefore interesting.

Ancient writers knew nothing of such individual subjectivity. It was the celebration of great men and their achievements, emphasising their ethical stances—were they just, loyal, virtuous, prudent, wise and so on?—and the extent to which they met norms of acceptable communal behaviour, that counted, with plenty of moralising to ram the lessons home.

Further, women did not count. That is not to say they were individually undervalued, but that great public achievements were the business of the male. They alone held political office and led armies into battle. QED.

So the biography of a woman, even a long-lived, famous and influential woman like Livia, wife of the first and greatest Roman emperor Augustus, presents a serious challenge. First, her story emerges only around the edges of Augustus’s, and there is precious little of that (e.g. only 9 mentions in Suetonius’ biography of the emperor). Further, everything we know about her is set in the context of her relationship with Augustus and his world. So if we expect her to leap off the page and sparkle vibrantly in front of us like some nightmare Cheryl Cole, we shall be sadly disappointed (or, possibly, greatly relieved). It is almost impossible to discern the human being, let alone anything we could call a personality, behind the sources.

So the problem for a modern biographer of Livia is intense, and Matthew Dennison is well aware of it. The first two certain events to which the record gives us access, as he freely admits, are her birth (probably in 58 BC) and her marriage (probably in 43 BC). He bridges this gap with 36 pages of background information about typical Roman childhood, and speculation. I lost count of the number of times Dennison was forced to come up with a variation of the formula ‘we do not know, but’. But he has no other option.

In the circumstances, the book is something of a triumph. The entirely proper picture of Livia that emerges is of an attractive, determined woman, who exemplified the virtues of the traditional, self-disciplined, home-loving, hard-working Roman wife and mother by which Augustus set such store in his efforts to recall the Roman nation back to its better self after the bloody nightmares of civil war, but also achieved an unexampled position of respect and authority in the male political world. Not that this was trumpeted, feminist-style, abroad. But everyone knew it.

But this came at a price. Livia had had two sons by her first marriage, Tiberius and Drusus. Her marriage to Augustus yielded no further children. Augustus had a daughter, Julia, by his earlier marriage. Keen to establish a dynasty through his own blood-line, Augustus nominated a series of successors, usually via his sister Octavia’s or Julia’s children. But they all died, until there was only one left: Tiberius. How come? Obviously, our sources say—none more emphatically than the cynical near-contemporary Tacitus—it was Livia, the frustrated step-mother, doing what all step-mothers always do: getting rid of her rivals, one by one, with that old female stand-by, poison (and was she not a keen herbal gardener?), so that her boy could succeed.

D. treats this side of the tradition with admirable caution, while agreeing that the worldly-wise Livia was probably not above giving her son a leg-up when the opportunity presented itself. But sadly for Livia, the imperial throne was the very last thing Tiberius actually wanted, even more so when Augustus, for dynastic reasons, compelled him to divorce his beloved wife for (of course) Julia. Tiberius did, finally, succeed, but the relations between Livia and him did not improve.

And Livia as a living human being? Dennison knows the boundaries between story-telling and history, and sensibly restricts himself to asking the appropriate questions. So what does one make of Suetonius’ report that, in case he went too far, or not far enough, Augustus always ‘wrote out beforehand remarks and comments he was to make to individuals on serious topics—even to Livia’? Or that Augustus’s last words to his wife were reported as ‘Farewell, Livia; always live mindful of our marriage’ (Livia was seventy-two at the time and had lived a life of blameless rectitude)? How did Livia take Augustus’ constant rejection of her sons as successors? How did she react when Augustus’ daughter Julia—whom she had herself raised—was exiled by Augustus and completely cut off her for involvement in lurid sexual scandals?

That is the way to bring Livia to life, and Dennison does it tactfully and well.

Constantine et al: THE GREEK POETS: HOMER TO THE PRESENT

The Greek Poets: Homer to the Present ed. by Peter Constantine, Rachel Hadas, Edmund Keeley and Karen Van Dyck

From The Sunday Telegraph, April 25 2010
Paul Cartledge reviews

Poetry – in ancient Greek poiesis, a process of making – can still cause a flutter in the birdcage of the muses. Nothing new under the sun there, so far as poets writing in Greek go. In his amusing introduction to this polymorphous collection of more than 1,000 poems by 185 poets, the former United States Poet Laureate Robert Hass mentions the 'small gap in my acquaintance with Greek poetry’ between Callimachus and Cavafy – a gap of, well, more than 21 centuries.

Greece can boast the longest continuous poetic tradition in European literature, by a very long chalk: from Homer (c700BC ?) to, in this case, Pavlina Pampoudi (born 1948). And it is a tradition of rare distinction, too, as Prof Hass could quite conveniently have gathered from perusing Constantine Trypanis’s still marvellous Penguin Book of Greek Verse (1971). Though of course outdated, that gathering of flowers does have the great advantage of containing both texts of the Greek originals and accurate English prose translations.

In mitigation Hass might plead that he is the author of the Berkeley Poetry Walk (128 cast-iron poem-panels, inaugurated in October 2003). This honours at least one of the entrants in The Greek Poets – Sappho, the 10th muse, as Plato called her. As for the company of translators – all 121 of them – this comprises both the very well-known (apart from the four editors, there are here versions by Carson, Connolly, Fagles, Fitzgerald, Lattimore, Raphael, Sherrard, Holst Warhaft), the less well-known and (to me) the hitherto quite unknown.

A comparison with the, admittedly, handier Trypanis collection reveals few surprises of either omission or inclusion (down to Nobel laureate Odysseus Elytis, with whom Trypanis concluded, on a high note).

The new collection does start the section labelled 'Byzantium’ rather early, perhaps, with Clement of Alexandria, who died more than a century before the old Bosporan city of Byzantion became Constantinople and so gave its name to the Byzantine era; but then Trypanis didn’t begin his 'Byzantium’ until the seventh century. Other times, other tastes. No doubt, too, the omission of martial, masculine Tyrtaeus of Sparta and the inclusion of Corinna, Praxilla, Erinna and Nossis are both trying to tell us something.

Of those who come after Elytis here, selection is particularly invidious. I pick out just one stanza from the classically allusive 'On the Sublime’ by the prize-garlanded Nasos Vayenas, now a professor at Athens University: 'I find those heights take the breath away, /where nothing seems impossible; /as if some hand has quietly wiped away /that gray rock, and where ennui /takes on the bouquet of a ripening apple.’

Poetry makes nothing happen? I don’t think so. Poets, especially Greek ones, are the acknowledged legislators of the word. We are, in that sense, all Greeks.

The Greek Poets: Homer to the Present

Ed by Peter Constantine, Rachel Hadas, Edmund Keeley and Karen Van Dyck

WW NORTON, £30, 692pp

Available from Telegraph Books 0844 871 1516

Grunëwald: BANDITS IN THE ROMAN EMPIRE: MYTH AND REALITY

Peter Jones in the BBC History Magazine, August 2004

Question: when is a bandit not a bandit? Answer: when he is a literary convention. Grünewald's argument is not quite that simple, but it gets the gist.

The Latin for 'bandit' is latro. Grunëwald identifies the names of eighty latrones in Roman history, and by examining the careers of each he establishes a number of categories into which they all broadly fall: four categories relating to their careers, and two to their personalities.

The four career categories can be summarised as follows: (I) those who practise robbery with violence and other non-political crimes against people; (II) guerrilla leaders, heading native or slave rebellions in the cause of political or social aspirations; (III) men who had become, or had aspirations to become, rulers by illegitimate means, usurping the established authorities; and (IV) self-styled judges, seeking justice for victims of dynastic murder, or using this as an excuse to create their own power-base. The two personality categories are somewhat less complex: good (driven by lofty motives, e.Grunëwald the desire for justice) and bad (violent, criminal, undeserving of respect, driven solely by the desire for booty or power).

Grunëwald's point is that the category into which any latro was placed depended on the agenda of the author concerned. Take, for example, the Thracian Spartacus, that best-known and most vividly drawn leader of a revolt. It began in 73 BC when Spartacus led a break-out from the gladiatorial compound in which he was incarcerated in Capua. He attracted to his side a large number of slaves working on the huge estates in the area, until his army numbered something in the region of 100,000 men. Incredibly, he defeated all the armies that Rome could hurl at him and made his way north to Cisalpine Gaul, where he assumed his followers, now free, would make new lives. But they preferred to stay with him ravaging Italy, and he returned south. Had transports arrived, he might even have crossed to Sicily, but in 71 BC he was caught by Crassus, his army largely destroyed and himself killed; Pompey finished off the surviving remnants. Spartacus quickly became a legend.

The Roman historian Florus (late 2nd C AD) sees him as a rebel against order and therefore a menace to Roman society and paints him in the darkest colours, though even he admits that he died bravely, fighting in the front ranks. But Plutarch, the Greek author of the deeply influential Parallel Lives of Greeks and Romans (c. AD 100), finds much to praise in him: he was intelligent, prudent, no ordinary barbarian but highly civilised, a man of skill, vision, leadership and courage, who knew what was and was not possible and returned to Italy after he had reached Gaul only because he was forced to do so by his short-sighted followers; likewise, when his army had won a brief victory against Crassus, he advised against a full confrontation, but his over- confident army ignored him and disaster duly ensued. But why does Plutarch make such a favourable assessment? The answer is that Plutarch wants a contrast with the repugnant Crassus, in his view a corrupt and degenerate member of the Roman oligarchy.

Grunëwald's work is a model of its kind, with the usual strengths and weaknesses associated with any act of categorisation by type. The strength lies in the observation of repeated patterns of historical thought-process; the weakness in that the search for repeated patterns can lead to the omission of details that makes the critical difference (e.g. here are two animals, both with lungs, hearts, ears, eyes, legs, and reproductive organs - but one is a dead vole, the other Robin Cook). Nevertheless, I wish Grunëwald had pursued the question - what is the difference between a literary and a historical interpretation?

Holland: AUGUSTUS: GODFATHER OF EUROPE

Peter Jones in The Sunday Telegraph, June 20 2004

Augustus was the first emperor of the Roman world (27 BC - AD 14). The fact is well known, but the story of his rise to power is less so, and this is the tale on which Richard Holland concentrates.

He was born Marcus Octavius in September 63 BC. His father was the first of the family to become a senator (though never consul), but his grandfather had married Julius Caesar's sister, and it soon became clear that Caesar rather took to the lad (he was invited to join one of Caesar's triumphs in 46 BC).

Nevertheless, it must have come as a bolt from the blue when, after the Ides of March 44 BC, he found out that he had been adopted by Caesar and made chief heir to his massive fortune - at the tender age of 18. As an adopted heir he now became Marcus Octavianus - Octavian. He returned to Italy at once from his posting on the eastern Adriatic coast - he did not want Marc Antony to grab the cash - and with utter ruthlessness set about using his great uncle's money and military connections to make himself Number One. Cicero patronisingly said of him that he was a young man of talent and promise, who should be 'praised, honoured - and removed'. Cicero did not know his man, and was later 'removed' himself.

Octavian, who was well aware that power in a collapsing Republic followed military might, privately raised two legions and was soon calling himself 'Caesar'. He made an alliance with Antony and Antony's old comrade Lepidus, and a law was passed, the lex Titia, effectively granting the three of them absolute power to rule Rome as they wished. First, they defeated Caesar's assassins at Philippi (Macedonia) in October 42 BC, and then divided up the Roman world between them. Octavian initially got the wooden spoon (Tunisia, Sicily, Corsica and Sardinia) but he soon set about changing that and eventually, with Lepidus 'retired', he emerged with the Western empire, Antony the Eastern. Slowly Octavian began to drive a wedge between himself and Antony, portraying his rival as a traitor to Rome and puppet of his Egyptian lover Cleopatra, and seeking any casus belli against them. In 31 BC at the battle of Actium in Western Greece, Antony and Cleopatra were defeated, and a year later were both dead. Octavian was undisputed master of the Roman world, soon to take the title by which he is best known - Augustus, 'venerable, august, majestic'.

The model for this style of book is the brilliant Rubicon by Tom Holland (no relation). But Richard Holland does not have his namesake's narrative flair, and the story, with its grinding details of the changing alliances and personalities, does not make snappy reading. Further, a book entitled Augustus - Godfather of Europe suggests to me the story of Augustus as the godfather rather than how he became the godfather. Only the last quarter of the book is devoted to this topic, and here Holland misses the central importance of the grip that Augustus kept on the nexus of the provinces, which produced the revenues, that paid his newly professionalised armies, who thus stayed loyal to him, while controlling the provinces, which ... .

The book as a whole is rather slapdash. On page one we are told that Greece was smashed and Carthage destroyed in 167 BC (it was 146 BC); on page two that the Latin for 'Catiline' was Catilinus (it was Catilina); Pharsalus on the map becomes Pharsala on the page; and so on. This does not create confidence in an author who affects an irritating air of matey superiority throughout, as if the scholars responsible for the real work on which the whole book is based did not actually know what they were on about. No one expects an author to kow- tow to authority, but when Holland takes on Sir Ronald Syme and claims that Octavian was not a revolutionary - on the grounds that he liked a bit of a laugh and adopted highly conservative views on various matters, and besides, Caesar had done it all already - one can only groan. The whole point is that Caesar hadn't; and Octavian's conservatism in religious and institutional matters was, of course, all part of the game.

Kelly: ATTILA THE HUN

Peter Jones; From Literary Review, September 2008.

‘Empire’ derives from the Latin imperium, meaning ‘the power to give orders’ and, by implication, enforce them. In the 5thC AD the Roman empire in the West lost that power. Since its constituent peoples could now ignore imperial commands with impunity, the empire was at an end.

In 1984 a German scholar helpfully listed the 210 reasons which had been advocated for the fall of that empire - from moral decline to over-hot public baths to gout. The root reasons were, in fact, military and economic. Germanic tribes to the north of the empire’s Rhine-Danube frontier had been prodding away at the empire for hundreds of years but had, on the whole, been easily repelled. But by the 4^th C they had coalesced into more powerful groupings. The turning-point came in AD 376 when tribes of nomadic Huns, savage fighting forces on horseback that Kelly argues are more likely to have had their origins in modern Kazakhstan than Mongolia, started moving west, driving all before them.

The reason for this migration is obscure, but the result was that Germanic tribes in the Black Sea region – Goths – started escaping en masse across Roman frontiers, sometimes by force, sometimes by agreement, sometime by a mixture of both. Not that the Huns themselves seemed to have had that, or indeed any, particular goal in mind. From AD 370-410 their tribes moved piecemeal across Europe from the Ukraine to Romania and West Hungary, disrupting peoples and causing general havoc on the Roman frontiers as they went. Eventually the Hun tribes became settled in the Great Hungarian Plain in the heart of Europe. From that position of strength, they changed tactics, no longer attacking at random and leaving trails of destruction behind them but demanding regular tribute from agricultural communities against the threat of reprisals. It was, as Kelly summarises it, ‘a protection racket on a grand scale’.

But the Roman empire was not a pushover. For the tactic to work, the Huns needed to unite their disparate tribes and work to a common goal. They required, in other words, a leader who commanded lasting and unquestioned allegiance. That man was Attila, flagellum Dei, ‘the scourge of God’, who created and controlled a Hun empire between AD 435 and 453. Not that his empire was in any sense a constructive, let alone civilising force such as Romans could reasonably claim of theirs. Booty and captives were its beginning and end.

These Hun-generated frontier upheavals caused hundreds of thousands of Germanic peoples to enter the western Roman empire and spread widely across it into France, Spain and North Africa. Unsurprisingly, the empire could not cope either politically (by means of settlements and alliances) or militarily with these Germanic influxes on its north and eastern boundaries. Nor was it helped by the fact that, in order to control the vast area it covered - from Britain to Iraq, from the Rhine-Danube to Egypt and the Atlas mountains – the empire had been carved up into an eastern and western region under emperors who frequently did not see eye to eye. As a result, taxes that formerly went to the centre to pay for the army to deal with revolt and maintain control now stayed local, paid to the leaders of the new Germanic kingdoms. It was a vicious circle, and in AD 476 the last, imperium-less emperor was quietly pensioned off.

So Attila, for all the chaos he caused and terror he evoked, was only one player in the empire’s demise. Powerful as the Huns were – they crossed the Danube in AD 408, 422, 434, 441-2, 447, and invaded France in AD 450 and North Italy in 451 - Attila generally avoided large-scale confrontation in order to play his more lucrative game of Danegeld. Nor did the Huns attempt to settle inside the empire, as the Germanic tribes did so effectively, many learning Roman styles of government and law-making. When Attila died of nosebleed on (yet another) wedding night, his ‘empire’ soon collapsed.

Christopher Kelly, Fellow of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, gives a fine account of this complex story, unpicking its strands cleanly and persuasively. He is particularly instructive on the 5th C AD bureaucrat and historian Priscus, who was (unwittingly) involved in a plot by the eastern Roman emperor Theodosius to assassinate Attila, and subsequently wrote it all up in great detail. It involved bribing Edeco, one of Attila’s bodyguards, with fifty pounds of gold. The problem was getting the gold to Edeco without causing the suspicious Attila to smell a rat. So Theodosius – or rather his eunuch Chrysaphius – set up an embassy entirely ignorant of the plot to pay court to Attila and create an innocent reason for the transfer of the money. It included Priscus. Unfortunately, Edeco had spilled the beans to his master …

This is a wonderful story, all the more amusing because Attila soon becomes aware that the embassy is wholly ignorant of the real reason for its mission and therefore toys with it mercilessly while it tries to work out what the hell is going on, before stomping off back home in frustration. Unfortunately, only excerpts from Priscus’ fascinating account survive – very good on the problems of travel through alien cultures - but they are enough to reveal Priscus’ admiration for many aspects of Attila’s court. The point is that Romans (like Greeks) tended to regard all barbarians, especially those from far-away places, as moronic, uncultured, misshapen sub-humans without a brain-cell between them. Priscus, however, was surprised and impressed by many aspects of their artistic taste and subtle and cultivated social and diplomatic skills. In other words, he saw beyond the crude stereotypes and, while not hesitating to regard Attila and co. as ‘the enemy’, was prepared to raise questions about the morality of a Roman court willing to use diplomatic immunity to cover up an assassination attempt. Similar challenges, as Kelly concludes, still face us today.

Attila the Hun by Christopher Kelly (Bodley Head)

King: THE ELGIN MARBLES

Peter Jones in Literary Review, December 2005-January 2006

This is the worst book I have ever reviewed. It reads as if it has been cut and pasted from a web-site by a semi-literate school-girl (in my proof copy, King talks of Greeks cities 'still under the [Persian] yolk'), struggling with her GCSE course-work. Doubtless a great deal of labour has gone into it, but to little purpose when the author's ignorance on many topics is encyclopaedic, her ability to clarify and marshal arguments based on evidence that demands careful handling almost non-existent, and her English style execrable (her favourite conjunction is 'and so').

Here, for example, King is struggling to say something about (i) the Athenian claim that their first king was born from the earth, and (ii) the absence of mothers from the Parthenon marbles (' … and so one can read the Parthenon as a statement of Athenian misogyny', she concludes, absurdly):

'The Athenians also thought of themselves as superior to all other Greeks, for they claimed that they had always inhabited Attica, and had not arrived as migrants, and so their race was the oldest. Athenian mythology is confusing, for it emphasises this notion of autochthony, and the lack of a human mother also of course emphasises how little the Athenians thought of women, and so we have not one king who sprang from the earth, but a whole series of them, so that a king almost didn't need a queen, or to bother himself with such trivial matters as procreation. Autochthony meant that Athenians could claim they were purer, allowing themselves to see other Greeks as pseudo-foreigners.'

Don't ask. I haven't the remotest, either.

Not only is the book unreadable, its title is also misleading. King begins her story millions of years ago with the formation of the Mediterranean basin, spends a hundred pages mangling Athenian history trying to describe the original Parthenon, and another hundred pages labouring through Hellenistic, Roman, Byzantine and Ottoman times, before finally arriving at the subject of the title, Elgin, two-thirdst of the way through. The subject of the title is then treated to a royal fifty pages before we turn to the controversy over the marbles' subsequent treatment and ownership (forty-six pages). The word 'history' would have been helpful somewhere.

King's views on this controversy continue to exemplify the seamless fit between prose style and logic evident from the rest of the book, i.e. she is against returning them, but then again, she isn't. The following points pop out like ping-pong balls from a lottery machine. Greeks: the marbles can be appreciated only in Athens. K: this is cultural nationalism. British Museum: we acquired them legally and have cared for them well. K: Greeks have made requests to get the marbles returned, rejected by various political and cultural bodies. Christopher Hitchens say that Greeks want only the marbles back, but we cannot know that. Greeks: we now want you to loan the marbles to us. K: they would never give them back. Their demand is cultural nationalism. BM: the marbles are better seen in the BM, in the context of other cultures. K: they have inspired poets and painters, and millions see them every year here. They are part of our culture. They have inspired philhellenism and led to the recognition of Greece as a country. They are part of our heritage. The city state of Athens no longer exists, but the marbles have been here for 200 years. Henry Moore and Selfridges have been influenced by them. Had Elgin not brought them back, they would not exist. BM: the trustees are not allowed to make permanent loans. Only an Act of Parliament will allow their return. K: states cannot return everything. Should we return things in chronological order? The marbles belong to the whole of humanity. To the Greeks they are a symbol of their imperial past. Should we destroy e.g. Venetian palazzi which contain bits of the marbles? The Greek and BM holdings could not be displayed next to each other because their quality is so different. The BM gets more visitors than Athens would. When I was studying Greek art, Greek authorities would not let me see material. The BM is open and free to all. The Parthenon was famous only to Athenians, not all Greeks. Greeks have not looked after their own material well, so ours and theirs could not be displayed next to each other.

And so the little balls continue popping out, some re-appearing two or three times, till she unveils a conclusion which she has already explained is constitutionally excluded, quite apart from contradicting everything she has said: 'When the Greeks can demonstrate that they too have done an admirable job of caring for the marbles in Athens then, perhaps, we can discuss a loan'.

I love that 'we'.

From The Independent, January 13 06, Paul Cartledge

This sorry book gets off to a very bad start. Actually, it is about the Parthenon marbles as a whole, not merely those marbles currently in the British Museum which may properly be called 'the Elgin Marbles'. Lord Elgin (Thomas Bruce, the 7th Earl) does not enter 'the story' - or rather Dorothy King's version - until two-thirds of the way through. The question of whether, as it claims, the Elgin Marbles constitute 'archaeology's greatest controversy' is both ambiguous (greatest ever? greatest current?) and substantively moot.

After that bad start, it gets almost unbelievably worse. There are so many elementary errors of fact, transcription and description in the opening historical chapters that it is hard to credit that the author really did get both an undergraduate and a graduate degree in classical archaeology from a reputable university. For small instance: there was no democracy at Athens before 508/7 BC. Hope was precisely what did not emerge from Pandora's box - in fact pithos or jar. 'Erechthonios' should be 'Erichthonios', 'epastatei' is not ancient Greek, 'yolk' for 'yoke' would be funny were it not painful. And so on...

Her publishers, moreover, have let her down rather badly. It is becoming a cliché to lament the absence of the modern equivalents of editors such as the legendary Maxwell Perkins. But Dr King seems to have had no editorial guidance whatsoever.

Apart from faults of fact and style, there is a fundamental flaw in the book's conception. It is a very bad idea to write what purports to be history in the form of all-too undisguised propaganda. Nor is it a good idea to seek to counter what she takes to be defamation of Lord Elgin by an equal and opposite defamation of his adversary Edward Clarke (or anyone else whose common crime is not to agree that the Elgin Marbles should be where they now are).

The heart of the author's book - or case - resides in its final chapter 'The Debate over the Elgin Marbles: who owns them, and where do they belong?' Unfortunately for King, as is the way with matters of urgent political concern, events have moved on since she submitted her final draft. The British Committee which she crudely lumps with the despised 'restitutionists' is now the British Committee for the Reunification of the Parthenon Marbles. There's a huge difference.

'Restitution' implies a legal and moral status quo that has been impaired and should and can be rectified. Restitution must be to someone or some body, the state of Greece or 'the Greek People'. But when the sculptures were removed by Elgin's team in the 1800s, what was then left of the Parthenon after the 1687 explosion found itself in Ottoman Greece; and though there was a Greek People, it was a very different Greek People from the People of 2006, who are constituent members of an independent sovereign State within the European Union and subscribe to the articles of Unesco under which the overall programme of conservation on the Acropolis of Athens has been conducted since 1977.

It is that state which is responsible for constructing a dedicated museum near the Acropolis to house the reunited Parthenon marbles. Easily the largest single collection of the diaspora marbles is in the British Museum, but there are also more or less significant pieces elsewhere. To avoid the obfuscatory issue of 'ownership', the overdetermined issue of how can one pay restitution to a state or people that no longer exist, it is more fruitful to speak now of 'reunification', not 'restitution'. Though even that is unsatisfactory, since all that can be reunited is what's left - and, so far as the sculpture goes, not on the Parthenon itself.

Besides, what we mean when we say 'the Parthenon', is itself an issue, not a given. Even a non-philosopher like me can see that it can hardly be the same building as erected almost 2500 years ago. The moral-political issue of reunification must turn ultimately not on emotion, but on the scholarly issues of the study, conservation and communication of understanding of the available remains of this extraordinary building.

The Parthenon is 'as much a modern icon as an ancient ruin' (to quote Mary Beard, author of the best short book on the subject); it is or contains 'the most important ancient sculpture to survive from classical antiquity' (Ian Jenkins, writing then as the assistant keeper with responsibility for the Elgin Marbles); and it may even be 'the Western world's biggest cultural cliche' (Peter Green's typically arresting and pugnacious formulation). At any rate, it's famous for being famous, but its fame is in no way helpfully explicated by a defective work such as that under review here.

Paul Cartledge is a Syndic of the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, and a member of the British Committee for the Reunification of the Parthenon Marbles.

Lane Fox: THE CLASSICAL WORLD

Rowland Smith, Literary Review, December-January 2005/6

Certain picturesque features of what scholars used to call ‘the life and manners’ of classical antiquity - the gladiatorial shows, for instance, or the volcanic eruption of AD79 that overwhelmed Pompeii - hold a perennial popular appeal that a Hollywood director or a best-selling novelist can still hope to tap. So do certain charismatic ancient personalities - Alexander of Macedon, say, or Queen Cleopatra. But the history of Greek and Roman antiquity spans a thousand years, and the study of its political nuts and economic bolts is nowadays a specialized field in which experts tend to plough quite narrowly circumscribed furrows. Still, whether or not modern Europeans and Americans care to register it, the brute fact is that many of their core political and cultural presuppositions are peculiarly linked to Greek and Roman precedents, and it is tempting in this connexion to apply to classical antiquity Leon Trotsky's celebrated dictum about war: you may not be interested in it - but it is definitely interested in you. To an outsider, the intricacies of ancient history may seem a matter of no importance except to a sub-Johnsonian species of scholarly drudge, but some modern practitioners of the subject take a far more combative view of its contemporary relevance – and more to the point, so did some of the neo-conservative clique around George Bush that lately pressed for military intervention and exemplary 'regime change' in an irksome Middle Eastern state: the portentously named '2000 Project for the New American Century', a right-wing think-tank patronized by Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld and Cheney, boasted a bigwig professor of classical Greek history from Yale among its leading lights.

In 2005, as their dream of a pax Americana dissolves in a sea of insurgents' bombs and threadbare spin, Washington's more reflective neo-cons may wish in hindsight that their professor's specialist knowledge had extended beyond Greek warfare to the geopolitics of the Roman Empire. An instance of gung-ho Roman adventurism in the early second century could have provided particular food for thought. In AD114, the emperor Trajan decided on a robust solution to the 'Middle-Eastern question' of his day: invade Mesopotamia, kick out its uppity ruling dynasty, and reconstitute it as an amenable Roman province. The initial invasion was easily accomplished and fulsomely celebrated. Three years later, the bulk of the native population of Iraq was in open revolt, and a fundamentalist visionary based in its southern marshes was prophesying an immanent visitation by angels and the triumph of God's faithful over all earthly empires. At that point Trajan obligingly died, or was covertly murdered: it was left to his successor to ditch the whole enterprise and engineer a prudent withdrawal of the imperial army back to the old frontier.

The account of Rome's Mesopotamian fiasco deftly sketched near the close of Robin Lane Fox's 'epic history' is one of many delightful touches in a wide-ranging book that offers a feast of intriguing insights to anyone curious about the classical world. The author is an Oxford don with extensive and long-pondered knowledge of his subject, but emphatically no dry-as-dust drudge: a keen horseman outside the lecture-room, he recently charged across the big screen as a Macedonian cavalryman in the company of professional stunt-riders in Oliver Stone's Alexander the Great (a movie in which he also served as historical adviser). On the page, he canters just as sure-footedly through the nine centuries or so that run 'from Homer to Hadrian', writing with a light touch and a wonderful knack for conveying the shifting texture of life in Greek and Roman antiquity to readers for whom it may be wholly unfamiliar territory. His wish to share and explain his own long fascination with the classical world and its literature is patent, and where he thinks that modern parallels or comparisons can help he readily draws them. Beyond that, and in marked contrast to the neo-cons' professorial ally at Yale, he has no sectional or political axes to grind - and his book is much the better for it. It is a generous text not just for its amplitude (it runs to 600 pages), but for the spirit in which it is written; its aim is not to win an argument or pretend to be definitive, but to stimulate and deepen the historical imagination of its readers.

To write a history of this sort requires artistry as well as learning. On any definition, 'the classical world' is a formidably complex subject to take on; potentially, it embraces several distinctive cultures and languages spread across Europe, Mediterranean Africa and the Near East, and the evolution over at least a millennium of scores of states and kingdoms. Even an 'epic' treatment must be shrewdly selective, and the topics that it picks for emphasis must be carefully orchestrated to point up their relationships and overall significance. The trick is to highlight and explain key background themes without depriving the ancient evidence of its power to speak to moderns in its own terms, and to cast them in a narrative frame that can illuminate long-term trends and changes without denying chance and contingency their role in the story. For Lane Fox, it is above all the range and subtlety of the ancients' own texts that gives their history an inexhaustible interest, and in this book the 'classical world' begins in the eighth century BC with the invention and rapid spread of an alphabetic script for Greek, and the writing down of the Homeric poems, the earliest substantial Greek texts which now survive. His chosen ending-point, the Roman Empire under Hadrian in the mid-second century AD, may seem premature, inasmuch as the empire was to survive for a further three centuries - but the choice has its logic. The first use of the term 'classic' to connote a canon of artistic excellence occurs around Hadrian's time, and Hadrian's own classicizing tastes in literature and architecture arguably mark the point at which a self-conscious sense began to crystallize in the ancients' own minds that they were heirs to a 'classical' past – a past whose achievements they could emulate, but scarcely hope to match. Hadrian’ reign can thus sometimes figure in this book as a half-way house between the ancient and the modern: at various points on the long road from Homer towards his second-century closing-point, the author pauses to consider how the particular subject under discussion might have appeared to Hadrian’s eye. It is a nice trope: Hadrian’s tastes were shaped partly by the ‘classic’ buildings and artworks he encountered on his near-constant tours of his empire; for him, the Homeric age – along with many another iconic ‘classical’ episode illuminated in this book - was already becoming ‘ancient history’.

Theoretically-minded readers might question Lane Fox’s preference for narrative over thematic analysis in his history, but he has his own theoretical reasons for the choice, and his narrative is unified by a thematic strand; it picks up on three notions which the ancient writers themselves especially liked to emphasise - ‘freedom’, ‘justice’ and ‘luxury’ - and traces their shifts and twists in practical politics and state-ideologies over a passage of a thousand years. Freedom and justice are words with a noble ring, but they are often code-words for vested interest, and luxury is a very elastic concept: if you wonder what ‘democracy’ or ‘liberty’ really amounted to in classical Athens or republican Rome, or what ‘legal rights’ meant for a Spartan helot or an Italian freedman, or how Sybarites became synonymous with luxury, or why Tacitus called heated bath-houses tools of ‘enslavement, you will find revealing answers here. And there is so much else. Books about particular periods or aspects of classical antiquity by experts writing for a general readership are no rarity, but it is a long time since a single author has attempted an ‘epic’ portrait of the entire age – still less one enlivened by such empathy and wit. Politics and warfare and their social contexts may be the backbone of Lane Fox’s ‘grand narrative’, but as it unfolds there are constant glances down antiquity’s vivid byways. An Aristotelian philosopher fetches up in town in Afghanistan, bearing an oracle from Delphi for its Greek inhabitants; a band of female fire-eaters puts on an impromptu strip show at a wedding-feast; a prostitute named ‘Lioness’ seduces the son of a one-eyed king. And who could resist a book in which the owner of a pet piglet sadly recalls how it trotted behind his chariot for a hundred miles from Thessalonica, only to fall victim to a road-hog on the crossroads at Edessa?