OUP (2018) h/b 406pp £55 (ISBN 9780190649890)
An Oxford volume, but for a Cambridge stalwart—Paul Cartledge, the inaugural Leventis Professor of Greek culture. The book began in a conference to mark his retirement in 2014, and the stellar cast-list is itself testimony to Cartledge’s influence and esteem; these have been matched by his immense energy in communicating with a broader public, not least through his engagement with Friends of Classics and Classics for All. Paul deserves a tribute of the highest quality, and he gets one here.
Festschriften these days tread a delicate path, as publishers and public expect a certain unity of theme rather than a hotchpotch of varia. The problem is particularly acute when the honorand has produced work of a broad range, and few have been broader than Cartledge. The conference-organisers and editors have, brilliantly, found the solution by welcoming the diversity and finding the unity in methodology: contributors were encouraged to burgle insights and approaches from other fields to illuminate their own specialities. Some do this more than others, with Atack for instance borrowing from discussions of gender to illuminate theories of kingship and Blanshard bringing together unexpected aspects of Athenian society; others turn to comparative approaches. There is no room here to discuss all the papers in detail, but all are interesting and I learned something, usually a lot, from all of them.
Kurt Raaflaub kicks off the volume with a big-picture overview of what he calls the ‘Great Leap’—the moment when Greek institutions started to diverge from ‘an eastern Mediterranean cultural koine’ to become something distinctive. Some time around the second half of the seventh century and first half of the sixth, Greek things changed, with bodies other than a king able to initiate and cities taking more control into their own hands: there is more sense of a rule of law, and humans, or at least men, as more in control of their own destiny.
Emily Greenwood conducts the ‘thought experiment’ of reading Plato’s idealised state in, particularly, the Republic against the ideal that Thucydides’ Pericles paints in the Funeral Speech. It becomes clear that for Greenwood this ‘thought experiment’ is not a fanciful one, as she makes a strong case that Plato is indeed developing his ideals with Thucydides’ Pericles in mind.
Melissa Lane continues the Plato theme, looking in detail at Republic 8 and exploring ‘how to turn history into scenario’—that is, into the models of different constitutions that succeed one another in a cycle. ‘Scenario’ and ‘model’ are appropriate words, as they are stripped down to essential features without the circumstantial specifics that always complicate their real life counterparts. These are placed in the future but draw on past experience, thus indeed ‘turning history into scenario’. That suggests a mirroring question of how to turn scenario into history, one that recurs in several of the papers that follow—how did classical writers use models to illuminate the past, and how far should historians now do the same?
Carol Atack applies to Xenophon’s Cyropaedia theories of performativity most familiar from modern work on gender. Is good kingly behaviour the result of innate eugeneia, or is it instilled by education and habituation? Atack applies such ideas to the old problem of the apparent rift between Xenophon’s enthusiasm for Agesilaus’ simple lifestyle as king of Sparta and his equal enthusiasm for his Cyrus, semi-fictional as he may be, who eventually adopts a very different, remote, and grand style.
Alastair Blanshard’s intriguingly titled ‘jurors and serial killers’ stresses how difficult it must have been to be lonely, or at least solitary, for an Athenian citizen in the hum of the city. People operated within groups, and the serial killing of unlinked victims seems unknown. How different, then, would jury service have been, with a juror cut off from his normal links with family and friends and operating with a group of relative strangers.
Josiah Ober and Barry R. Weingast concentrate on Sparta, a city one might expect to loom larger in a Cartledge-shaped volume, and apply an economic model deriving ultimately from Adam Smith to link the stability of the regime, its relative economic stagnation, and the reasons for its eventual demographic decline. The principle is one of the distribution of wealth according to each individual’s potential for violence and disruption: the elite shared in an equal capacity for violence, enough to keep the helots under their power, but some would drop out in each generation. This accepts more of the ‘Spartan mirage’ than some scholars would grant, and archaic Sparta was not so stick-in-the-mud as all that: after all, it colonised Taras. But models can still be illuminating even if the reality was doubtless muddier.
The next two chapters deal with Marx and Marxism. Nippel looks at Marx’s own comments on the ancient world – rather a moving target, as new pieces of genuine Marx keep emerging (the history of their publication is itself a fascinating one, with ups and downs during the Stalin era). Nippel brings out how many of the most familiar aperçus look rather different when read in their original contexts. Some of them, he thinks, have the air of remarks thrown out during a pub-crawl with Engels; I’ve known a pub-crawl or so in my time, but that would not have been one for me.
Kostas Vlassopoulos turns from Marx to the dilemmas that Marxist historiography has had to face, especially with the rise of postmodern and postcolonial approaches and the ‘literary turn’. A concept like ‘class’ seems progressively more difficult to pin down, as we see that the relation to the means of production is only one component along with, for instance, race, gender, and culture. The difficulties are compounded by the focus of our sources, interested as they are in top-down history: how can we see things from other viewpoints? As Vlassopoulos says, these are problems that face any ancient historian, not just Marxists.
Comparative history comes with Walter Scheidel’s ‘Building for the State’, examining how large scale construction projects were undertaken. The basic picture is not unexpected, with corvée (i.e. forced) labour gradually giving way to a more specialised work force funded through taxation. A degree of commercialisation and especially monetisation is needed for the second, but there are many exceptions to any simple model here. Greece and Rome, especially the Rome of the Republic, were themselves exceptional in their scant use of corvée labour: projects such as the building of the Piraeus walls in the early 470s are interesting because they are so rare.
The longest piece is Jeremy Tanner’s on ‘Picturing history’, comparing two visual explorations of (near-) tyrannicide, the Harmodius and Aristogeiton group in Athens and the Chinese portrayal of the attack of Jing Ke on the king of Qin: ‘near-‘, because both failed, with Harmodius and Aristogeiton killing not the tyrant but his brother and the king of Qin managing to escape. Again, the most interesting aspects are the ones that run contrary to expectation: it is the open society of Athens that takes the assassins as inspirational figures, right and heroic, with no room for argument, whereas it is statist China that explores the representation in ways that prompt reflection and mixed views.
We are still dealing with visual art in Robin Osborne’s ‘imaginary intercourse’, and the clue is in the title: the intercourse, and other forms of sexual behaviour, depicted on vases should not be taken as a direct reflection of real life, and so we are dealing with Greek images of pederasty rather than images of Greek pederasty. In particular, Dover’s category of ‘intercrural’ intercourse, postulated as a chaste and non-penetrative sort of intimacy, is argued to be a myth.
In ‘the Boys from Cydathenaeum’ Edith Hall takes on the job of reading Thucydides and Aristophanes against the grain and showing how a more favourable picture of Cleon can be painted. There is certainly a grain here to read against, and Hall does it well; her analysis of the techniques by which Aristophanes makes his Sausage-Seller outmatch Cleon is particularly good. She also brings out how conservative historians have recruited the ancient revilers of Cleon to their own anti-demagogic and often anti-democratic agendas; a well-argued counterblast from the radical left is certainly in place, and here it is.
Tim Whitmarsh, Cartledge’s successor in the Leventis chair, begins his analysis of ‘how to write anti-Roman history’ with Dionysius of Halicarnassus’ Roman Antiquities and its programme of countering negative accounts of Roman history. Such ungenerous views, says Dionysius, are owed to such writers’ presence at the courts of other kings. Who is meant here? The cap particularly fits Metrodorus of Scepsis, resident at the court of Mithridates; Metrodorus is a shadowy figure, but Whitmarsh makes a good case. Those rancorous writers clearly attributed Rome’s success to luck, and Whitmarsh relates this illuminatingly to a wider Hellenistic debate on the conflicting roles of Fortune and Virtue.
The volume is rounded off by a graceful postscript by Cartledge himself. There is much more in each of these papers than these bland summaries have conveyed: I especially enjoyed Raaflaub, Atack, Blanshard, Scheidel, and Hall, but everyone will find eye-openers in one or more of the papers. Big questions are recurrently put, new ways are found to look for answers, ancient and modern worlds intertwine, and simple models illuminate but also fall short of the rich messiness of life. And Paul Cartledge will welcome all those ideas with the infectious enthusiasm that he has shown about so much for so long.
Christopher Pelling