OUP (2017) h/b 453pp £49.50 (ISBN 9780195386844)
This ground-breaking book features the pioneering work of seventeen contributors in seventeen chapters; thirteen are from the USA, including the two editors, one each from Canada and Australia and two from the UK: Matthew Nichols and Ian Rutherford, both in the University of Reading. ‘Ground-breaking’ and ‘pioneering’ because this is the first series of essays to shed revealing shafts of light on the extensive and diverse topic of ancient world communication.
The book benefits from ten maps, two tables and eighty-nine figures (mainly black and white photographs) along with an impressive forty-five page bibliography, and a somewhat mean five page index. The contributors come from a range of disciplines: eight classicists, three classicists/historians and four historians are accompanied by an art historian, an oriental studies specialist and a Near-East scholar. The book ranges through the ancient Mediterranean, assessing communication with the Hittites, Egyptians and Mesopotamians as well as with the Greeks and Romans.
The key to the book’s scope lies in its sub-title: while its four distinct parts—networks, modes, divinities and engagements—are a little obscure, the chapters within clearly delineate the fare on offer, exposing the impressively wide coverage of the book. We have chapters on environmental perspectives, libraries and archives, communication deployed in trade and war, and in religion (pilgrimage, oracles and Christianity). Indeed, it must have been a real struggle for the editors to decide just what to leave out: ‘communication’ of one sort or another underlies and informs so much in life—conversation, literature, linguistics, oratory, visual arts, legal, political, diplomatic and social intercourse, and official and personal record-keeping, for example, all of which require and deploy skills in communication. None of these makes the final mix but gesture, cartography, archives, numismatics, music and artistic expression do.
Grant Parker’s opening chapter on the physical environment—land and water—focusses on the Mediterranean as a vital means of communication between ancient places—a subject neglected by scholars despite its importance from earliest times. Communication between places is exemplified by Delos, Delphi, Ostia and Palmyra.
In his chapter on libraries Mathew Nichols takes a cerebral viewpoint as well as the more usual physical aspect. He interestingly explores how libraries promote ‘the exchange and transmission of ideas and values’ and the political kudos derived in Hellenistic times from ostentatiously setting up a prestigious centre of culture and learning—a practice which extended well into the Roman Empire. The military takes centre stage when Fred Naiden reminds us just how crucial and indispensable robust and reliable communications were (as now) in the prosecution of battles and their outcomes.
Jennifer Trimble argues that the sheer immensity and diversity of the early Roman empire go some way to account for the ‘image communication’ used by various communities to establish their individual identities and proclaim to the wider ancient world what their peculiar situation was in that world. Timothy Power reminds the reader just how potent a communications force was music and poetry—mousike in the ancient Greek world, not least as a persuasive force in contemporary politics.
George Aldrete’s fascinating and thought-provoking chapter on gesture as one manifestation of body language is a reminder of just how elemental and complex human gesture is in communicating, and how the simplest, inadvertent gesture can, and did, change the course of history—with examples. Michael Kulikowski’s chapter on Christianity reveals how the uptake of a major religion depended so much on the physical communication networks in place in the early Roman Empire: without the roads, the word would never have spread so quickly and so extensively.
Richard Talbert’s closing chapter on maps as a form of communication underscores the value of maps as propaganda, drawn up to emphasize the magnitude and might of the empire to observers within and without, rather than, more mundanely, just for showing people where a particular place or topographical feature might be.
The editors lament the general lack of scholarship devoted to this pivotal but neglected aspect of ancient history, ‘so persistently neglected’, because communication in its myriad manifestations informs and influences so many aspects of ancient life. We can, nevertheless, look forward to publication of Roman Record Keeping and Communications in spring 2018 which will nicely complement many of the essays here. The editors of Mercury’s Wings were intent on offering a ‘broader and more rewarding canvas’ than just depictions of the values of straight roads and shipping lanes. In that they have certainly succeeded.
Paul Chrystal