Princeton (2024) h/b 439pp £30 (ISBN 9780691181479)
The title cleverly reverses America's traditional motto e pluribus unum ‘Out of rather many, one’, and the book is as good as its word. Roberts’ prologue (‘They contain Multitudes’) explains its aims: ‘to explore areas of dramatic divergence, areas of subtle difference and areas of broad agreement’ across the Greek world.
R. begins with chapters on Greek myth (‘A World of the Imagination’), which rightly includes Hesiod, and Homer’s epics (‘The Heroic Past’). These combine plenty of storytelling together with admirably sensible analysis of their content and significance. While the rest of the book does not regularly look back at these two foundational monuments of ancient Greek literature, R.’s clarity of exposition can hardly fail to capture the reader’s imagination, auguring well for the rest of the volume.
My one problem with the Homeric chapter is that R. has been reading too much of the novelist Margaret Atwood. Like Atwood, R. claims that Penelope ‘suffers a stunning loss that offsets her recovery of her missing husband’, because Telemachus hangs 12 faithless maid servants. But Homer tells us he does so ‘because they heaped insults on my head and on my mother’s and slept with [my mother’s] suitors’, i.e. with those aiming to take control over Ithaca, by murder if necessary. There is not a word in Homer of Penelope's sense of ‘loss’, stunning or otherwise. Indeed, as soon as the news of Odysseus’ return is announced, Homer informs us that the remaining, obviously loyal, women ‘flocked in from their quarters’ in the palace and ‘embraced Odysseus in welcome and took and kissed his shoulders, head and hands’. (R. returns to this episode in her Epilogue, repeating the same views). Obviously, the novelist can do what she likes with Homer. But please do not call it Homer.
Chapter 3 ‘Meeting the Greeks’ is an outstanding summary of Greek history from the Persian wars to the end of the Hellenistic age in 31 BC with the defeat of Marc Anthony by Augustus and the absorption of the Ptolemies into the Roman Empire. The Hellenistic period always seems a bit of a mess, not being one thing or the other, but R.’s account of it is superb, knitting it all together into an easily intelligible whole. (But is Arês really connected with aretê and aristos?)
Chapter 4 (‘The Polis—City and State’) begins with Aristotle's definition of the polis and then deals with oligarchic Sparta, democratic Athens, tyrants (especially Sicilian ones), monarchy (Mausolus), alternative constitutions such as those in Gortyn and Locri (in the boot of Italy)—a matrilineal society famous for its laws—the curse of stasis, and the beginning of Alexander the Great’s Hellenization of Asia and beyond. Again, this rich menu is extremely well integrated and easy to digest (though at one point she gives the impression that the Olympics were held every year).
Chapter 5 (‘Foreigners, Slaves and Sex[ism]’) begins with an analysis of Herodotus’ understanding of what it meant to be foreign i.e. non-Greek, with an emphasis on his admiration for Egyptians and what the Greeks owed to them, after which R. tackles Greek views of the effect of climate and physiology on human character (the implication being that if you changed location, you became a different sort of person). R. then moves on to a wide-ranging discussion of slavery (and Greek preferences for making slaves out of non-Greek peoples), by association with which she turns to Greek attitudes towards ‘the deadly race and tribe of female kind who live with mortal men, a thing of bane, no help in poverty but glad to share in wealth’ (Hesiod). She covers medical views of their differences from males and their limited agency, but points out that Herodotus was open about female agency in non-Greek lands (female agency in Greek tragedy is a fascinating myth-derived phenomenon, as she will discuss in Chapter 7), and discusses their religious roles, the implications for them of elite male pederasty, and the existence of many named poetesses, from whose fragments she quotes.
In Chapter 6 ‘Giving the Gods their Due’, R. quite properly begins with the Greek awareness that gods and nature—the sole resource available to mankind—were vitally connected and at the heart of their sense of the world and of the rituals needed to keep the gods on side, not merely in order to survive but also to ‘uphold justice in public and private life’. R. covers sacrifices, festivals, the problems raised by multiplicities of gods (and the deification of humans), mystery religions, magic, syncretism, means of communication via e.g. oracles and dreams, the rise of Epicureanism and Stoicism as alternatives to ritualistic religious belief, as well as arguments about the gods’ nature and sometimes even their existence (cf. Socrates’ trial). She rightly remarks on Thucydides’ refusal to acknowledge that the gods played any part in controlling the events of the Peloponnesian war, though of course he was well aware that men's belief in the gods could influence their decision-making.
Ancient Greeks were notoriously competitive, and Chapter 7 (‘The thrill of Victory’) covers everything from its manifestations in tragedy (Aristotle, Oresteia, Oedipus and Hippolytus), comedy (Frogs), politics (ostracism and impeachment) and litigation, to games (Pindar’s Epinikia celebrating aristocratic competition), warfare, and philosophical arguments. (Your reviewer was slightly surprised to see no sign of the endlessly repeated injunction to ‘help your friends and harm your enemies’ or any of those 147 top one-liners for a successful life from the oracle at Delphi). It may be worth pointing out here that Sophocles’ Antigone was centred round the five eternal conflicts that dominate literature: young vs. old, male vs. female, man vs. gods, family vs. state and living vs. dead. There were no winners there.
Socrates’ famous observation that ‘the unexamined life is not worth living for a human’ fronts up chapter 8 (‘The Search for Meaning’), which R. begins by pointing out that, while myth and religion were of central importance to Greeks, the search for alternative ways of describing and thinking about the nature of the cosmos and purpose of human life never ceased to engage equally competitive intellectuals (endlessly mocked by Aristophanes), but over time came to be relevant to everyman. R. picks a clear path through the competing interests of the thinkers of the day, from the presocratics and sophists, with their belief that human opinion, not gods, was the arbiter of reality, to Socrates, Plato and Aristotle (with his crucial emphasis on observation and data gathering) and on to the more humanly sympathetic Cynics (follow your instincts), Epicureans (what happens in your head is all you can control, so make sure you control it), Stoics and Sceptics (Pyrrho saw no reason to assign special roles to males and females). Meanwhile the museum at Alexandria provides an example of the mathematical, scientific and medical research that flourished at the time, to the astonishing results of which R. gives a number of examples to tweak the interest of the least scientific mind.
R. dedicates Chapter 9 to ‘Life after Life’, covering the treatment of the dead and Greek interests in reincarnation, the effects of the dead upon life on earth (probably imported from the Near East), the islands of the blessed, and so on, all adding up to a mass of contradictions no more or less meaningful then as now, and of very little of significance to everyman except in this respect: for the living, it was a fundamental duty to maintain the graves and memory of the family.
R. closes with an epilogue (‘The Greeks among Us’) reflecting widely on the impact of a ‘legacy which is both rich and problematic’, one main problem (among others that she adumbrates) being ‘colonialism’. Ancient Greeks being long dead, it cannot have its normal meaning of taking over and exploiting the resources of another country. It is in fact a metaphor for the take-over of an academic discipline by those intent on perverting its history to justify their own beliefs, however deranged, on any particular topic. One can hardly blame the discipline, let alone the ancients, for that.
This review can only skim the contents of this beautifully written, thoroughly engaging, thoughtful, wide-ranging, informative and humane take on the ancient Greeks. Its readers will come away with the feeling that, whatever the social and cultural differences, the Greeks’ remarkable political, philosophical, intellectual and artistic achievements (not to mention glorious language) are an important and even more a fascinating part of our own culture and history.
Peter Jones