Bloomsbury (2023) p/b 267pp £24.99 (ISBN 9781350289192)
‘The aim of this book has been to try to understand how and why the classical Greeks came to have such an unusual society and outlook, and how this society and outlook enabled them to develop their remarkable culture.’
B. begins by emphasising the Greek city-states’ predilection for rational thought and its invention of democracy. This, he suggests, laid the foundations for its astonishing literary, philosophical, political and educational achievement and justifies the idea that it lies at the root of Western civilisation. B. might here have mentioned that, since at that time Western Europe was completely illiterate, the key to the survival of that Greek achievement lay with the Romans, the only other culture at that time to pick up from Greeks the idea of literature and put the learning of Greek at the heart of its education system. Indeed, all Western literature was composed in Greek and Latin until about the 4th century AD.
In the first chapter, B. deals with the difficult problem of determining how the tribal states of Homeric Greece developed into differing types of what we have come to know as city-states. Phocis, for example, remained a single political unit but without an urban city centre; Thebes could not quite turn itself into a city-state controlling a large number of other city-states, becoming more like the head of a federation; Sparta controlled all the local towns and villages without giving them citizenship; Athens turned Attica into a single city-state, with citizenship for all its freeborn members. B. correctly emphasises that Greek historians never talked of locations such as ‘Athens’ and ‘Sparta’ acting in anyway, only of ‘Athenians’ and ‘Spartans’.
In chapter 2, B. deals in some detail with the economic development of the city-states. As modern scholarship has shown and B. describes in detail, a degree of local specialisation and trade involving exchange of services and products came to play an increasingly important part in maintaining a city-state’s wealth and dominance. But here B. should surely have said something about the financial implications of the Athenian Empire, which played a major part in helping Athens to remain top dog so long, and without which the Parthenon (for example) could not have been built, let alone a huge fleet maintained.
The third chapter looks at the development of warfare (the ‘Spear’ of the title). B. contrasts the aristocratic ethos of Homeric battle—the achievement of the single warrior seeming to control the outcome of any conflict—with the hoplite tactics of the city-state, involving (on land) mass formations of large numbers of well-trained men, all equipped with the same style of armour, and at sea equally well-trained citizens pulling at the oars of triremes.
He rightly stresses the communal nature of these strategies, but rather overplays its significance. In that world wealth, power and security lay primarily in the land, and the seizure of the land belonging to others that increased one’s wealth, power and security. So in the absence of standing armies, every man of fighting age, from the very rich to the very poor, underwent military training of some sort, because they risked losing everything they had—wealth, power, security—unless they could successfully defend their own territory (the rich losing more than anyone). B. might here have brought in Livy’s early history of Rome, which gives a very clear picture of how the poor, who made up most of the army, exploited it to their own advantage, by e.g. occasionally refusing to fight in order to strengthen their political grip. So there is nothing uniquely special or different about the Greeks in this respect.
B. develops this point in Chapter 4 (‘the Pebble’ of the title, referring to voting in the law courts and democracy more generally): universal military engagement, on land and sea, gave the Greek male citizen a sense of entitlement to engage in political decision-making. He describes in detail the Athenian system, but also draws the larger picture, pointing out that not all Greek states were Athenian-style democracies (e.g. Sparta: there were many variations on the theme). He uses Boeotia as an example of a federation of oligarchies, each city with four councils, taking it in turns to propose policy on which all citizens voted. (Here a correction: the Greek for ‘tyranny’ is turannis; there is no such word as turanneia.) There is a useful account of the Greek theory of political decision-making, taking in Herodotus, Plato’s Protagoras, pseudo-Xenophon and culminating with the Politics of Aristotle, who argues that only those with a basic reasoning capacity to enable them to participate virtuously in deliberation and decision-making should be granted the status of a fully participating citizen.
B. ends this chapter with an important question. As he says, ‘to participate properly in a complex political system, one needs to know the laws and rules governing and organising that system, so that one knows how to go about playing one’s part’—a problem the Greeks, as he explains in detail, solved by publicly displaying laws, treaties, arbitrations, state business (e.g. finances), lists of priests and officials, copies of official correspondence, honours granted to individuals, and so on. But how literate was Athenian society?
To that question he devotes the final chapter (the ‘Scroll’ of the title), claiming that if it were not literate there would be no point in displaying in public the content of laws, treaties, political decisions and so on. Here he attempts to demonstrate from the sources that all Athenian children were compelled by law to go to school. But this is not what the sources that he quotes actually say. What they talk about are those laws (whose origins are unknown, but probably Solonian) which apply to children who do go to school; the laws imply nothing about anything remotely resembling compulsory, let alone universal, education. B. looks more widely for further evidence and quotes a bored Dikaiopolis in Acharnians, waiting for the prutaneis to arrive and start the Assembly, saying ‘I sigh, yawn, stretch, fart, and graphô’, which he translates as ‘I write’. What? With kalamos, papyrus and to melan?! Graphô basically means ‘draw, scratch’. He’s doodling on the ground (as B. later on agrees is more likely).
But the fact is that basic functional literacy does not require a public education system, especially (as B. points out) the invention of the Greek alphabet, consisting of 24 letters indicating vowels and consonants, made reading so much easier than any other system. B. himself quotes in detail from Protagoras’ long speech in Plato’s eponymous dialogue, in which Protagoras argues that the family, the community and private teachers dealt with those sorts of problems. Simple human need and natural curiosity would also play a part. One is not expecting all Greeks to be able to master Sophoclean choruses, once memorably defined in a lecture by Deny Page as follows: ‘Say something which is not what you mean, and instead say something else from which what you do mean can be inferred’. But B. really should really have quoted Aristotle here, who at the end of the Politics states specifically that education ought to be something that the state took in hand, but does not: ‘education must be one and the same for all, and the responsibility for it must be a public one, not the private affair which it now is’ (1337a11).
Equally doubtful is B.’s research-based conclusion that only the ability to read the printed word enabled the brain to allow humans to develop a ‘narrative identity’, which refers ‘to the internalised and evolving story of the self that a person constructs to provide his or her life with unity, purpose and meaning’ and which he claims is a particular characteristic of Greek literature. Gilgamesh, anyone? Or Homer’s epics, composed at a time when the Greek world was only just beginning to have access to the wonders of the new alphabet? All that said, however, B. is absolutely right to raise this question. It is quite possible that there was a basic functional literacy among much of the male citizen population at least.
B.’s conclusion is followed by three appendices, extensive notes on sources and a lengthy bibliography. The remit of his work may be narrow—a ‘society and its outlook’ surely depends on all its members, not just its warrior ‘collective’—but in its own terms it is a success. B. writes clearly and enthusiastically, and covers a much wider range of ground than one normally finds in such a book. He is to be congratulated on an ambitious project, as is Bloomsbury, which has published it at a very reasonable price.
Peter Jones