CUP (2025) h/b 188pp (ISBN 9781009505604)
Every schoolboy and every schoolgirl alive knows that the ancient Greeks invented mathematics—both the subject discipline and its name (which meant simply ‘matters to do with teachings or lessons’). Or did they? Well, not out of whole cloth: but for the grace of their Egyptian and Babylonian forerunners, not even Professor Netz’s hero Archimedes (principle of buoyancy—heureka!) or Eratosthenes (measurement of the earth’s circumference) could have achieved what they did.
As for ‘Euclidean’ geometry, the name says it almost all: for example, from theories of geometric constructions and the discovery of the properties of irrational numbers to the theory of equations and their symmetries there is a direct, traceable intellectual lineage from ancient Greek mathematicians to their contemporary successors such as Professors Matthew Emerton (U. of Chicago) or Marcus Du Sautoy (Oxford U.). And indeed, to historians of mathematics such as the coruscatingly brilliant if unorthodox Professor Reviel Netz (originally from Israel, now Stanford U. via Cambridge).
It all adds up. Or does it? As will be seen, N. is a most unusual, left-field sort of thinker, so that when he titles his book Why the Ancient Greeks Matter, the matter of mattering ain’t what it might be thought to be. N.’s new book is indeed unusual in several ways. For starters, in having two long ‘puffs’—by Oxford classicist Jaś Elsner and Princeton’s Dan-El Perilla Peralta; and these are not only excerpted, conventionally, on the back of the dust jacket but also printed in full in the book’s prelims. Peralta is perhaps better known, even notorious, for wishing to have Classics as such—or versions of it—burned down, an aim endorsed, for example, by Johanna Hanink (Brown U.), like N. a Cambridge PhD. I can recommend the temperate response to that provocation by Michael B. Poliakoff (senior classical historian turned educationist and disciplinary advocate): https://www.goacta.org/2021/02/on-burning-the-classics/.
Yet in this book Peralta can seem to see nothing but good: ‘a model of … discerning argument’, a powerful intervention ‘in studies of canon formation and knowledge production’, and, not least, ‘an exhortation—moving, timely, and urgent—to study ancient Greek history’ against the surging tide of ‘institutional and national disinvestment in the critical investigation of premodern cultures’. Elsner is only slightly less laudatory, and their joint view is corroborated by Cambridge’s recently retired Professor of the History of Science and director of the Whipple Museum, Liba Taub. Such a trio can’t all be wrong. Surely. And yet…
Another leading Classical scholar, though not of science or mathematics, Professor Stephen Halliwell (St Andrews U.), is of a radically divergent opinion. In a letter to the TLS (8 August 2025) responding to a review (TLS, 1 August) by ancient historian Professor James Romm (Bard College), Halliwell takes stern issue with what he regards as N.’s reduction of the modern study of classics to ‘intellectual scavenging’ (a quotation from N.), with what Halliwell considers N.’s ‘muddled reasoning’, and ‘provocative dogmatism’ (in denying that the Greek legacy ‘embodied any values at all’). What’s the fuss all about?
N. does indeed utter some challenging, provocative remarks, some of which seem to align him uncomfortably with the Peralta-Hanink axis of de-interpretation, but others of which are left-field in a good way. Potential readers unsure whether to dive into the debate may be reassured that N. can write in a perfectly comprehensible way and express with his usual force opinions that are unobjectionable. Throughout, N. is admirably insistent on and admirably clear about his methodological presuppositions. In this and other respects (most obviously his predilection for ancient Greek mathematics and sciences) he is a star former doctoral pupil of the redoubtable (Sir) Geoffrey Lloyd. Readers of this book might well profit from a parallel reading of the book of Lloyd’s 2012 Tanner Lectures, The Ideals of Inquiry. An Ancient History (Oxford, 2014). Thence too hails N.’s determined comparativism.
All that is poured into the service of one of his central preoccupations—to deconstruct the cant phrase ‘the Greek miracle’. On multiple—sorry, many—occasions he emphasises (to rephrase his subtitle) that the ‘miracle’ that was ancient Greece was ‘problematic’. Yes, what some individual ancient Greeks achieved and the culture they instantiated was indeed in several important respects miraculous and was deservedly received and enhanced by Classical Romans, Byzantine Greeks and Romans, and medieval and early-modern Italians among others. But the process whereby that miraculous achievement—not only in science and mathematics but above all in the canon (‘yardstick’) of literature originating in Athens—became foundational and should still be regarded retrospectively as such is … problematic. For the full exposition of N.’s understanding of canonicity as it affects the ancient Greeks, see his 2020 Scale, Space and Canon in Ancient Literary Culture (C.U.P. 2020, reviewed by Elsner, BMCR 2021.06.40). For his more detailed exposition of what for him constitutes the ‘problematic miracle’, see this book’s Chapter 1.
But that leads us back to the—surely on the face of it justified—objections of Halliwell: how can N. in all conscience deny that the (or any useful understanding of the) Greek legacy ‘embodied any values at all’? Well, that denial has to be read in context, N.’s own context of objection—surely correct—to the imputation to ancient Greek literature of ‘any timeless values’. Fair enough: context is all. But for a specialist student of science—and therefore, by implication—of formal logic to move from refusal of timeless values to refusal of all value(s) strikes me as not just illogical but also irresponsible. However, it’s more complicated even than that. For—rather as the late Martin Bernal saw his Black Athena series as ultimately an anti-racist project—so N. likewise sees a ‘timeless values’ view of the Greek legacy that makes the ancient Greeks ‘just like us, only long ago’ (my words) as equally ‘racist’. Here he is in a—possibly the—key passage towards the end of chapter 4 that is entitled ‘Post-Miracle’ (pp. 163-4):
‘This was the main point of this book: the Greek pivot was indeed decisive. However, it did not involve the uncovering of “timeless values” whose preservation is required for civilization. The significance of the canon is structural; it is a matter of beginning a process of change; we are post-miracle. The past matters, but the proper attitude towards it is not conservatism but, rather, admiration—from the vantage point of a present that has already no direct need of that past’ (my emphases).
However one parses that passage , if it can lead to a (value) judgement such as that Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin ‘is superior to the Odyssey’ (p.154), then I can well see why Professor Halliwell, by no means a conservative of the kind N. lambasts, would throw up his hands metaphorically in horror. Me too. However, whatever about his views on the ancient Greeks and why for him they matter, I shall always admire N. for another reason, his pioneering, leftwing as well as left-field, work on barbed wire and its profound inhumanity: https://muse.jhu.edu/article/210767
Oh, and also for that on Archimedes and ancient Greek mathematics more generally—if only I were able to claim to understand even the half of what he writes here in Chapters 2 and 3!
Paul Cartledge