The Oxford History of the Classical World
-Edited By John Boardman, Jasper Griffin, Oswyn Murray.Contents:
Book Cover (Front) (Back)
Scan / Edit Notes
List of Colour Plates
List of Maps
Acknowledgements
Introduction (By Jasper Griffin)
Greece
1. Greece: The History Of The Archaic Period (By George Forrest)
2. Homer (By Oliver Taplin)
3. Greek Myth And Hesiod (By Jasper Griffin)
4. Lyric And Elegiac Poetry (By Ewen Bowie)
5. Early Greek Philosophy (By Martin West)
6. Greece: The History Of The Classical Period (By Simon Hornblower)
7. Greek Drama (By Peter Levi)
8. Greek Historians (By Oswyn Murray)
9. Life And Society In Classical Greece (By Oswyn Murray)
10. Classical Greek Philosophy (By Julia Annas)
11. Greek Religion (By Robert Parker)
12. Greek Art And Architecture (By John Boardman)
Greece And Rome
13. The History Of The Hellenistic Period (By Simon Price)
14. Hellenistic Culture And Literature (By Robin Lane Fox)
15. Hellenistic Philosophy And Science (By Jonathan Barnes)
16. Early Rome And Italy (By Michael Crawford)
17. The Expansion Of Rome (By Elizabeth Rawson)
18. The First Roman Literature (By P.G. McC. Brown)
19. Cicero And Rome (By Miriam Griffin)
20. The Poets Of The Late Republic (By Robin Nisbet)
21. Hellenistic And Graeco-Roman Art (By Roger Ling)
Rome
22. The Founding Of The Empire (By David Stockton)
23. The Arts Of Government (By Nicholas Purcell)
24. Augustan Poetry And Society (By R.O.A.M. Lyne)
25. Virgil (By Jasper Griffin)
26. Roman Historians (By Andrew Lintott)
27. The Arts Of Prose: The Early Empire (By Donald Russell)
28. Silver Latin Poetry And The Latin Novel (By Richard Jenkyns)
29. Later Philosophy (By Anthony Meredith)
30. The Arts Of Living (By Roger Ling)
31. Roman Life And Society (By John Matthews)
32. Roman Art And Architecture (By R.J.A. Wilson)
Envoi: On Taking Leave Of Antiquity (By Henry Chadwick)
Tables of Events
Further Reading
Descriptive List of Illustrations (Removed)
Index (Removed)
Scan / Edit Notes
This has to be one of the best all in one History books dealing with Roman and Greek periods that I have
ever had the privilege of scanning. Due to its enormous size (approx 882 + pages with more pictures
than I care to count) all of which had to be scanned one page at a time (pictures scanned separately);
there will be no text or pdb version. The text alone was over 2 MB in size. IMHO the effort was well
worth it as this is a treasure house of knowledge.
Unfortunately due to its size I will be breaking the book up into chapters (linked) instead of using the
newer method of making one large html file with bookmarks. -Sorry about thisVersions available and duly posted:
Format: v1.5 (HTML)
Format: v1.5 (Ubook-HTML)
Genera: History
Extra's: Pictures Included
Copyright: 1986 / 1993
Scanned: November 10 2003
Posted to:
alt.binaries.e-book (HTML-PIC)
alt.binaries.e-book (HTML-UBook)
Note:
The U-Book version is viewable on PC and PPC (Pocket PC). Occasionally a PDF file will be produced
in the case of an extremely difficult book.
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Structure: (Folder and Sub Folders)
{Main Folder} - HTML Files
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|- {Nav} - Navigation Files
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|- {Pic} - Graphic files
-Salmun
TOC
List of Colour Plates
Caeretan hydria: Heracles leads Cerberus
Northampton amphora: Triton, floral fantasy
Athenian oil vase: a Muse on Helicon
Statue of a girl from the Athenian Acropolis
Bronze warrior from Riace
Iron corselet from the tomb of Philip II of Macedon
The Athenian Acropolis
The fourth-century theatre at Epidaurus
Engraved Greek gems, finger rings and jewellery
Detail of the Alexander mosaic
Hellenistic earrings
Interior of the Tazza Farnese
Painting of a frightened girl, Pompeii
Tablinum of the house of M. Lucretius Fronto, Pompeii
Pont du Gard, Nimes
Detail of the Canopus in Hadrian's Villa, Tivoli
Head of Autumn, Cirencester
Mosaic from Tivoli: Nile boat-trip
Arretine bowl made by M. Perennius Tigranus
Decorated Roman glassware from the Rhineland
TOC
List Of Maps
1. Greece and the Aegean World
2. Greek colonization
3. The Athenian Empire
4. Attica
5. The Hellenistic World
6. Alexander's journeys
7. Italy
8. The growth of Rome in Italy
9. The Roman Empire
10. The Growth of Roman Rule
TOC
Acknowledgements
The editors wish to express their thanks to the many institutions and individuals named in the List of
Illustrations for provision of photographs and drawings, and permission to use them; and to Philippa
Lewis who did the picture research. A special debt of gratitude is owed to Roger Ling who undertook
the main responsibility for the choice of illustrations and the writing of captions from Chapter 13
onwards. The pictures and captions of earlier chapters were chosen and written by John Boardman.
Oswyn Murray compiled the Chronological Charts. The index was compiled by Peter Tickler. Many
members of the Press have devoted their skills to the creation of this volume, but our principal debt must
be to the authors for their patient cooperation.
TOC
Introduction
By
Jasper Griffin
The subject of this book is enormous. In time it covers a period of well over a thousand years, from the poems of
Homer to the end of pagan religion and the fall of the Roman Empire in the West. In geographical extension it
begins in Greece with small communities emerging from a dark age of conquest and destruction, and with
Bronze Age villages on the hills of Rome; it ends with an Empire which unified the Mediterranean world and a
great deal besides, from Northumberland to Algeria, from Portugal to Syria, from the Rhine to the Nile. The fall
of Rome was further removed in time from Homer than we are from the Norman Conquest; as for political scale,
the Roman Empire comprised the whole or part of the territory of what are now thirty sovereign states, and it was
not until 1870 that Italy, for instance, achieved again the unity which Rome had imposed before the birth of
Christ.
That world is given the title 'classical'. The word carries the implication that the works of art and literature
produced in Graeco-Roman antiquity possess an absolute value, that they form the standard by which all others
are to be judged. In the Renaissance and even after it that was indeed what many people thought; Swift's Battle of
the Books expresses the idea with wit and brilliance, and in painting such works as Raphael's Parnassus in the
Vatican, showing Apollo and the Muses with the great poets of Greece and Rome, or the ineffably academic
Apotheosis of Homer by Ingres, give it visual form. The time is past when it could make sense to think of the
ancient world as passing judgment on its successors. On the one hand, the technical advances of the last five
generations have transformed life in too many respects for such a comparison to make sense; on the other,
interest in other early cultures outside the classical framework has shown that Greece and Rome were less unique
than our ancestors supposed.
Yet while we can no longer allow to classical antiquity the exclusive dominance which its study once enjoyed in
the schools and universities of Europe, it must retain a special interest for the western world. The art of
Michelangelo and Rubens, the poetry of Milton and Keats, the architecture of our cities, with their domes and
triumphal arches deriving from Rome and their pillared porticoes deriving from Greece, are only a few examples
of the pervasive presence of the ancient world in the modern. No less important has been Greek mythology:
Helen, Oedipus, Narcissus, the Minotaur in the labyrinth. Other myths have been no less haunting: Athenian
democracy, Spartan austerity, the stern virtue of the Roman Republic, the luxury and order of her Empire. And
that world presents, as no other can, the prospect of a society which, though distant, was not merely barbaric, but
which attained high sophistication and produced great works of art, and which is in addition directly linked by
history with that of the modern West, as the societies of ancient China and Peru, for instance, are not. Western
civilization grew out of the classical world, and it never lost the knowledge that a high culture had preceded it,
whose legacy was there to be emulated and exploited. The study of that distant but not completely alien world
can allow us to understand that there are alternatives to our own ways and assumptions, and so it can help to
liberate us from the tyranny of the present.
The story is a long one, the setting is wide and varied. Many varieties of human society are to be found in it:
primitive villages, fiercely independent city-states, great kingdoms, even federal leagues. Democracy was
invented, practised, lost. Tyrants seized power; aristocrats fought to retain it; philosophers argued and speculated
on the origins of society, the nature of justice, the duties of the citizen. In the beginning there was verse and song,
and with time prose literature can be seen coming into being, with philosophy and history and fiction. Rational
thought struggles out of the mythical and poetic mode. We see the interaction of Greek intellectual supremacy
and the irresistible military might of Rome, in many -ways a tragic story, and one which is full of significance for
our own time. Not less resonant for us is the twofold breach of continuity at beginning and end of our work. The
polished society which produced the palaces of Minoan Crete -was destroyed, and the splendours of Mycenaean
Greece, the imposing citadels, the ivory and the gold, found no successors in the next three hundred years of low
artistic standards, depopulation, and poverty. The fall of Rome was followed by an age of barbarian invasions,
universal insecurity, destruction of cities and works of art. High civilization, once achieved, can be lost: that is
among the reflections suggested by the study of the classical world.
The ancestors of the Greeks, like those of the Romans, belonged to the great Indo-European family of peoples,
which spread in the course of many centuries from an original home somewhere near the Caucasus into India,
Iran, and Europe. They began to enter Greece from the north about 1900 B.C. From the great steppes they
entered a world in which the sea was of primary importance for communications; the land of Greece is
mountainous, broken up into a multitude of separate small plains, river valleys, and islands. The fierce
particularity of classical Greece, in which every city as a matter of course had its own coinage and even its own
calendar, with jealous hostility and intermittent war the rule between neighbouring cities, is clearly connected
with the terrain. Italy, too, is not a country of great navigable rivers: the Romans were astonished by the broad
and equable rivers of Gaul. The climate of Greece is temperate, although the Aegean Sea is notorious for sudden
storms, and a man needed little-by the standards of the wet and chilly North-for reasonable comfort. Open-air
gatherings and a life largely lived out of doors came naturally in such surroundings. However spectacular the
public buildings on the Acropolis, the life-style of a classical Athenian was very modest. The Greeks themselves
said that poverty was their great instructor in hardihood and self-reliance.
A River Valley In Arcadia, east of Olympia. Rivers in such a landscape are treacherous in flood though
commonly dry in midsummer, and have earned away much cultivable soil even since antiquity when the land may
have been better wooded.
Mycenaean Greece was culturally dependent on the sophisticated arts of the Minoans, the non-Indo-European
people flourishing on Crete and some of the Aegean islands. It was in contact also with other ancient cultures of
the Near East: Hittites, Egyptians, Syrians. The sea made it natural for Greeks to turn to neighbouring maritime
peoples rather than to the hill-dwellers who lived on the European mainland. Egypt and Asia Minor were more
interesting than Macedonia or Illyria. From those already ancient cultures these early Greeks learned many
things: the names of exotic gods and goddesses such as Hera and Athena, who became fully naturalized, part of
the classic pantheon; luxury arts; music and poetry. When all the other arts were temporarily lost in the dark age
which followed the fall of the Mycenaean citadels about 1150 B.C., poetry and song survived and kept alive the
memory of an age of great kings and heroes, of Mycenae, not an abandoned ruin but rich in gold, the seat of
Agamemnon king of men. The Bronze Age Mycenaean culture was the setting of the myths, whose importance
for classical Greece cannot be exaggerated. In the dark age which followed its fall the complex inheritance from
the earlier centuries was digested and organized. At its end the pantheon is virtually complete, and religion has
taken its lasting form; contact with the East is restored; and the polis, the independent city-state, is settling into its
classic shape.
It is a revealing piece of evidence for the importance of the surrounding cultures that in Greek most names of
musical instruments, and even those of many poetical forms, such as elegy, hymn, iambus, are loan-words from
languages which were not Indo-European. Poetry and literature always remained the supreme arts in Greece, both
in social prestige and in impact; and their forms, like their mythical content, went ultimately back to a time when
the ancestors of the Greeks found themselves arriving in a world of settled dwellings, palaces, frescoes, music.
That early contact must be a great part of the explanation for the Greek achievement. Their distant kinsmen who
invaded the Indus valley found there cities and temples, which gave a flying start to Aryan culture in India; the
first Greeks, similarly, were helped by contact with sophisticated societies to develop along lines very different
from the Germans and the Celts, wandering in the northern forests, who remained for centuries in something far
more like the original tribal society.
The Lion Gate At Mycenae. This monumental gateway to the citadel at Mycenae was built in the mid thirteenth
century B.C. and was never lost to view. It, and the massive walls, thought by classical Greeks to have been built
by giants, were a reminder to them of the achievements of their Age of Heroes, the period about which Homer
sang. It is shown in this old photograph as it may have appeared to the Greeks themselves.
The Greeks themselves were aware of their debt to Phoenicia for the origin of their alphabet, to Egypt for their
early style of sculpture, to Babylon for mathematics. In Greece all these things developed in a particular and
characteristic way, sculpture, for instance, achieving a realism and also a range quite different from Egyptian art,
while in mathematics a keen and novel interest arose in questions of proof and the basing of the whole system on
axiomatic foundations. The alphabet was perfected into a script which in its Roman form has satisfied the
western world ever since. Above all, the human scale, both in art and in society, characterized Greece. The
independent city-state, in which alone a man could develop to the full as a citizen, is the central Greek
achievement. It was possible because the great kingdoms of the East, which were close enough to give seminal
inspiration, were not close enough to subjugate Greece: when Xerxes finally tried, it was too late.
Greek culture was competitive. Each successive historian and philosopher made a point of showing how he
improved on his predecessor; the great Panhellenic occasions, at Olympia and Delphi, centred on athletic
competitions; when tragedies or comedies were put on in Athens, it seemed natural that they should be ranged in
order by a panel of judges. It was also a culture which raised in acute form all the basic questions about human
life: Is slavery wrong ('against nature')? What is the ultimate source of law, human or divine? Should the family
be abolished? (Plato abolished it in theory, and Sparta went a long way towards abolishing it in fact.) Is civil
disobedience sometimes right? How can the rule of law be established over blood-feud and family loyalties?
What justifies a state in ruling other states? What is the ideal size for a community? What is the role of heredity
and what of education in the formation of character?
A View East Across The Eurotas Valley, near Sparta, from the Byzantine hill-town of Mistra. This is one of the
broader, fertile valleys of south Greece, some 5 km across and with easy access to the sea at the south: an easier
landscape than most in the Peloponnese but dominated by the massif of Mount Taygetus on the east.
It was marked in all its aspects by an extraordinarily strong feeling for form. That was what gave Greek art and
literature their immense impact on the other societies with whom they came into contact. The formal perfection
of Greek architecture and town planning, the self-conscious precision of the statues, the strict and exacting
requirements which were felt to be appropriate to each genre of literature: all these trained in the audience a
demanding and knowledgeable taste. Those who acquired that taste-Etruscans, Lydians, Lycians, Sicels, Messapians-found their own native productions by contrast embarrassingly crude and provincial. Only works in the
Greek style would do, and literature in the Greek language. The other languages failed to produce literature and
(with the exception of Hebrew) were marked for disappearance. Only in Rome was the heroic decision taken to
avoid the easy option of writing in Greek, and to embark on the enormous task of creating in Latin a literature
which could be judged by the most exacting Greek standards. This aesthetic precision must also explain in large
part the failure of the Greeks to achieve more technical progress. Even such simple devices as the windmill and
the screw were invented late and exploited little by a people ingenious enough to devise machines powered by
steam. The existence of slavery does not account for this: slaves were a small part of the work-force in Greece.
There was a general preference for aesthetic perfection rather than innovation-a thought-provoking contrast with
our own age. We could take as symbolic the riders on the Parthenon frieze, controlling their mounts without
stirrups: their beauty is marvelous, and the absence of gear increases it, but the early mediaeval invention of the
stirrup would transform the power of cavalry.
In Rome, too, the Indo-European inheritance was strongly modified. The influence of the Etruscans was great
enough to leave Rome, for instance, with a triad of gods worshipped on the Capitol-Jupiter, Juno, and Minervawhich makes sense only in Etruscan terms, and with elaborate systems for discovering the divine purposes by
omens, which were officially practised by Roman magistrates. Even their own names came to follow an alien
pattern, the Indo-European single name (Menelaus, Siegfried) giving place to a complex style (Marcus Tullius
Cicero). Etruria also transmitted the influence of Greece, especially in the visual arts.
Early Rome was characterized by a powerful public opinion, a strong public spirit, and a marked distaste for
eccentricity and individualism. The 'way of the ancestors' (mos maiorum) possessed a great moral force, and
within the family the father enjoyed a degree of power over his sons, even when they were grown men, which
astonished the Greeks, and which is reflected in many stories of fathers who put their own sons to death and were
admired for doing so. It is not difficult to imagine the stress produced in Romans by such pressures, and it is
tempting to connect with it the double Roman obsession, on the one hand with parricide, and on the other hand
with pietas, dutiful behaviour to parents, the archetype of which was the figure of Aeneas, founder of Rome,
carrying his old father on his shoulders out of burning Troy. The anxiety engendered by such conflicts within the
psyche, issuing in restless energy, might be part of the explanation for that astonishing fact, which seemed to the
Romans themselves to be explicable only by constant divine favour: the fact that this city, not particularly well
sited or obviously well endowed, conquered the world.
Roman art and literature alike present the men of the Republic as tight-lipped, tight-fisted, and resolute. Such
qualities as parsimonia, severitas, frugalitas, simplicitas, constantly praised, tell their own story; as does the
moral ascendancy of a man like Cato, the quintessential peasant farmer magnified into a senator and consul. The
names of many Roman grandees poignantly reveal their peasant origin. Cincinnatus and Calvus ('Curly' and
'Baldy'), Capito and Naso ('Big-head' and 'Nosey'), Crassus and Macer ('Fatty' and 'Skinny'), Flaccus and Bibulus
('Floppy' and 'The Drinker'), are the names of Roman consuls and poets, the inheritors of Etruscan kingly regalia
and Greek aesthetic refinement.
Our richest and clearest evidence is for the late Republic, when the system was visibly breaking down, and when
the old safeguards could no longer restrain the magnates from looting the provinces and even marching with
armies on Rome in pursuit of their own aggrandizement. It is tempting to suppose that the reality had always
been as venal and as ruthless. Yet it is clear that there had really been a change. When for twenty years Hannibal
led an invincible army about Italy urging Rome's Italian allies to revolt, the great majority of them stood firm; not
much more than a hundred years later their grievances drove them to make war on Rome themselves. Roman
justice and self-restraint, the public spirit which impressed Greeks when they met it in the second century B.C.,
were not a myth.
Archaic and classical Greece, the truly creative period of antiquity, involve a comparatively small area of the
eastern Mediterranean. The conquests of Alexander spread the language, architecture and art of Greece as far to
the East as India; the rise of Rome led eventually to the whole Mediterranean world, and its 'fringe' as far as
Britain, Romania, Iraq, sharing in one recognizable culture with two great languages, Greek and Latin. Anything
like modern nationalism was strikingly ineffective, and the Empire was not held down by force: for most of the
first century A.D., for instance, there was only one legion stationed in north Africa, and none at all in Spain. The
same books were studied by schoolboys all over that huge world, and whether in Provence or in Turkey or in
north Africa cities arose whose lay-out and temples and public buildings shared the same repertory of forms and
decorations. The silver on the table, the mosaics on the floor, the under-floor heating: a uniformity of style
existed which is only now returning to our world.
That style was not, of course, all inclusive. It was the creation of a leisured class, and Berber tribesmen or Illyrian
goatherds doubtless felt little sympathy with it. The Empire must have depended on unfree labour to a much
greater extent than Greece; and the slums of Rome show that many of the free urban poor lived lives of great
poverty. Yet Rome was extraordinary among slave-owning societies in that slaves were constantly freed in great
numbers, and that the moment they were freed they became citizens. More than half of the thousands of epitaphs
extant from imperial Rome are of freedmen and freedwomen. The poor citizen had the great public baths and
public squares and parks and forums, in which he reckoned to spend far more time out of his house than is
normal in the modern north.
Still darker aspects are not to be glossed over: the slave trade, infanticide, the gladiatorial shows, absolute power
which could be in the hands of irresponsible or unbalanced men. Caligula and Nero, the spectacle of bloodshed
and the sinister opulence of the orgy, have haunted the imagination of Europe. One of the ways in which the
Roman Empire is interesting is that it shows certain sides of human . nature developed to their fullest extent:
'Remember', Caligula used to say to people, 'that I can do anything to anybody.' The past is the laboratory in
which human nature can be studied with security, perhaps the only way it can really be studied at all.
The Approach To Delphi From The East, through the foothills of Mount Parnassus. Land communications in
Greece were not easy, and often circuitous: one reason for preferring coastwise traffic by water where possible.
These lower slopes may have been better wooded in antiquity, but limited farming has always been possible
between the rocky outcrops, and there are good upland pastures.
The ancients believed in the power and significance of great individuals. The daemonic Alcibiades, the
imperturbable and ironic Socrates, the vehement Alexander: these stand beside such Romans as the allconquering Caesar, the gallant but profligate Mark Antony, the demented aesthete Nero. The will to power
incarnated in great individuals, the qualities of resolution, magnanimity, pride: the ancients saw events very
much in such terms. Such qualities as pride and magnanimity are essentially un-Christian. In the Middle Ages
and still more in the Renaissance such pagan virtues, which Christian Europe had in reality by no means
renounced, could be glorified in the persons and stories of the ancient world. The Trojan War and the Quest for
the Golden Fleece, for instance, were good pretexts for the glorification of purely pagan chivalry and passion.
Important human qualities which Christianity seemed to leave out, or which it rejected, could be depicted with
sympathy in Achilles or Caesar, Helen or Cleopatra; in the rational suicide of Seneca or the passionate suicide of
Dido.
The incompatibility of some pagan virtues with Christianity draws attention to an important aspect of the scope
of this book. Jews and Christians are in principle not included-the Envoi looks forward to Christian Europe. The
Jews and the Greeks do not mention each other at all until a surprisingly late period, and when they did meet
neither side was very favourably impressed with the other. In the early second century B.C. there was a time
when it seemed possible that Judaea would become altogether Hellenized: there was a high priest named
Menelaus, a gymnasium was constructed near the Temple, and young men started to wear the Greek dress. The
nationalistic rising of the Maccabees put a stop to this. At the time of St Paul there were plenty of Hellenized
Jews in the Mediterranean world, but the chance that Judaism would peter out had vanished.
Judaism and Christianity do not belong in a History of the Classical World because they were too separate, too
unclassical. The presuppositions of Jewish literature were essentially different from those of Greece and Rome,
and so were its characteristic forms. Rome could come to terms with Judaism, an ancestral cult, at least, if a
bizarre one, more easily than with Christianity, which was not even respectably ancient, and which in vital
respects contradicted the fundamental nature of the pagan state. Other-worldliness, celibacy, refusal to take an
oath or offer the regular sacrifices-all this was more than official Rome could stomach, while the uncouth literary
form of Christian writings and their outlandish message repelled the educated class: to the Greeks it seemed
foolishness, St Paul admits of the Gospel. Yet there was a perspective in which, at least later, the classical world
could be seen as necessary for the universal acceptance of the Christian revelation. The glorification of Socrates'
condemnation and death as being a martyrdom, a triumph, which was proclaimed with all the literary genius of
Plato and accepted by the educated of Greece and Rome alike, prepared the way for the understanding of the
Passion of Christ. The Roman Empire had pacified and united the world in time for the Gospel to be proclaimed
everywhere. Rome the Imperial City became Rome the Holy City, and her bishops took the old Roman title of
Supreme Pontiff. The universal claims of Rome assumed a sacerdotal form, but the continuity is obvious.
The classical tradition, a large fraction of the history of the West, is too vast a theme to be more than glanced at
here. Greece and Rome provided the languages of the Western and Eastern Churches, when the unity imposed on
the Mediterranean world finally broke in half with Rome's fall, and they continued to be the vehicle of
intellectual communication for many centuries. The Eastern Empire continued to call itself' 'Roman' to the end, in
1453, but it did so in Greek. Some of ancient literature survived, including many masterpieces, although much
more was lost. It proved to be highly important that in later antiquity so much scholarly work had been done,
establishing texts, commenting on them, compiling grammars and dictionaries. They helped to make the texts
intelligible. By contrast a literature like Old Irish, where there was very little scholarly apparatus of this kind, is
full of words whose meaning is now quite lost. After great struggles and doubts on the part of Fathers of the
Church it was widely, though never universally, accepted that the pagan classics could be read and taught by
Christians. Virgil and Terence continued for a thousand years to be fundamental texts at school in the West.
The idea of Rome haunted the imagination of Europe; Charlemagne went to the inconvenient Italian city to be
crowned Emperor, and the struggle for and against a Roman Empire with universal claims dominated the history
of Italy and Germany for hundreds of years. Napoleon revived it again, and Mussolini claimed to have 'restored
the fasces' (whence 'fascists') and reconstituted an Empire for Rome. Shakespeare explored the dilemmas of
power more deeply in his Roman tragedies than in his English history plays; Kipling, in some of his best poems
and stories, took the Roman Empire as a paradigm of the British Raj. In the sphere of political reality the same
idea can be seen. The trial of Warren Hastings for oppression and extortion in India was felt by all the
participants to be an echo of the celebrated trials of Roman governors like Verres, denounced by Cicero. The
word 'proconsul' was unselfconsciously applied to British colonial administrators.
The founders of new constitutions often took Roman models: thus there are Senates in France, Ireland, Italy, and
the United States. The radical political wing could also find Roman models. French Revolutionaries took names
like Gracchus and claimed the inheritance of the tyrannicide Brutus and the Roman Republic. A German
revolutionary movement named itself after the rebellious slave Spartacus; a left-wing magazine in Britain is still
called Tribune. The Roman Church, of course, re-enacted the claims of the Empire on a different plane.
In the period of Charlemagne the study of the ancient texts aimed to produce churchmen and state servants who
could write intelligible Latin. Later in the Middle Ages those texts were devoured as the best books available on
logic, or architecture, or medicine. The Renaissance found their literary form, its shapeliness and concision, a
delightful relief from mediaeval formlessness; and many tried to emulate the lofty spirit, magnanimous and
pagan, which they depicted in ancient men. The Augustans of the eighteenth century were impressed by the
urbanity and correctness of Horace and Cicero. Romantic poets, such as Keats and Shelley and Holderlin, turned
from Latin literature to Greek: 'We are all Greeks,' said the painter Delacroix. The last hundred years have seen a
great anthropological interest in antiquity, from Frazer and Jane Harrison to Louis Gernet and Jean-Pierre
Vernant, and impassioned performances of Attic tragedies. This brief and exaggeratedly pointed survey brings
out the Protean character of the ancient world, which in every period has had different things to offer, and which
has been exploited with extraordinary thoroughness over the centuries.
For the arts the influence of antiquity had three aspects: subject matter, form, and spirit. The myths of Greece
were the other great subject of Renaissance art, along "with Christian themes; the myths of Ovid were painted by
Titian and Correggio, Rubens and Poussin; Mantegna and Piranesi and David created visual images of Rome;
Michelangelo began his career as a sculptor by creating works so closely modeled on ancient models that they
passed as genuine antiques. The genres of ancient literature, too, lived on. Pastorals and epics, elegies and satires
sprang up in every European language; the Italian musicians and patrons who created the first operas were trying
to reconstruct the musical drama of antiquity; before Greek tragedy was understood, the rhetorical melodramas of
Seneca were a formative influence on the tragedy which blossomed with Marlowe and Shakespeare. In another
art the triumphal arch, the Doric and Ionic and Corinthian capitals, the fountains with marble nymphs and river
gods, the ornamental urns, all proliferated through the cities. The spirit is even more pervasive. David's Marat
stabbed in his bath recalls the philosophical suicides of Rome; the grand manner of Raphael and Milton is
inseparable from their classical studies; Dante claimed Virgil as his master, and for all the enormous difference
of their styles the claim clearly expresses an important truth.
The philosophical legacy is also vast and various. Greek thought penetrated Christian doctrine from the first: 'In
the beginning was the Word' is intelligible only in the light of Greek theories of the Logos. St Augustine was
much influenced by Plato, and many theologians attempted to reconcile Platonism and Christianity, both in the
Middle Ages and, like Sir Thomas More, in the Renaissance. Aristotelian logic laid the basis of scholasticism and
was finally reconciled with orthodox belief by Aquinas. The brilliant guess of the atomic theory was remembered
in the Renaissance, when also the proud virtue of the Stoics provided a model for generals and dynasts.
Platonism, increasingly freed from Christian colouring, was the dominant school of philosophy in England in the
nineteenth century.
The idea of a university goes back to Plato's school at Athens, which lasted for nearly a thousand years. From
Greece it passed to Europe by way of the Arabs, like the text of Aristotle; Universities spread north from Salerno,
where contact with the Muslim East had planted the seed. Textual criticism began with the study of corrupt texts
of classical authors. Such words as 'museum', 'inspiration', 'poet laureate', reveal their ancient connections: a
temple of the Muses, the 'breathing into' a poet of his inexplicably splendid verse by some supernatural force, the
crowning of a successful poet with laurel. The modern cult of athletics and the revival of the Olympic games are
of course strongly Greek.
The English language itself is distinguished from its cousins in the Germanic branch of the Indo-European family
by the very large number of words which have come into it from Latin and, to a lesser extent, from Greek; some
directly, others through French or Italian. People sometimes talk as if such words were always massive and
abstruse, like 'psychiatry' or 'prelapsarian', and indeed the vocabulary of abstract thought, of science and culture,
is especially full of such words. But the following sample of twenty-five may remind the reader that many short
and basic words have the same source; act, art, beauty, colour, crime, fact, fate, fork, hour, human, idea, justice,
language, law, matter, music, nature, number, place, reason, school, sense, sex, space, time.
Every generation approaches classical antiquity in a different way, draws different lessons from it, finds different
things about it interesting. It is hoped that this book will help contemporary readers to understand something of
its continuing significance and fascination.
TOC
Greece
1. Greece: The History of the Archaic Period
(By George Forrest)
Map 1. Greece And The Aegean World
The Emergence of the Polis
For most historians the characteristic and peculiar element in Greek political life has been the polis, the city-state, an institution of which any precise definition obscures the variety in size or shape or social and
political organization. Very roughly, it was a community of citizens (adult males), citizens without political rights (women and children), and non-citizens (resident foreigners and slaves), a defined body,
occupying a defined area, living under a defined or definable constitution, independent of outside authority to an extent that allowed enough of its members to feel that they were independent. The land at large
may have been virtually empty of residents or occupied by farmhouses or villages or even small towns, but there had to be one focal point, religious, political, administrative, around which usually grew up
(Sparta was a notable exception) a city, the polis proper, usually fortified, always offering a market (an agora), a place of assembly (often the agora itself), a seat of justice and of government, executive and
deliberative, in the early period monarchic or aristocratic in type, later usually oligarchic or democratic.
The physical base was almost essential, but even more so was the sense of community. 'We Athenians have a city so long as we have our ships', Themistocles was to say at Salamis (below, p. 45). So too the
notion of independence. Some part of it could be shed involuntarily, by acceptance of tribute-paying to a stronger power, or voluntarily, by joining an alliance or even a federation (the Thessalian or Boeotian,
for instance), but a sense of 'autonomy' had to be there. This institution at its best, the ancient theorists argued, should be neither too large nor too small, neither too self-sufficient nor too dependent, neither too
oligarchic nor too democratic. Certainly, for the archaic and classical periods, most historians have been right to regard the polis as the characteristic form of political organization; certainly, too, many poleis
approached somewhere near the happy norm. But recent enquiries have drawn attention to two other factors which in earlier years will somehow have influenced the origins of the city and may have continued
for some time to colour its development.
The first of these is the repopulation of large tracts of the Greek countryside after the collapse of Mycenaean society. The immediate consequence of this collapse was a long period of chaotic tribal wandering
which by about 1000 B.C. had set the pattern for the future: Dorians, newcomers from the north, in most of the Peloponnese, Crete, south-west Asia Minor and its offshore islands; Ionians in Attica, Euboea,
most of the Aegean islands, and on the central coast of Asia Minor; in the north, in Lesbos, and north-west Asia Minor a mixture which we may roughly call Aeolian. But at the start most of the settlements were
small nuclei with much land around them left to occupy.
The second factor is the appearance of associations of communities, clearly linked with, but not necessarily in all respects coterminous with, this repopulation. Greek tradition hands on several examples of such
associations, some mere hazy recollections, some surviving as more or less empty religious institutions, some few surfacing occasionally in later political life. The six Dorian cities of south-west Asia Minor; the
twelve Ionian states to the north, capable once of concerted action in the 'Meliac' war, too far away in time to be properly recalled; the amphictyony (a league of neighbours) of Anthela at Thermopylae which
owed survival and prosperity to its association with the sanctuary of Apollo at Delphi. Except in the last case, however, vagueness of information has tended to divert attention to more solid things, to Athens,
Sparta, Corinth, to real city-states.
But excavations of the last decade or so awaken interest and prompt a new perception. There existed archaeologically in central Greece an area of common culture: southern Thessaly, Boeotia, Euboea, and the
islands around its eastern coast, an area which has been given new focus by the discovery of a major settlement at Lefkandi on the west coast of Euboea, half-way between what have hitherto been regarded as
the island's two main cities, Chalcis and Eretria. Stunningly prosperous (by contemporary standards) throughout the Dark Age, say 1 1oo to 750, it appears to have reached a height of wealth in the late ninth
century, but more than a century earlier it could offer the tomb of a hero, buried with his consort and with his horses, of unparalleled grandeur and wealth. On available archaeological evidence Lefkandi was the
core of the wider community. Was it also the religious core? It is tempting to say that it was not, to think rather of Thermopylae some 60 miles to the north across the narrow water, the site of the amphictyony
which, it was said, originally included precisely those same peoples, Thessalians, Boeotians, the smaller tribes between them and the Ionians, no doubt the Ionians of Euboea. Did it, or Thermopylae, provide
any kind of political core? Who knows? But stories or hints of early collaboration, commercial and military, between various parts of the area, read against the firm archaeological background and with the
likelihood of some religious association, argue for some much greater degree of cohesion than has previously been countenanced.
Lefkandi. The site lies on the shore of the Straits of Euboea, between Chalcis and Eretria, and must have been the focus of the early dispute between these cities, as well as a prime source for early Greek
exploration and colonization. British excavations there have dramatically changed our view of the so-called Dark Ages of Greece, in the tenth and ninth centuries B.C.
The Burial Of A Woman At Lefkandi. She wore gold jewellery and an unusual gold brassiere. Near her was the cremation burial of a warrior, his ashes wrapped in a cloak. Both were found in a great apsidal