wednesday, january 30, 2008
The Classical World - Robin Lane Fox
Years ago, during my first ill-fated attempt at attending an institution of higher learning, I took a class in Ancient Roman History for no better reason than it was unusual and nobody else seemed interested in taking it.I still recall the befuddled enthusiasm of the professor, who wore the same tattered pinstripe suit covered in chalk dust each and every day… well, each and every day I found time to attend his class.
Or any class for that matter. Not surprisingly, I was not invited to return to that institution the following year. After that, my education became much more scattershot yet continued apace and I eventually even was able to manage to garner a degree but my studies on the world of the Ancients was never realized.
It was an oversight I always regretted. So much about the fascinating events in the Mediterranean basin between about 800 BC and 200 or so AD is simply assumed as part of the culture we live in. Yet, our – my – understanding of this era was erratic at best; a compendium of names and places that had little bearing on each other or organization, chronological or otherwise, in my mind.
To address that shortcoming I spent quite some time reading up on the era and discovered the unfortunate truth about such histories, they rarely were as gripping as my interestingly confused professor. Despite that, I stuck with it and kind of drew up a general outline of the Ancient World in my mind that was good enough to provide a general roadmap for understanding.
What I wished I had found was Robin Lane Fox’s “The Classical World.” While this tome boasts strong stretches of mind-numbing exposition, it also provides a degree of context to the story of this long-past world and the peoples who lived in it.
There are two major pitfalls for ancient histories; either they become a rigidly chronological collection of dates and events or they become wrapped up in their own theories and cannot extricate themselves from that particular perspective.
Fox offers a slightly different take:
Part of the story of the classical world is the invention and development of history-writing itself. Nowadays, historians try to apply sophisticated theories to the understanding of these changes, economics and sociology, geography and ecology, theories of class and gender, the power of symbols and demographic models for populations and their age groups. In antiquity, these theories of ours were not explicit, or did not even exist. Instead, historians had favorite themes of their own, of which three were particularly prominent: freedom, justice and luxury.
Those three concepts are what drives his narrative. Starting with Homer and the worldview the blind poet espoused, Fox moves forward examining the Greek society, its evolution and downfall, the rise of Alexander’s Hellenic world and it’s passing then the emergence of the Roman state and it’s eventual transition to empire. At the end is the second-century Emperor Hadrian and the tale is told as a story for his benefit – since he is the logical conclusion of the almost 900 years of history that precedes his reign.
“This history follows the thread of a changing story, within which hits three main themes have a changing resonance,” Fox explains. “Sometimes it is a history of great decisions, taken by (male) individuals but always in a setting of thousands of individual lives.”
Where Fox’s book is most interesting in accomplishing that is in the way it provides context. The history of the Ancient world is much more than a history of the rulers but the evolution of societies. His book looks at the forces that drove these societies and how they, in turn were shaped by them.
It’s a thorough examination touching such topics as slavery, homosexuality and the lack of rights held by women. All topics assumed obvious by the ancients but abhorrent to us in the modern world. Fox doesn’t judge but he doesn’t forgive either. And his motivation is simple…
“Those who idealize the past tend not to understand it: restoration kills it with kindness,” he writes.
So instead of a surfeit of military and political miscellanea, Fox offers a hearty examination of art, religion, technology and sex. The book sacrifices historical detail for interesting detours to subjects that cover the Ancient globe; the rise of the Ionian philosophers, the differences between the society of Sparta and the rest of ancient Greece, the forces of Greek colonization on Rome’s emergent society and, most interestingly, a detailed examination of Pompeii’s ruins and what it tells us about the mundane affairs of a long ago civilization.
In his chapter on the rise of spectator sports in ancient Rome, Fox’s analysis has interesting parallels to our popular culture. The emergence of gladiatorial contests and other public entertainments often flew in the face of emperor Augustus’s rigid degrees that affected the moral makeup of Roman society. Art was busy imitating life, it seems, rather than falling in step with the censor.
The interest and attention paid to these sports have interesting echos to our current cultural fascination with sports and entertainment figures. The circus maxiumus was eventually enlarged to seat more than 200,000 spectators – almost twice the maxium capacity of the largest university football stadiums in the United States today.
But a key difference between the role these contests played for the Romans and our contests today is their profile politically. Politicians desiring favor backed the games and the events could become a forum for the public to make known their displeasure or agreement with various edicts. A dialogue, Fox explains, between a ruler and people.
The best that can be mustered in a modern sports contest is disapproval with a coach or owner that, more often than not, is either silenced by ejecting the offender or simply ignoring the display.
What is most refreshing about Fox’s book is that he refuses to be judgmental. He certainly finds himself partisan to various cultures and players but his examination of the cultures remains steadfastly observational. Presenting the proper context eclipses making moral judgments about a world long past no matter the reach of its influence.
What really emerges from the narrative are personalities. Pericles is little known beyond his orations but Fox pieces together a complex and much more morally questionable biography than you might be used to.
Marc Anthony is often just an aside to the drama of Julius Cesar and, later, Octavian but his unique lifestyle was as much a hallmark of the society as his actions were to direct its fate. They are just two of a long list of characters Fox illuminates that include Alexander, Socrates, Cicero and Pliny. Not to mention Homer and Hadrian of the book’s surtitle.
Yet, more than simple biographic sketches, these characters illuminate the mores and concepts of the societies they emerged from. Rather than know the individual historical figure better, Fox’s portraits show the evolution of the populace that they represented (or mis-represented) during their lifetimes.
Perhaps the most illuminating aspect of his history is the casual references to the rise of Judaism and how the forces of history worked serendipitously at first and later maliciously to draw the religion into its particular destiny. It shows the group evolve, in the eyes of the powers-that-were as a pesky but not particularly notable religious sect.
Eventually though, this changes as the rise of Christianity slams headfirst against the ideology of the ruling Roman empire – a cataclysmic event Fox paints very sharply in the latter chapters of his book.
While Fox’s book would certainly have electrified me to the powerful story of the Ancient World it’s very doubtful having it at my disposal all those years ago would have changed my wayward attempt at higher education. I always read a great deal and this would have been the perfect tome to read cover to cover while I was supposed to be reading something else for an assignment.
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