BOOK OF THE DAY: The Birth of Classical Europe: A History from Troy to AugustineBy Simon Price and Peter Thonemann Allen Lane, 398pp, £30.00
HIGH UP on the list of books I should never want to write is an enterprise such as this, a history of the roots of European civilisation “from the earliest times”– in this case as a first volume of a projected Penguin History of Europe.
Yet I recognise it as a most useful task, and am happy to salute those who do it well. Such, I am glad to say, is the case with the authors of this volume. Price is a well-respected senior scholar at Oxford who has published much on ancient religion, and has excavated in Crete, while Thonemann is a more junior scholar, also of Oxford, who is an authority on the antiquities of Asia Minor (modern Turkey). Both have a good feel for how to present often recalcitrant material to a general audience, while maintaining scholarly excellence.
They divide their vast field into nine chapters, starting with Bronze-Age Crete and its environs, and proceeding down through the so-called Dark Age of the early first millennium BC (the early Iron Age), to the Archaic (7th-5th centuries) and Classical (5th and 4th) ages of Greece.
Then comes a chapter on the Macedonian Alexander the Great and his Hellenistic successors, and then four chapters on the Romans, from their earliest impact on history around 500 BC through the great days of the Roman Republic and Empire of Augustus (146 BC to AD 14), and the high period of Empire in the first to the third centuries, down to the sack of Rome by the Goths in AD 410, and a bit beyond.
How is one to bring such a project to life, and avoid becoming just another tedious work of potted history? Well, first of all, the authors make a point of beginning each chapter with a vivid image or detail appropriate to the period – the abduction of Europa by Zeus to start things off; the story of Hero and Leander to lead into the Persian invasion of Greece in chapter 4; a description of the Gauls sleeping while surrounded by their savage hogs at the beginning of chapter 7; a mosaic of Bellerophon and Pegasus on the floor of a fine late Roman villa in Lullingstone, Kent, to begin the last chapter.
Their other device is to insert periodically, in boxes, interesting snippets illustrating the later influence of the Classical world, such as the modern search for Atlantis, Derek Walcott’s Omeros, Lord Byron at the Hellespont, emulating Leander, or the influence of the Roman constitution and empire on such figures as Thomas Jefferson or Mussolini, all serving to remind us of the myriad ways in which the Classical world continues to live in the modern consciousness.
What the authors are really concerned with, as it turns out, is not so much the course of history as the development of the self-image of the Greeks and Romans over time, and their vision of their respective pasts, which have of course contributed mightily to our own view of them, and of the growth of the European idea in general.
A final thought which one might carry away from this book is a reminder that the history of Europe is intimately bound up with that of the Middle East, from the Sumerians, Babylonians and Egyptians down to the Arabs and the Turks, and this makes the ongoing hostilities there all the more tragic and deplorable.
Europe would not be Europe without the stimuli emanating from that area, from the moment that young Europa first climbed on the Bull, on that Phoenician shore.
John Dillon is Emeritus Professor of Greek at Trinity College Dublin