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A review by generalheff
Classical World: An Epic History of Greece and Rome by Robin Lane Fox
2.0
Disappointing is the first word that comes to mind when reviewing Robin Lane Fox's ambitious attempt to provide a one-book history of the Ancient Greek and Roman worlds. Contrived is another. You will learn a lot about the history of Ancient Greece and Rome, from the Archaic Greek world of Homeric epic right through to the Roman Empire at its (arguable) zenith under Hadrian in the 130s AD. Quite a lot of this history is well told to be sure, but you will have to endure reading the good parts amidst not one but two bizarre framing devices. Let's take these in turn to understand why (for me at least) this book is such a let down.
The less pervasive but perhaps more irritating structuring device utilised by Lane Fox is the adoption of the conceit that we are following Hadrian in the 130s AD around the ancient world. He was an ardent traveller and so would have seen first person much of the Greco-Roman world that is of interest to us today. The first chapter introduces this notion and the rest of the book intermittently refers back to how Hadrian might have viewed something and the contrast between this and modern history's view. It strikes me as an utterly pointless device, the modern reader being far more interested in what current evidence says about events than what Hadrian might have thought. Perhaps it is a blessing, but the device is also very inconsistently applied; one goes dozens of pages without reference to Hadrian, only for him to be crowbarred into a discussion seemingly for no good reason.
The second device is the framing of the historical analysis around three very deliberately chosen themes: luxury, freedom and justice. We hear in an early chapter how Homer speaks about luxury in his epics - "Homer's heroes and kings are not 'corrupted' by luxury" indicating a fairly accepting view of luxury goods (including for the "women portrayed in the poems"). We are also told how "Freedom is also a crucial value for the participants" and how the "heroes, often kings themselves, may complain about a king or leader, but they do not long to be 'free' from monarchy. They take for granted their own freedom to do much as they please before their own people". When we get onto discussing real events and societies, these three themes are used as guiding principles of the discussion. For example, we hear how "most of the laws which reformed Spartan society ... were intended to address the basic issues of freedom, justice and luxury which underlay the rise of tyrants and lawgivers elsewhere in the contemporary Greek world". And so on and so on.
The problem of all this is that I veered between thinking the three categories of justice, freedom and luxury were so broad and vague as to naturally encompass most of what might be considered to drive historical changes (whatever 'drive' means in this context) - or at least be capable of explaining them, as per the Spartan laws noted above. Or else, they are a restrictive and arbitrary trio of concepts that will needlessly funnel the discussion to the loss of other ideas that might be illuminating in trying to develop a picture of long-lost societies and ways of life, or political and economic structures as Lane Fox variously tries to do.
Which is precisely why I gripe with the device of constantly harking back to justice, freedom and luxury in the first place. Whether an inspired framework within which to explore history, or guilty of the above limitations (as I mostly saw them), the book is simply clearer and more enjoyable when they are not employed. Because much of this book is very engaging in spite of what I've said above.
On the micro-scale the book is full of so much interesting information. To give just one example, there is some amazing detail on the accountability of Athenian rulers: "When [Herodotus] visited, the Athenians' Acropolis was being lavishly rebuilt with the support of the annual tribute received from their allies. Yet publicly elected committees were supervising all these public works and upholding the details of financial accountability on which the democracy insisted". I cannot help but ask why accountability or transparency of the rulers to the ruled is not just as valuable a guiding principle as justice, but that only returns me to my criticism above. More generally, Lane Fox does a good job showing us what life for women might be like, particularly given the paucity of evidence he has to work with.
On the wider-scale of the book as a whole, I particularly value its weaving together of the Greek and Roman worlds. It is common to read a book on one or the other but this epic book adeptly joins them, showing how the Roman world was developing in the early 200s BC alongside the declining Greek one, characterised by fragmented states constantly at war with each other and still suffering the fall-out of Alexander the Great's many successors carving up the wider Mediterranean world.
Yet even this good macro structure is somewhat undercut by another problematic feature of Lane Fox's approach: the interposing of cultural or economic or religious discussions in the middle of narratives telling us what happened when (the baseline all readers of a pop-history book need before the historian can delve into the nuances of societies' life itself). A typical illustration of this is in the discussion of the rise of Rome. We get a brief overview of how the not-yet fabled town began to dominate its surroundings. This is then interrupted by two chapters on the political and religious systems of these early Romans before we return to the city's attack on Tarentum and war with the Greek Pyrrhus (of 'Pyrrhic victory' fame for his habit of winning battles at great personal loss).
None of which is to say the discussion of politics or religion is not valuable, but why did it have to be injected right into the middle of some genuinely exciting action? I'm currently reading Chris Wikham's The Inheritance of Rome (appropriately enough straight after this book, leaving a gap of about 250 years I now know nothing about from 150-400 AD). This has made me see how such a mixture of 'what happened' history with more sophisticated cultural (religious, political, economic etc) discussion can be achieved. The chapters on events like who overthrew whom, who died when, how states or empires rose and fell, these all need to be handled first and in a self-contained manner. Only afterwards should the nuanced discussions of life in those times be tackled. Of course this cannot always be hard and fast: economic changes can drive the events and so on and so forth, but there is still a way of broadly separating these things to help the reader who may know very little about the area (this is not an academic book after all).
Overall this book gives and takes away: while we are given a keen insight into much of the ancient world, such as the procession of events that led (say) to Alexander's great conquests, we are then too often pulled abruptly into an analysis of freedom, luxury or justice or made to think about how Hadrian could have viewed something. The Classical World: An Epic History of Greece and Rome is certainly epically long and dense and is at times epic in the positive, 21st century sense. Yet far too often it buries itself in its own structural complications. Better books (like those of Tom Holland) certainly exist in this genre; I can only think that the glowing quotations on the cover reflect reviewers so overawed by Lane Fox's scholarship, and the heady scope of this book, that they overlooked what I think are deep issues with this work.
The less pervasive but perhaps more irritating structuring device utilised by Lane Fox is the adoption of the conceit that we are following Hadrian in the 130s AD around the ancient world. He was an ardent traveller and so would have seen first person much of the Greco-Roman world that is of interest to us today. The first chapter introduces this notion and the rest of the book intermittently refers back to how Hadrian might have viewed something and the contrast between this and modern history's view. It strikes me as an utterly pointless device, the modern reader being far more interested in what current evidence says about events than what Hadrian might have thought. Perhaps it is a blessing, but the device is also very inconsistently applied; one goes dozens of pages without reference to Hadrian, only for him to be crowbarred into a discussion seemingly for no good reason.
The second device is the framing of the historical analysis around three very deliberately chosen themes: luxury, freedom and justice. We hear in an early chapter how Homer speaks about luxury in his epics - "Homer's heroes and kings are not 'corrupted' by luxury" indicating a fairly accepting view of luxury goods (including for the "women portrayed in the poems"). We are also told how "Freedom is also a crucial value for the participants" and how the "heroes, often kings themselves, may complain about a king or leader, but they do not long to be 'free' from monarchy. They take for granted their own freedom to do much as they please before their own people". When we get onto discussing real events and societies, these three themes are used as guiding principles of the discussion. For example, we hear how "most of the laws which reformed Spartan society ... were intended to address the basic issues of freedom, justice and luxury which underlay the rise of tyrants and lawgivers elsewhere in the contemporary Greek world". And so on and so on.
The problem of all this is that I veered between thinking the three categories of justice, freedom and luxury were so broad and vague as to naturally encompass most of what might be considered to drive historical changes (whatever 'drive' means in this context) - or at least be capable of explaining them, as per the Spartan laws noted above. Or else, they are a restrictive and arbitrary trio of concepts that will needlessly funnel the discussion to the loss of other ideas that might be illuminating in trying to develop a picture of long-lost societies and ways of life, or political and economic structures as Lane Fox variously tries to do.
Which is precisely why I gripe with the device of constantly harking back to justice, freedom and luxury in the first place. Whether an inspired framework within which to explore history, or guilty of the above limitations (as I mostly saw them), the book is simply clearer and more enjoyable when they are not employed. Because much of this book is very engaging in spite of what I've said above.
On the micro-scale the book is full of so much interesting information. To give just one example, there is some amazing detail on the accountability of Athenian rulers: "When [Herodotus] visited, the Athenians' Acropolis was being lavishly rebuilt with the support of the annual tribute received from their allies. Yet publicly elected committees were supervising all these public works and upholding the details of financial accountability on which the democracy insisted". I cannot help but ask why accountability or transparency of the rulers to the ruled is not just as valuable a guiding principle as justice, but that only returns me to my criticism above. More generally, Lane Fox does a good job showing us what life for women might be like, particularly given the paucity of evidence he has to work with.
On the wider-scale of the book as a whole, I particularly value its weaving together of the Greek and Roman worlds. It is common to read a book on one or the other but this epic book adeptly joins them, showing how the Roman world was developing in the early 200s BC alongside the declining Greek one, characterised by fragmented states constantly at war with each other and still suffering the fall-out of Alexander the Great's many successors carving up the wider Mediterranean world.
Yet even this good macro structure is somewhat undercut by another problematic feature of Lane Fox's approach: the interposing of cultural or economic or religious discussions in the middle of narratives telling us what happened when (the baseline all readers of a pop-history book need before the historian can delve into the nuances of societies' life itself). A typical illustration of this is in the discussion of the rise of Rome. We get a brief overview of how the not-yet fabled town began to dominate its surroundings. This is then interrupted by two chapters on the political and religious systems of these early Romans before we return to the city's attack on Tarentum and war with the Greek Pyrrhus (of 'Pyrrhic victory' fame for his habit of winning battles at great personal loss).
None of which is to say the discussion of politics or religion is not valuable, but why did it have to be injected right into the middle of some genuinely exciting action? I'm currently reading Chris Wikham's The Inheritance of Rome (appropriately enough straight after this book, leaving a gap of about 250 years I now know nothing about from 150-400 AD). This has made me see how such a mixture of 'what happened' history with more sophisticated cultural (religious, political, economic etc) discussion can be achieved. The chapters on events like who overthrew whom, who died when, how states or empires rose and fell, these all need to be handled first and in a self-contained manner. Only afterwards should the nuanced discussions of life in those times be tackled. Of course this cannot always be hard and fast: economic changes can drive the events and so on and so forth, but there is still a way of broadly separating these things to help the reader who may know very little about the area (this is not an academic book after all).
Overall this book gives and takes away: while we are given a keen insight into much of the ancient world, such as the procession of events that led (say) to Alexander's great conquests, we are then too often pulled abruptly into an analysis of freedom, luxury or justice or made to think about how Hadrian could have viewed something. The Classical World: An Epic History of Greece and Rome is certainly epically long and dense and is at times epic in the positive, 21st century sense. Yet far too often it buries itself in its own structural complications. Better books (like those of Tom Holland) certainly exist in this genre; I can only think that the glowing quotations on the cover reflect reviewers so overawed by Lane Fox's scholarship, and the heady scope of this book, that they overlooked what I think are deep issues with this work.