Guest review by Graeme Fife: THEBES - THE FORGOTTEN CITY OF ANCIENT GREECE, by Paul Cartledge

 

"The core is here, vital to how Greece, its states and peoples, came to be and what made them tick."

Graeme Fife is a regular reviewer here. He has written many plays, stories, features and talks for radio, stage plays and articles for newspapers and magazines, and is a regular contributor to BBC Radio 4's From Our Own Correspondent. He's the author of a string of books - children's stories, biography, works of history and fiction. His novel of the French Revolution, No Common Assassin, tells the story of Charlotte Corday. His new novel, Memory's Ransom, a compelling wartime story, is published by Conrad Press. 

In what we know as Greece, their Hellas, the prominent power bases are celebrated: Sparta in the south, the formidable militaristic people, ruled by two kings; Athens, the fledgling democracy and agitator-in-chief in the centre and to the north, athwart the main invasion route, in Boiotia we find Cartledge’s aptly named ‘forgotten city’, Thebes. 

Variously oligarchy and democracy, Thebes was a political and social counterweight to its more prominent distant neighbours and often at odds with them in the matter of solidarity against a common foe. Indeed, as Cartledge tells us, its strategic position led to the surrounding region being called the orchestra (theatre’s dance floor) of the war god Ares. It was here that the resisting Greeks, forever quarrelsome, were, by great good fortune, marshalled under the Spartans, acknowledged masters of battle, in the climactic engagement which ended Persia’s attempt to subsume all mainland Greece/Hellas into its huge empire: Plataea, 79 BC, which unquestionably conserved Greek civilisation and culture for us. Hobbes called it crucial in world history. Consider: philosophy, tragedy and comedy, literature and political template…why bother to plumb the origins of Greek culture? The answer is here in Cartledge’s compelling account.

It may be that his more scholarly descriptions of how so much knowledge passes to us via archaeology, archaic inscription and tablet do not detain the average reader. Doesn’t matter: the core is here, vital to how Greece, its states and peoples, came to be and what made them tick.

All cities look to their mythic foundation – ours, formulated by a mediaeval monk, was long since overlaid by ecclesiastical fictions, but ancient Greeks leaned much to myth, their word for story. Myth…in our parlance so often misused as meaning fairy tale. Not so to them: their myth is the very foundation of human understanding, it underpins all feeling and human response. Thebes claimed origin from no fewer than three mythic beings whose significance still resonates: Heracles, the strongman demigod, symbolic of human links with the divine, an important thread of our relationship with the universal pulse of nature and its manifestations, he whose celebrated Labours mirror our own travails and fortitude in coping with them; Dionysus, god of wine, ecstatic pleasure and passions, a good time, and Apollo whose cultural importance is wide-ranging within the influence of our arts. This may come across as a nonsensical construct, but in the ancient world mythic stories - Helen, addressing the lords of the Greek Trojan expedition, bids them sit and feast and ‘take joy in telling stories’. (Iliad IV 238ff) those stories are their life’s inspiration. For myth was central to the Greek examination and analysis of human sentience and behaviour, exploring and addressing the darker currents of the psyche and unconscious. They questioned things and fastened on the difficult, often frightening shifts of human nature; an admirable candour. What Cartledge terms our imaginary thought-world, echoed in myth.

Central to the Theban myth are the personages illustrated on the cover of this excellent study: Oedipus and the Sphinx, most potent elements in our own comprehension of the human psyche. Their myth/story drives three plays written by the outstanding Athenian tragedian, Sophocles. Other Athenian tragedians also looked to the myths of Thebes in their work, plays which thrill in their writing and action, and this alone gives some idea of the importance of a place so often overlooked in more general accounts of the basic ‘why Greece?’

Consider: a multiplicity of divine beings as representative of the great and teeming foison of Nature in this eco-age? Homer talks of ‘the earth that feeds us all’. It makes a lot of sense to me and Cartledge is an excellent guide to the evolution of such a forceful idea. The gods are capricious, argumentative, partial and problematic in their loyalties…why so? Because the people who conceived of their existence and behaviour exactly resemble them.

Greece, as the Romans named it, was eventually swallowed in the Imperium Romanum and we owe much of what survives of their literature etc to that subjugation. As the Latin poet, Horace, puts it: captive Greece took its untutored conqueror captive and introduced an uncultivated people to the arts and culture (Epistles II i 156ff).

This book is no homily but a fair-minded account of how embedded matters Greek are in our own culture - and best we acknowledge that, surely? Cartledge states that he aims to point out and to emphasise that ‘Apollo and Dionysus are both still vigorously at work deep within our collective and independent pysches.’

Thebes - the Forgotten City of Ancient Greece is published by Picador  

See also Graeme's review of Emperor of Rome by Mary Beard

Guest review by Graeme Fife: EMPEROR OF ROME - RULING THE ANCIENT WORLD by Mary Beard

 

"In this age of fake news, media trolling, flummery and misinformation it seems to me most salutary to read such a thoroughly scrupulous examination of a time which yielded to different pressures ..."

Graeme Fife is a regular reviewer here. He has written many plays, stories, features and talks for radio, stage plays and articles for newspapers and magazines, and is a regular contributor to BBC Radio 4's From Our Own Correspondent. He's the author of a string of books - children's stories, biography, works of history and fiction. His novel of the French Revolution, No Common Assassin, tells the story of Charlotte Corday.

The word comes from imperator, the title with which (usually victorious) legionaries hailed their commander and derives from imperium, the blanket term for power, the official directive to rule either by applied or threatened physical force or indirect pressure, law, the full weight of empire…think imperative, imperious, imperial.

The first recognisable emperor, though not so acknowledged in his lifetime, Gaius Julius Caesar gave his name to Czars, Tsars and the Kaiser, each foremost in autocratic rule. Beard titles her study in the singular to give tighter focus to the various men who occupied the position (some of them ‘mad, bad and dangerous to know’? That’s the first assumption to assess) and to the role itself – where and how did the emperor live, how was such a vast domain, or imperium, administered, the paperwork, the countless clerks, scribes, placemen and officials who managed the unwieldy bureaucracy, the day-to-day work, the communication – in a world when even relays of horse-rider couriers travelled slower than carrier pigeons. It is, therefore, a study – and a magnificent study – of the mechanics of autocracy, the main difference between what we know – or presume - about autocrats and the Roman version in that many of our autocrats are or have been elected by popular vote, in itself a chilling fact. There are parallels however, and Beard’s rigorous scrutiny brings to light much of the exhibitionism, false statement and posturing which helped to substantiate the power of men who were not elected and often came to their position by selection – largely of loyal soldiers (think Putin and the KGB … my comparison not hers, for she is firm about not drawing parallels and that’s wholly to the credit of this most readable book) or because there really was no one else and few anyway, with blood connection to the inaugural emperor, Caesar Augustus, himself the adopted son of his uncle Julius who could trace his own family connections back to the goddess Venus (you get the idea?) or else by being jostled into place by an ambitious mother.

There was a lot of loose talk and false message purveyed, much of it by writers with their own agenda – of lampoon or critique – or else by hearsay and Beard’s scepticism is welcome: how, she asks, can we know? Easy enough for us to see through the arrant stupidity of Trump declaring, in a presidential address, no less, that the reason the Americans prevailed against the British in 1812 was that they held the airports and thus controlled the skies but it’s less easy to call out slippery Bunter/Johnson lies when the bleat re-echoes: ‘But it wasn’t me sir.’ Not to make it stick, at least.

What, then, are we to make of Vespasian’s celebrated last words: ‘Blimey, I think I’m becoming a god …’ A joke or wry comment on the absurdity of the whole thing from a weary cynic? Or those of Augustus, asking friends gathered at his deathbed whether he had ‘played his part properly in the comedy of life?' implying that it had all been for show, a huge act. Hard-nosed self-knowledge or throwing the solution back at them in a political climate where protest or censure, even robust question was risky?

Again, I draw a parallel and with apology but in this age of fake news, media trolling, flummery and misinformation it seems to me most salutary to read such a thoroughly scrupulous examination of a time which yielded to different pressures of news. It all amounts, finally, to what another Roman summed up in his infamous question: ‘quis custodiet ipsos custodes?’ (Juvenal Satire VI 347f)

There is scandal aplenty but Beard is resolutely cautious about the truth of what often probably amounts to little more than tittle-tattle. Perhaps it just shows that the Roman were as prurient, suggestible and avid for lurid stories about the monarchy as any people, in any time, in whatever condition – and on people, populus, the Populists depend. It is for us to be sceptical, cautious and Nell Gwynn nailed it when an angry anti-Catholic crowd mobbed her carriage in London. She pulled down the window and screamed at them: ‘No no no, I am the king’s Protestant whore.’

Beard concludes this most compelling and richly engaging book:

‘The Romans will not and cannot give us the answers [to our problems]. But exploring their world does help us to see our own differently. While I have been writing Emperor of Rome over the last few years, I have thought hard about that view of autocracy as fundamentally a fake, a sham, a distorting mirror. It has helped me to understand ancient Roman political culture better – and has opened my eyes to the politics of the modern world, too.’

Emperor of Rome: Ruling the Ancient World is published by Profile.