Typical Greeks

Typical Greeks

"The Tomb of the Diver", National Museum of Paestum

Book Details

Edith Hall

INTRODUCING THE ANCIENT GREEKS

From Bronze Age seafarers to navigators of the Western mind
304pp. Norton. £17.99 (US $26.95).
978 0 393 23998 0

The continuous process of intercultural exchange in the ancient Near East

FRANCESCA WADE

The Cup of Nestor, found at Ischia in 1954, is an eighth-century BC vessel inscribed with one of the oldest pieces of Greek writing and the oldest-ever game of Consequences. Three lines of poetry, each scratched in a different hand, bear teasing witness to an ancient party where friends gathered to drink, laugh and compete, enjoying their shared frame of cultural reference by cracking jokes about Nestor, the staid old sage from the Iliad. Yet, as Edith Hall shows in Introducing the Ancient Greeks, the cup is also significant evidence that even by this early date, travelling Greeks were establishing networks far and wide. Our partygoers had travelled from the island of Euboea to a new trading post in the Bay of Naples, to drink wine from a cup made at Rhodes, and mark it in an irreverent game of wits using an alphabet they'd learnt from abroad: they were, in other words, "absolutely typical Greeks".

Who were the disparate group of Mediterranean peoples known as "the ancient Greeks", and how were their culture, technology, literature and thought disseminated, via Rome, down to us? Hall's answers, emerging from a very readable survey of ancient history from 1600 BC to AD 400, lie in ten broad qualities that, she argues, were shared by most of the Greeks, most of the time. This slightly contrived framework traps Hall into some dangerous generalizations. She is projecting a collective mindset, however broad, onto a huge civilization with wide gulfs between rich and poor, free and slave, man and woman. Openness to new ideas is well attested at Athens, as Hall shows, manifesting itself in the agora with the creation of democracy, and in the theatre with tragedy's examination of raw human emotions, yet the Spartan constitution was notorious in ancient legend for remaining resolutely unchanged across centuries. Other qualities from her list, particularly the Greek love of seafaring and intellectual inquiry, provide themes Hall traces fruitfully from earliest Mycenae to the Greeks under Roman dominion, in a fresh demonstration that the story of Greek culture's predominance over later intellectual tradition is, perhaps above all, the history of Greek travel.

Plato wrote that the Greeks lived "like frogs or ants round a pond", never settling too far from the sea nor venturing out too far from land. Travel brought early Greeks into productive contact with other cultures – Hall emphasizes the "continuous process of intercultural exchange" between Greeks and Near Eastern civilizations, especially the Phoenicians, with all their technological knowhow – and expanded Greek horizons in a literal sense, as a spate of colonizations in the seventh and sixth centuries extended the Hellenic world across the Mediterranean and beyond. The classic Greek symposium quickly reached the colonies: at Posidonia (Paestum in southern Italy), where the famous Tomb of the Diver portrays guests singing, dicing and embracing over drinks in a host's home, local potters began to make their own distinctive symposium pottery. A joint Greek shrine, the Hellenion, was built at a Greek trading post at Naucratis in Egypt, while at the sanctuaries of Olympia, Pythia and Nemea, Greeks came together for shared religious festivities and athletic contests celebrating another of Hall's Hellenic traits – admiration of "excellence in talented people". Gradually, ancient Greece was being formed.

Greek ideas travelled as fast as their proponents. Ionia was a trailblazer of philosophical thought: at Miletus, Hall convincingly suggests, a gradually silting harbour inspired the first inquiries into natural science. After the defeat of the Persian Empire, which had held Ionia under its sway, many Ionian intellectuals travelled to Athens, the self-appointed cultural centre of the Greek world. Later, Philip and Alexander of Macedon made a concerted effort to tempt "world-class brain-power" to court, most prestigiously securing Aristotle as tutor to Alexander. Inspired by their example, the rulers of Hellenistic Alexandria made a business out of the travelling Greek intellectual. So determined were the Ptolemies to make their Library the prime repository for Greek wisdom that they confiscated books from ships docking in Alexandrian harbours, refusing to return them until scribes had made hurried copies. The Library sponsored poets including Apollonius, Theocritus and Callimachus, the composer of sophisticated epyllia (mini-epics) who also developed the Library's catalogue system. Polybius complained that convenient library access made historians' work too easy, preferring the old-style personal adventures of Herodotus and Thucydides. But following conquest by Rome in the mid-second century BC, Greek travel became increasingly donnish. Neatly linking the Greeks of the Second Sophistic period with their classical forebears, Hall successfully demonstrates the continued flourishing of Greek thought under Roman rule, its survival enabled by the longstanding Greek penchant for travel. Since Greek remained the dominant language in the East, authors such as Diodorus, Plutarch and Polybius gave public lectures across the empire, reviving "the classical Greek figure of the travelling sophist" and becoming the first "celebrity intellectuals".

As well as up-to-date evidence and informed analysis of battles, constitutions and alliances for the general reader, Introducing the Ancient Greeks is full of colour and human touch. Hall's Spartans are not just the hardy souls who were exposed at birth if weak, forbidden to carry torches in the dark lest their guard ever lapse. They are also the wittiest of the Greeks – the word "laconic" comes from Laconia, the ancient name for the area around Sparta. Hall punctuates her narrative with spotlights on important characters (paeans to Herodotus and Aristotle; a shudder at the grisly Pontic warlord Mithridates), teasing out the interactions between individual Greek minds and their cultural contexts. There are enterprising leaders with ruthless PR strategies, from Alexander the Great, who faked the untying of the Gordian knot to fulfil an oracle affording him domination, to Ptolemy I, who maintained Alexander's stolen body as a tourist attraction in a magnificent tomb at Alexandria. Hall's Greeks remain, broadly, the traditional males who dominate our sources (three of the seven index references for "women" are under "as slaves"), though notable women are picked out for praise, including the poets Sappho and Nossis, and the democratic women of Kerkyra who attacked their oligarchic adversaries with tiles from their roofs. Hall ends on the sorry figure of Palladas, the fourth-century Alexandrian epigrammatist forced to sell his Pindar, Callimachus and even his Greek grammar, as pagan statues were melted down at Christianity's rise. Gone, but, as this book engagingly shows, certainly not forgotten.