Allen Lane £25 pp710

Ancient history lives for Robin Lane Fox and he makes it live for his audience. He knows all the main sources, and can also find his way to the nooks and crannies, such as the piece of clay tablet on which a scribe recorded the death of Alexander, together with the weather: “Clouds”. The Classical World is a terrific read. This is not a subject on which Lane Fox could be dispassionate, and he doesn’t pretend to be. The original meaning of “classic”, as he tells us, is “first class”, the top grade of heavy-armed Roman infantryman. The whole book makes the case for seeing the ancient world, delimited by Homer at one end and Hadrian at the other, as first class.

The case is made with skill. This is not a small book — nearly 600 pages of text, plus notes. Even so, the topic is huge, the best part of a millennium. Lane Fox has also chosen to approach it by a specific route: narrative. This, he stresses, is an essential, because a purely thematic approach quickly loses any sense of the play of hope and fear that is the stuff of real human experience. It also creates an overly static sense of unchanging societies, and divorces cultural forms from the contexts which generated them.

His reasoning is compelling, but makes his task harder. If a narrative approach were applied evenly, the results would be tediously thin: three-fifths of a page per year. But Lane Fox is much too canny to let this happen. Narrative density thus varies hugely, with two extended stories attracting particular attention. The first is that of Athens from the fifth century to its absorption into the Macedonian Empire, the second the emergence of the Roman Empire from its roots in the late republic. These are, Lane Fox argues, the key moments of ancient history, and his storytelling here is intense and engaging. We don’t just get events, but characters too, and a strong sense of whose eyes we’re seeing it all through. The statesmen of Athens come vividly to life, as do the characters of first-century Rome, not least Cicero, whose letters are used superbly both to tell the story and bring out their author’s “wonderfully wrong” judgments of character. Lane Fox’s end of the Roman republic is much better than its recent television rival. Not only do we get all the sex and violence, but we also get politics and consequences.

His other device for achieving a sufficient change of pace is to include a huge range of thematic chapters. These cover everything from the cultural role of women and children in classical Greece to a well-worked engagement (using literary and archeological sources together) with Pompeii on the eve of its destruction. Their inclusion does not contradict his emphasis on narrative. They are all set in precise contexts, delineated by the narrative chapters around them.

Throughout this well-blended cocktail of events, anecdote and analysis, Lane Fox picks out three important themes: freedom, justice and luxury. For him, competing definitions of these terms provided the energy that drove forward ancient politics. One set of leaders, for instance, traditionally seen as first among equals, would be condemned for the same degree of conspicuous luxury that was absolutely de rigueur in another, later set. And what was the best way to combine freedom, justice and the law? The importance of these themes is incontestable, and Lane Fox uses them well to tie together narratives of political dispute and institutional change.

There is, though, so much more than this here, and any number of other themes could have been highlighted. Some of them emerge naturally from normal human behaviour. The book is full, in fact, of sex: everything from the often contentious sexual mores of leaders, to general social norms. It’s a bit light on female homosexuality (just two pages or thereabouts on Sappho), but otherwise pretty much everything else you can think of recurs at regular intervals, and much is learnt on the way. Greek culture sanctioned homosexual relations between men of equal social status, though not usually of equal age; Roman culture only those between freemen and inferiors.

Another recurring theme stems directly from one of the author’s interests: horses. No ancient charger of note fails to get a mention, and religious rites involving horses — Romans used them to start and end the campaigning season — are given plenty of coverage. (I did wonder, idly, if a good subtitle for the paperback might be Only Sex and Horses . . .)

This is a highly informative and hugely entertaining book. Its chapters provide an excellent introduction to almost every area of ancient history, and the further reading at the back is an excellent guide on where to go next. Not every part of it, unsurprisingly, is done with quite the same verve. We’ve all (including, I think, the author) been around the block once too often with the Julio-Claudians; thanks to I Claudius, Caligula and Nero offer few surprises. The author’s excitement at ancient achievement also leads on occasion to slightly rose-tinted views. The Athenians did wonders for political science, but surely never invented democracy. Even at its broadest, their constitution was a way for 55,000 citizens to enjoy themselves at the expense of maybe twice that number of slaves. But none of this takes away from Lane Fox’s overall achievement, and the way he dominates his vast subject area, combining order with a lightness of touch. In the process, he has given us a magnificent, panoramic introduction to the ancient world.

SHOW-OFFS

Excavations of paintings and frescoes at Pompeii have revealed that many of the town’s houses were smothered with images. Such conspicuous display, suggests Lane Fox, may tell its own tale: “Part of the story may be that a new class of parvenus, freedmen by origin, were taking over old houses in Pompeii and showing off by over-doing them up.”

Peter Heather is the author of The Fall of the Roman Empire. The Classical World is available at the Books First price of £22.50 on 0870 165 8585

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websites:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/ancient/
Extensive ancient-history site

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