How did you start choosing these books?
There is so much to choose from. in a way, it was like the process of choosing the authors to speak twelve voices about. it is partly to give an idea of what was special or different about ancient greece and partly to give an idea of the ways they are similar or still speak to us.
You are reading: Best ancient greece books
I’ve been reading, thinking and teaching about it for many years. These are wonderful books that have meant a lot to me too.
The two modern books I chose trace the legacy of ancient Greece: what Greek authors and Greek ideas have meant and can still mean. one of the books covers all sorts of different areas and the other, particularly close to the bone in 2017, deals with democracy.
tell me about your own interest in ancient greece. when did you first become interested in this time and place from long ago?
It was also a long, long time ago for me. It was probably the language that got me at first: doing things right and in the right order. It was an almost mathematical delight.
So, that was the story. my interests have always been in ancient culture and the historical side of things. I have done a lot of work on Greek authors who write about the past, whether they are historians or biographers. that has continued. and that was, in fact, what I was originally admitted to the university for: to end up as a historian. but I never quite got it. I got more and more caught up in the classics and I never quite escaped. I still think that when I grow up I could still become a historian, but time is running out.
It was the thrill of reading Greek, doing it and thinking about it on an increasingly challenging level, and continuing to find it very difficult and very exciting.
Let’s start with the first book on your list and also the oldest text you have chosen, which is Homer’s Iliad, written around 700 BC.
I guess you could say “composed” instead of written. how and when it was written is still a mystery. just as it remains a bit of a mystery who Homer was, or you could even say ‘were’ because it may well be that the Iliad and the Odyssey were composed by different people.
Clearly there is a very long tradition behind them that somehow comes together. what that is somehow and how it happened, we do not know. but it must be said that both poems are simply too good to have been composed by committee. there seems to be at least a single controlling brain, if not a hand, then at least a mouth, behind each of these poems. I think most people would now probably agree with that, although they might find multiple contributions, possibly after that single controlling voice.
Do most people think that Homer was one or two people?
probably more people, now, would opt for two. is still hotly debated. since there is also the possibility that it was only written at some later point or by someone other than the person we might call homer, there are various permutations it could have. you could have two original people, who shaped the poem, written by the same person later on. or the other way around: you could have a single person as the original poet, if you wish, with all sorts of variations at a later stage and finally written by two. it’s all highly speculative.
It wasn’t even physically possible to write works that length in 700. You’d need a lot of papyrus. People have sometimes thought that it could have been written on leather, but you would need a whole herd of cows to write the Iliad. it is not, in general, very plausible that this was what writing was used for in the early stages.
What is the Iliad about? my husband and i listened to it in the car and were a little confused because she seemed to stop all of a sudden.
It’s a very good question. as you say, it stops suddenly. part of the brilliance of the iliad is that it only takes four or five days of action, but you feel like it captures the 10 years war in its entirety.
At the beginning of the poem, you often feel like you’re going back to the beginning. there is a catalog of boats. why ships? they’ve been in tents for 10 years, but this is what it would have looked like when they sailed 10 years earlier.
There is a duel between Paris and Menelaus. that’s something, you might think, that could have easily happened at the start of the war. it feels like the beginning of a war. who knows, the first audience might have heard versions of that sung in the context of a beginning. then, start by going back to the beginning.
then at the end there are all sorts of hints about what’s to come. Hector dies. there is a simile towards the end: “it was as if the whole troy collapsed in flames”. and, in a sense, it is. troy is almost done.
“part of the brilliance of the iliad is that it only takes four or five days of action, but you feel like it captures the 10 years war in its entirety.”
Also, you know Achilles is going to die. his mother comes and cries for him and his friend patroclus at patroclus’s funeral. Achilles blames himself terribly for Patroclus’s death. Achilles gives away all of Patroclus’ possessions as part of the prizes, but he also gives away all of his own possessions.
He knows he’s next. and he has good reason to know because his mother, who has access to the gods and is a goddess herself, has told him, “if you kill hector, you’re next.” fighting, by taking revenge for patroclus, which he feels he should do, since he owes it to patroclus and his men whom he has let down, he is also killing himself. We know what all this means. we know what he is going to lead to. but he projects that back and forth so that he’s not just an Achilles. the clue is in the title ‘iliad’: it’s a poem about troy.
is achilles the key character, if any?
It’s so much about Hector. Many people identify with Hector. Achilles and Hector are very different. it is partly because they are on different sides. Achilles is part of a military machine. there’s female company for him, and that’s where it all starts, but he’s anything but a family man. his father, at home, is important. Achilles fights in part because his father is there, but also for the glory. in a way, this is what he feels he’s made for.
while for hector, it’s the baby seat in the back of the car, so to speak. it is the fact that he has a warm bath waiting for him, he has his wife and his child. he is fighting for troy and he knows they are going to lose, but he must do it for the community.
and these different things come together, instead of being one person. you feel for a lot of people. you also feel for women, which is interesting. you think of it as a very masculine poem but you see it a lot through the eyes of women.
They play a key role in the dispute that provokes the war but also in the dispute between Achilles and Agamemnon.
well, things start with the women and then go back to the women at the end. It’s a fight over a woman. agamemnon takes away the prize from achilles because he has had to give up his own girl. It is not about blaming women, because the males take over and it becomes a matter of male pride. but, in the end, you feel for hector’s wife, andrómaca. you feel for this family that is being destroyed and for all the other families.
In your book you mention themes of death, glory, love and loss of loved ones. Are those the key things that make the Iliad feel relevant to us today?
I think so. It’s a reflection of war, really. warfare was omnipresent in the Greek world. sometimes they gave the wars names like the Persian wars. but they also gave the peace names such as the king’s peace or the peace of thirty years. it was quite unusual to have peace. war was everywhere at that time; after all, it still is.
There is a choice Achilles has to make. they tell him that he has two alternative destinies: he could stay out of the war and live a long life and no one would know or remember him. or he could go and win everlasting fame and glory, but he would have a short life. in a way, that’s a version of a dilemma that keeps coming back. I start the chapter on Homer in our book with the soldiers of the First World War, for whom the Iliad meant a lot. they had to face that choice. and for them, too, it was a choice that could only be made one way, or so they felt.
do you think he cheated them in the first world war? they felt that it was glorious to die for their country, and then they realized that war was not glorious at all.
perhaps, although there were many other things that confused them. one could certainly say that the officer class was saturated in the Iliad. In general, this class was very well educated: Wilfred Owen was a primary school student, and some of the other poets were prize-winning Etonians. In those early years of the war, they could think of glory and of themselves as a new Achilles.
Similarly, poems from the end of the war, such as Owen’s “Strange Encounter”, were also saturated in the Iliad. we all have our mental frames, I suppose, and that was a big part of them. they could fit into it both the euphoria and the feeling of meaning and then eventually the feeling of ‘well, wait a minute’. Is there such a meaning?’ and that is part of the brilliance of the poem.
In a way, it is the dilemma of Western literature. a lot of that is already there in homer. we’ve been struggling to keep up ever since.
let’s move on to your second book, which is the stories of herodotus. you mention in his book that this is the oldest surviving continuous Greek prose text: the date is around 425 BC. although called ‘stories’, the ancient Greek suggests ‘inquiries’; he is looking at the wonders of the world, instead of writing a story as such.
That’s right, ‘story’ is ‘inquiry’. he was an interviewer. the key word is ‘thomata’, which means prodigies or wonders in greek. These are things to make you say coo, I guess. it’s all kinds of things about humanity; things that originate from humans, and then how the Greeks and the barbarians, as he calls them, went to war with each other.
the frame is signaled from the beginning. in the end it will all end in the greatest wonder of all, which is the fact that there were a series of great persian invasions of greece, one in 490 and then again in 480/79, where greece is totally outnumbered and, however however, they win. when he gets down to it, he tells that story and he tells it beautifully.
but there are many things in the way. In fact, after the first 40-50 pages or so, Greece is out of sight. the Persian expansion was terribly useful to him, in that sense. they first moved to lydia. They then moved on to various other tribes like the Massagetae, which is important because it led to the death of the great king, Cyrus. and then he is egypt and herodotus wants to tell you about egypt. and then libia, ‘let me talk about libya’. India? oh yes, I will tell you about India.’
so you have this wonderful frame to put all kinds of other things. all the time, you have an idea of what is coming. part of it is putting this big thing to come, the final wars, in its place in space and time. there’s a big world out there and there’s a lot of history. it will withstand all these things, but there are many other things and they are all wonderful too.
He has a wonderful ability to be amazed. He is a very contagious personality. you are also surprised because there is always something new.
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what is your favorite wonder he sees?
One I find particularly endearing is a wonder that doesn’t happen. You have been told that there is a floating island in the middle of a lake in Egypt. he says, “I didn’t see him move.” I have this wonderful image of him sitting on a stool all day, looking out into the middle of a lake. ‘was that a small change there? no, just a little haze.” it’s this wonderful feeling of inquiry.
has all kinds of stories about flying snakes and skulls that don’t break in the sun.
I think one of the most stimulating is a story that tells about a Persian king, Darius, who is very interested, like many kings, in other customs. they are proto-herodotes, I suppose. he has some Indians and some Greeks at his court. he asks each of them what they would do with their parents’ bodies when their parents die. Would they burn them or eat them? the Indians are absolutely horrified at the idea of burning themselves and the Greeks are absolutely horrified at the idea of eating. the conclusion he draws is, ‘well, there you have it, there are customs everywhere and we are all different’. custom is king and each of us gets used to our own.
What I think is beautiful is its context. It comes at a time when they’ve had a particularly wacko Persian king, Cambyses, who has been particularly insensitive to the practices of the Egyptians. this is a time when the Greeks would feel particularly superior reading (or, more likely, hearing) Herodotus talk about it.
In my notes, I noted his opinion that people think their own ways are the best and that “only a madman” would make fun of what others do. that is very, very relevant today.
absolutely. So much for anyone who wanted to feel that, ‘we Greeks are dramatically better than those nasty foreigners who are so primitive.’ suddenly you are surprised and realize that the Greeks are much less sensitive to human difference than the Persians here. it’s one of the ways people are made to think quite a bit about what’s special and what’s not special in their own culture.
There are a lot of things in stories that make you think, ‘wait a minute.’ just as those poets in the first world war could take different things away from homer depending on what they sought, you too can take different things away from herodotus. and also, unless you are very sleepy, you will take things off to make you doubt yourself and control your own prejudices.
Did Herodotus travel to all these places or is this just a rumour?
There is some dispute as to whether he actually traveled to all the places he said he did. she can twist the truth a little. the extreme skeptical position, that most of his trips are fundamentally fabricated, I don’t think many people will sign up. Likewise, there are times, for example in Egypt, when she might not have gone as far as she appears to have. but sometimes he is also very careful to say “I heard this” instead of “I saw it”.
we know he traveled a bit because it seems he spent some time in athens. and he ended up, so it was said and it seems correct, in thurii in italy, which is quite far.
thurii was a very interesting exercise. With all the jealousies and rivalries between cities in Greece, it was a panhellenic settlement, with people from all the different cities coming together. that is part of his project, being interested in the different cities. inevitably, it wasn’t necessarily as easy as all that. They were not necessarily greeted with full acclaim by people already in Italy. and there was also some fighting between the different contingents of the city in thurii itself.
came from Halicarnassus itself. is that what gave you this understanding of different cultures?
understanding and interest, I think. it is a border area. It is close to that area of Asia Minor where much of the great intellectual research of the fifth century originated. And in fact, even the ethnicity of Halicarnassus matters because it is a Dorian city but very close to Ionia. that whole area is full of Ionians. so i knew very well these two ethnic groups within greece, who rather defined themselves against each other.
In your book, you say that Herodotus is the person you would most like to be. why is that?
I think it’s his ability to always be fascinated by something new. he gives the impression of being someone who really likes to talk and is wide-eyed when telling things. and yet it maintains a very critical, not to say cynical, part of the brain as well. he says, ‘I’ll say what I heard, but I don’t have to believe it’.
freedom is another theme that comes up a lot in the stories, right?
yes. this is particularly a key note when he speaks of the greatest wonder of all, the fight against the Persians: freedom as an inspiring force for the Greeks. there is a wonderful moment when some Spartan envoys make their way to what they believe will be their deaths. they are being sent to atone for an outrage the Spartans had committed years before against the Persians. a Persian says to them, ‘why don’t you come over to our side? They would treat you very well. we take care of you. they just say, ‘Look, you don’t know freedom. we know freedom. if you knew freedom, you would tell us to fight for it, not just with spears, but even with axes.” that inspiring force is certainly there.
but at the same time there is a feeling that it can go very wrong because when people are free, they are also free to go their own way. freedom can lead people to decide that our interest is to get out of all this and be our own state instead of being part of a coherent unit that represents something bigger.
Now let’s talk about Euripides and his work, Medea. in his book he mentions that Euripides completed his first tragic festival in 455 BC. what was the tragic party?
all the attic works we have would have been composed for this annual festival. in fact, there were two festivals. A lot of the comedies we have were written for Lenaia, who was probably the smaller of the two. the others we have were for Dionysia, which was a festival in January, before the start of spring, but much of the Athenian year.
You would have the three tragic poets each year who would present their trilogies, and maybe also a satirical play. I’m not sure if it was always the same or if it changed. people were very competitive, fighting for a prize. the medea was one of those who did not actually win. I think he hit rock bottom that year. but it’s still one of the most exciting for us.
why did you choose euripides and not sophocles? is it more ‘out there’?
Perhaps it is more an image than a reality. Euripides, we like to read, is the one who shakes things up while Sophocles is more serene. but sophocles can also change things.
There is a story told in one of the modern books I have chosen, of gladstone, the prime minister, asking the cambridge classicist, jane harrison, who was her favorite greek author. The answer was supposed to be Homer, whom Gladstone had written much about and greatly admired, and she said Euripides. the conversation stopped dead. Euripides was too much of an agitator.
but I think there is something we can still feel in the works of Euripides. maybe it’s not too far from some of the things I was saying about herodotus, where you monitor your own biases. you feel uneasy and medea would certainly have made people uncomfortable, and I think she still makes people uncomfortable, whether in theater or reading. it is an impressive piece of work. it is very difficult to feel comfortable in the end.
can you say a bit about what it’s really about for people who haven’t read or seen it?
it is about a woman who ends up killing her own children. it’s not that she doesn’t love them: she loves them. that’s why she kills them, because she is a way to take revenge on her husband. Her husband Jason de Ella has taken her out of her homeland, she has sacrificed an immense amount for him, they swore an oath, they got married, they have children.
but now they live in corinth and jason has a chance to get ahead. if he gets rid of medea, he can marry the local princess and everyone would be very comfortable. Jason is not a very attractive figure, it is fair to say. and this in itself is quite remarkable because conventionally he was a great Greek hero, but here he is treated in a way that makes him seem quite the opposite. he is very accommodating, he says he just did it for the kids. “I did it to advance them. He is in your own interest! he looks at everything I’ve done for you. I brought you to Greece, it’s so wonderful here, and I brought you out of the barbarian land.”
and medea absolutely cleans the floor with it. there is no question about who wins the particular trades of him. Medea expands the discussion. she’s a very smart woman, clearly much smarter than jason. she also has magical powers, which is quite disturbing. Jason doesn’t know what movie she’s in, basically. he is completely out of her reach. she also has divine connections and that will be important in the end.
but she makes a wonderful speech, right from the start, to the Corinthian women who are the chorus, the group of singers and dancers who are always there, to win them over to her side. she only talks about the terrible fate of women. it’s ok for men. when they get bored of the marriage, they can just go out and party and have a good time. while we stay at home, there is nothing we can do about it. They say they go to all the trouble, ha ha! How was the delivery? I prefer to be in the front line of battle three times instead of giving birth once”. for an audience that is undoubtedly overwhelmingly male, this is somewhat difficult. they can’t laugh about it. it was probably true that the statistical dangers were worse for women in childbirth than being on the front lines, however dangerous. being on the front lines of battle was the absolute criterion of masculine courage. you really don’t know how to deal with it.
she is very manipulative. you feel fear, that’s part of the danger of it, and that’s part of the way that jason doesn’t know what it is. It can be hard, even for that audience, not to see it from her point of view, from a woman’s point of view. that’s pretty shocking.
and then continues, suddenly you start to be quite a bit more surprised. wait, I was sympathizing with that woman and now look what she’s done. she just went off and killed her own children’. how can we organize our own thoughts and sympathies? in the end, her relative the sun gives her a car to take her to athens. here we are in athens and we are involved, so to speak. we are the ones who are going to give him a home. it’s hard to know how to deal with this, in the end. but it’s a very interesting way to really get into a psychology, a strange one. one that you’d expect to be immensely alienating.
In your book, you mention that Euripides can be seen as a misogynist or as a feminist, which has both. Anyway, I was intrigued by your comment that Medea is taking a woman’s mind too seriously. Greeks seem to be more interested in women than she expected.
It is a profoundly masculine society in many ways. you have to be a man to be a citizen. women could be “bearers” of citizenship. women staying at home and men going out in the sun talking to each other was an ideal, although it was probably only feasible in the upper classes. you can’t get away from that, any more than you can get away from the fact that it was a slave society. and often the role of a woman had much in common with that of a slave.
but, at the same time, the Greeks are interested in women, and for more than one reason. women can think. that was disconcerting, this feeling that women actually see things and understand things and can even do it better than men. Aristophanes makes a great game of this in his comedy of women who take control of the state and have some good ideas after all. I remember writing, in another book, that it is good to think with women. it may not be as extreme as “what would a Martian think of Brexit?” or the world cup, or the national lottery?’ but something like that. someone who clearly has a brain, and a very good one, who sees things from a slightly different and off-kilter point of view (from the male perspective), can come up with surprising ideas.
What would you say were the Greek tragedies?
There is a lively debate about what the tragic genre really means. it may be reduced to “these are works that could be presented in the Greek tragic festival”, since they vary a lot. some have almost happy endings and some have very sad endings. some are very patriotic and others quite subversive.
what they tend to have in common (with one or two exceptions) is that they are not set in the contemporary world. they are set in the distant world of legend and myth. they use myth and that’s an interesting way to present issues that are alive, probably timeless, in a way that gets away from the complicated, maybe even confusing, details that always surround the real moral dilemmas we have in everyday life. /p >
Very often you can see moral dilemmas in a slightly filtered way. it’s almost like playing a game of scruples or the games philosophers like to play: do I start the train on a branch line where it will kill one person instead of letting it go ahead and kill five? it’s very simple, but actually, because they put things in a very crystallized and clear way, they allow you to think a lot. I think that’s something they have in common. they make you think a lot but in many different registers. and certainly not all of the audience is thinking as hard as everyone else, or thinking along the same lines as everyone else.
Who decided who won the tragic festival?
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There were judges from the different tribes, but they were probably heavily influenced by the clap-meter. It was kind of an “athens has talent” kind of competition.
why do you think medea was the last?
many of the plays we most admire didn’t win. there is a tradition that he also won oedipus tyrant, a great play by sophocles. Of course, we don’t know what the other works were. maybe they were even more elegant.
Your fourth book is Paul Cartledge’s Democracy: A Life. So the birth of democracy dates to around 500 BC and then flourishes around 450 BC. can you tell me about the book?
this book came out about a year ago and was based on his cambridge lectures. the first part, and most of it, deals with ancient democracy. It is very much based on Athens because that is the democracy that we really know. it does point out that there were maybe a thousand other democracies, but this is a big one.
A lot of states would not have been democracies. then there is the skepticism with which the Romans approached it and it went underground for a long time.
The last part of the book is rebirth in modern times, first of all, as an idea to be played with very carefully. we are talking about the British civil wars, the levellers, the diggers, etc. there is the cautious game with democracy in the French revolution. There is also talk of the American Revolution. but with the french revolution, very quickly we have napoleon. and with American democracy, there was slavery. then ends with some final thoughts on democracy now and where we go from here.
but a lot of this is just about how similar ancient and modern democratic ideas are and where it all comes from. We tend to think of democracy as very Greek, and Cartledge, I think, is correct in saying “yes, it is.” it’s one of the ten things the sun said we owed greece, on a list. which also included theater, democracy and the kebab.
but there is some discretion in the book. certainly there are elements that we value in democracy, like public debate, for example, that are not particularly distinctive of greece. you can also find parallels and antecedents in india and china.
Cartledge emphasizes that if we are talking about power and decision-making, then there is a sense in which Athens reached the stage of letting the people actually decide things in a way that many ancient states did not. some did; Syracuse, interestingly enough, was a democracy. but this has very rarely been achieved since. There are good questions about whether we will ever have that degree of democracy again: the real participation of ordinary people in Athens, beyond elections. elections were there for some things, but there was also the lot to ensure that ordinary people could have their moment in the sun. and could be literally anyone.
All that really direct government hasn’t been characteristic of any democracy as states have gotten bigger. everything has been representative democracy. with the new technology, we could now move in the direction of much more direct democracy with the new technology. whether we want to or not is, of course, a big question.
There is also ambivalence in ancient Greece towards democracy. is that basically because democracy could easily turn into mob rule?
this is what john stuart mill called the ‘tyranny of the majority’. even in athens, if one goes back to the tragedies, it is as easy to find quite strong criticism of democracy as praise. criticism usually takes the form of criticism of people and their basis for making decisions.
a particular play by Euripides, the Supplicating Women, has both. There is a very eloquent passage in praise of democracy that John Milton later put on the cover of Areopagitica. but there’s also a lot of criticism pretty close to the bone. Echoing a criticism that has often been made, it suggests that people are simply not educated enough and that it should be the people educated enough to understand the real dangers who should make the decisions.
There are also criticisms going back to Herodotus. describes a constitutional debate from three points of view: do we want a monarchy? do we want an oligarchy? or do we want a democracy? Surprisingly, this is in Persia. has a very succinct treatment of democracy from one of the speakers. he says ‘I prefer a monarch to a democracy, at least he knows what he’s doing! while people just jump up and kick everything. it is like a flooded torrent.”
so there’s a lot of skepticism about it and that happens on the Roman side as well. yes, the Romans had an element of democracy, they had elections and people had something to say there, but that has to be very nuanced.
What was Greek democracy like? were they just men?
they were just men and citizens. citizenship mattered a lot and probably only one in ten people you would see on the street in athens would be a citizen. there would be women, there would be a lot of slaves and there would be a lot of what they called ‘metics’: resident foreigners, who made a living and made a living in athens and were very important to the economy, but were still not part of the corps.
if you had citizenship, in a sense you were already an aristocrat. maybe you were not one percent but at least one of the ten percent. it was a great privilege. it appears, possibly almost by mistake, as part of a general constitutional arrangement around 508 BC with Cleisthenes. it is part of a political game. he puts the demos, the people, on his side to establish power for himself. and part of the power, then, goes to the people as part of the retribution for that.
You said cartledge talks about the differences between democracies then and now. can you say a bit more about that?
The big difference is that Athenian democracy could be really direct. the assembly of adult male citizens was truly sovereign. he told himself that it would be appalling if people were prevented from doing what they wanted. in one particular case, there was a trial of some generals who were called to account for letting people drown after a sea battle. And it’s pretty clear it wasn’t his fault. there was nothing they could have done about it. but people just said that the generals should be executed and they were executed.
is a balance between democracy and the rule of law. the rule of law is also an important concept. the law was also considered an important part of democracy. but even so, the ability of a sovereign people to rule is something that was quite ingrained in Athenian thought. therefore, the notion that the supreme court could be, as the daily mail would put it, “enemies of the people” would have far more stinging objection in the ancient world than in the modern. the protection of the rights of people is something that is part of the freedom that perhaps we would describe in another way.
Cartledge himself is very optimistic in his treatment of democracy. He is obviously very pro-democracy, however, he has said in an interview that he is a little less pro-democracy directly since Brexit than before.
is quite pessimistic about the future. in the last pages of the book he talks about the threat to democracy caused by religion and the deployment of religion against democracy, for example, Daesh’s pro-sharia slogans against democracy. the balance between religion and democracy is very interesting in the ancient world. religion was part of what the city-state was. the role of the city in guiding religion, caring for it and organizing it was fundamental. I think the notion that you can play against each other is more modern than old.
How does freedom in democracy fit into your book?
The connection between freedom and democracy is an interesting area. they are so close in modern slogan – people fighting for freedom and democracy. with George W. bush, in particular, came out almost as one word: “freedom and democracy.”
There are hints of that in the ancient world. that connection emerges around 450 BC. c. largely because, although they are not necessarily so closely connected, they both have the same opposite. both are contrasted with tyranny. if there is a tyranny (as there was in the Persian world, according to the Greeks), there is a chief and all the others are slaves. tyranny and democracy are polar opposites.
which affects the way in which herodotus, in particular, portrays the idea of freedom as a great inspirational force. with all the disadvantages, it’s pretty much the same if you win, but you win.
on the other hand, certainly in the Greek world, there should be a pretty clear antidote to considering them equivalent because there were a lot of states that were anything but democracies and yet extraordinarily proud to be free. they would have been horrified at any suggestion that they weren’t.
The slogans that are associated with democracy, even more than with freedom, are those of equality: either equality of expression —’isēgoría’— where everyone could speak, or equality of access to the law —’ isonomia’—perhaps not quite equal before the law but all protected by law. but, as we saw with the case of that trial, it does not necessarily mean that they are all so closely connected; the protections are not so good. it is this idea of all citizens sharing things that is more basic, perhaps even than freedom, to democracy.
Let’s talk about your latest book, which is Greek Fire.
this is quite old, from a friend and colleague from oxford, oliver taplin. I’ve been looking at it again recently. It was originally a very well illustrated and extraordinarily extensive Channel 4 series. I chose it because of its interest not only in the Greek world, although it says a lot of true things about the Greek world, but also in what subsequent generations have made of the Greek world in different ways and how they have responded creatively.
He himself draws the analogy of Orpheus going down to the underworld. as you go into ancient greece you are in a sea with all the interest, knowledge and ideas you have acquired, but you cannot stay there and you cannot bring it all with you. all you can do is be different from the experience. is a very good analogy.
he talks about many things: aesthetics, tragedy (he is an expert in tragedy), politics, ideas, architecture, art. it is very rich and beautifully written. It’s also extremely good at giving you an idea of what it’s like to travel around modern Greece. It is an almost poetic response to the great landscape and to Greece as it is now. he clearly loves greece and knows it very well. there’s a sense of some kind of contact, a very filtered and distilled contact, that you might still have when you’re there. I love that.
It is also interesting for the ideas. An example that caught my eye is when he talks about the difference between what Plato called the sophists, the philosophical thinkers who are particularly interested in rhetoric, and what Plato taught about truth and truthfulness. it is a balance between what was later called “homo rhetoricus”, the rhetorical man, who is interested in persuasion, and “homo philosophicus”, the man who is concerned with wisdom and truth. it is the clash between persuasion, what you can say, and truthfulness, what is really true. It is a book written in the early nineties, but this may have even more relevance today, with post-truth societies.
as a final question, why has ancient greece had such a big impact? is it because they were doing really cool stuff or is it more an accident of history than it is the people we study and follow? could it have been the Persians as well?
the great byzantine historian steven runciman, we are told, liked to wonder if it might not have been a good thing if persia, instead of athens, had won the battle of marathon in 490 b.c. then we would be thinking of Zoroastrianism and dualism, and all sorts of other Persian ideas. It is surely an accident of history that the Greek legacy, largely through the Romans, has come down to us.
The Romans did what they did to it, which wasn’t easy, and then it came through the Byzantine culture as well. then it may well be correct that some of these ideas seem very significant to us; they have never ceased to be significant.
Similarly, with science, we cannot neglect how Islam was extraordinarily important. Around the millennium, it was Islamic scholars who were translating Aristotle, responding to Aristotle, taking it much further, at a time when Christianity was pretty much frozen. and a lot of other stuff got in too, which makes the channel from the ancient world to us anything but direct and direct.
there was that feeling of intellectual inquiry, I think, which is what so appeals to a lot of us, especially, inevitably, people in my neck of the woods [oxford] and academics in general. It is this sentiment that Socrates is said to have said, that “the unexamined life is not worth living.” you look at things very carefully and do not take anything for granted. that feeling of energetic, vigorous, open-minded inquiry is something that appeals in ways that are not simply a matter of direct heredity.
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