Robin Lane Fox - The Classical World: An Epic History from Homer to Hadrian

The Classical World

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

Alexander the Great

Pagans and Christians

The Unauthorized Version

The Making of Alexander

ROBIN LANE FOX

The Classical World

An Epic History from Homer to Hadrian

ALLEN LANE

an imprint of

PENGUIN BOOKS

ALLEN LANE

Published by the Penguin Group

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First published 2005
1

Copyright Robin Lane Fox, 2005

The moral right of the author has been asserted

All rights reserved
Without limiting the rights under copyright
reserved above, no part of this publication may be
reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system,
or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior
written permission of both the copyright owner and
the above publisher of this book

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

EISBN: 9780141902661

FOR MARTHA

He found his father alone in his well-ordered orchard
Digging round a plant: he was wearing a dirty tunic,
Patched and unseemly, and round his shins he had bound
Sewn leather leg-guards, keeping off scratches,
And he had gloves on his hands because of the thorns.
On his head he wore a goatskin cap, increasing his air of sorrow.
When noble, enduring Odysseus saw him
Worn by old age and with such great sadness in his heart,
He stood beneath a tall pear-tree and shed tears

Odysseus returns to his father: Homer, Odyssey 24.22634

This tomb of well-sculpted metal
Covers the dead body of a great hero,
Zenodotus. But his soul is in heaven, where Orpheus is,
Where Plato is, and has found a holy seat, fit to receive a god.
For, he was a valiant cavalryman in the Emperors service,
Famous, eloquent, god-like. In his speech
He was a copy of Socrates among the Italian people.
Leaving to his children his sound ancestral fortune,
He has died, a fit old man, leaving boundless sorrow
To his well-born friends, his city and its citizens.

Palatine Anthology 7.363, possibly composed by Hadrian himself

PART ONE
The Archaic Greek World

PART TWO
The Classical Greek World

PART THREE
Hellenistic Worlds

PART FOUR
The Roman Republic

PART FIVE
From Republic to Empire

PART SIX
An Imperial World

It is a challenge to be asked to write a history of some nine hundred years, especially when the evidence is so scattered and diverse, but it is a challenge which I have enjoyed. I have not assumed a familiarity with the subject but I hope that readers who do or do not have one will be drawn in and retained by what I have had space to discuss. My hope is that they will leave it, as I have, with a sense of how this history varied but can still be made to hang together. I also hope that there will be parts which they will want to pursue, especially the many which I have had to compress.

I have not followed the conventional thematic presentation of classical civilization which discusses a topic (a gendered world, getting a living) across a thousand years in a single chapter. For theoretical reasons, I have chosen a form with a framework of narrative. I believe that changing relations of power, sharply changed by events, changed the meaning and context of most of these themes and that these changes are lost by taking the easy thematic short-cut. My approach is shared in contemporary areas of medical thinking (evidence based medicine), the social sciences (critical juncture theory) and literary studies (discourse analysis). I owe it, rather, to the hard old historical method of putting questions to evidence, reading with it (not against it) in order to bring out more of what it says and constantly retaining a sense of turning points and crucial decisions whose results were shaped, but not predetermined, by their context.

I have had to make hard choices and say little on areas where I feel I know most. One side of me still looks to Homer, another to the still-green orchards near Lefkadia in Macedonia where my vaulted tomb, painted with my three great horses, sixty-petalled roses, Bactrian dancing girls and apparently mythical women awaits discovery by the skilled ephors of the Greek Archaeological Service in 2056. I have chosen to give slightly more space to narrative for one cardinal era, the years from 60 to 19 BC, not only because they are of such significance for the role of my assumed reader, the Emperor Hadrian. They are so dramatic, even to my post-Macedonian eye. They also attach initially to the letters of Cicero, the inexhaustible reward for all historians of the ancient world.

I am extremely grateful to Fiona Greenland for her expert help with illustrations. The jacket was the publishers choice, but the descriptions of the illustrations are otherwise mostly mine. I am also very grateful to Stuart Proffitt for comments on the first part which forced me to go back over it, and to Elizabeth Stratford for expert copy-editing and correction. Above all, I am grateful to two former pupils who turned a manuscript into discs, Luke Streatfeild initially and especially Tamsin Cox whose skill and patience have been this books essential support.

Robin Lane Fox
New College, Oxford

The following was [resolved] by the council and people of the citizens of Thyatira: to inscribe this decree on a stone stele and to place it on the Acropolis (at Athens)so that it may [be] evident to all the Greeks how much Thyatira has received from the greatest of kings since he (Hadrian) benefited all the Greeks in common when he summoned, as a gift to one and all, a council from among them to the most brilliant city of Athens, the Benefactress and when, on his proposal, the [Romans] approved [this] most venerable Panhellenion [by decree] of the Senate and individually he [gave] the tribes and the cities a share in this most honourable Council

Inscribed decree, c. AD 119/20,
found at Athens, concerning Hadrians Panhellenion

The classical world is the world of the ancient Greeks and Romans, some forty lifetimes before our own but still able to challenge us by a humanity shared with ours. The word classical is itself of ancient origin: it derives from the Latin word classicus which referred to recruits of the first class, the heavy infantry in the Roman army. The classical, then, is first class, though it is no longer heavily armoured. The Greeks and Romans did borrow from many other cultures, Iranian, Levantine, Egyptian or Jewish among others. Their story connects at times with these parallel stories, but it is their own art and literature, thought, philosophy and political life which are correctly regarded as first class in their world and ours.