Charles Freeman - Egypt, Greece, and Rome: Civilizations of the Ancient Mediterranean

by Oswyn Murray

All over Europe multi-volume histories of the ancient world are steaming towards the millennium; most of them have as many authors as chapters, and some of them as many editors as authors. But history-making by committee is never wholly satisfactory because it tends to perpetuate orthodoxy and to concentrate on established areas of study. In Mediterranean history there is a serious need for a shorter work which can chart a less zig-zag course with only one captain on the bridge.

Working with Charles Freeman on an earlier project convinced me that here was a man with the enthusiasm, literary skills, and zeal for research which made him ideally suited to writing history on a broad scale. When he proposed the present volume, it was obvious that it would fill the need for a general and up-to-date history of the ancient Mediterranean world in a way that was probably no longer possible for scholars dedicated to a single civilization. In place of multiple captains (to continue the nautical metaphor) he proposed a succession of scholarly pilots who would direct him through the shoals of controversy into safe mooring in each port. Thus, the unity of approach would be maintained through a single author, but it would be supported by expert advice in each historical area.

In this book Mr Freeman has tried to give a narrative account of the main events within each period, but also to highlight the developments in cultural and social history, and to show something of the evidence on which his judgements are based. He has indicated where the evidence is uncertain, or where his interpretation may be controversial; but he has not avoided the responsibility of making decisions about the evidence in order to present a clear account. The aim of all of us who struggle to write in that most difficult of historical genres, the introduction to the study of a period, must always be to combine the current state of information with excitement and encouragement to study the subject further. History aims at producing narratives and explanations, but it is the methods by which these aims are achieved which constitute the most interesting aspect of being a historian; and making historians is at least as important as writing history. For history is a creative activity that must be renewed in each generation: there will never be a fixed and final narrative, partly because our evidence is incomplete and growing all the time, and partly because our explanations of events and the ways they interconnect reflect our own interpretation of our present world, and so are always changing. As the philosopher and historian R. G. Collingwood insisted, it is not the facts that are interesting in history, but the questions and their answers -- and these can never be fixed.

On behalf of his team of pilots, I would like to congratulate Charles Freeman on the skill with which he has made use of our help to produce a new account of the ancient world in the Mediterranean and the Near East which is both accessible to the general reader and based on the most recent research.

Oxford April 1996

-vi-