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"The Birth of Classical Europe" review |
By Peter Jones, Daily Telegraph
As the authors demonstrate in fascinating detail, Greek and Roman elites put an enormous amount of effort into calling up or reinventing the past to suit the present. For example, after Cleisthenes invented democracy in Athens in 507BC, Athenians soon began ascribing elements of it to an early (to us mythical) founding hero Theseus. In 196BC, Lampsacus (a town near the Dardanelles) tried to strike up an alliance with Marseilles on entirely bogus claims to historical links with it (which is why historians were regularly members of diplomatic embassies). Both Greek and Roman elites were always harking back to the Trojan War. This invocation of the past is a defining feature of ancient elite mentality.
But it does raise the question how far such a 'communal identity’ was anything more than simply an elite identity. For example, when the Persians defeated Roman armies in the third century AD, they boasted that they were reliving the glories of their great kings Darius and Xerxes 800 years earlier.
Price-Thonemann argue that this sort of political image-making 'profoundly [my italics] shaped’ the Persian world. But in what way did it make an actual difference to anyone other than the elites who created it? Or bring classical Europe to 'birth’?
For the rest of the review click here.
The Birth of Classical Europe: A History from Troy to Augustine
By Simon Price and Peter Thonemann
ALLEN LANE, £25, 398pp
Available from Telegraph Books 0844 871 1516
