Antiquity

Antiquity: The Civilization of the Ancient World
© 2003 Norman F. Cantor
256 pages

Perhaps western history is all Greek to you. In that case, Norman Cantor's Antiquity may shed a little light on the subject. It is a brief work, scarcely over 200 pages,  and in it Cantor reviews the primary roots of Western civilization (Greece, Rome, and Judaism), as well as more material considerations like the role of cities.  Civilizations of the middle east also appear through the Jewish connection.  This book has a curious organization, and one of its chapters eschews narrative altogether: instead, Cantor presents the debates within early Christian thought as a lively conversation involving St. Augustine and a few others.   Although the book is intentionally pitched as a survey for the historically illiterate, Cantor doesn't shy away from probing a little more deeply when he can --  exploring the meaning behind classic architecture, for instance, the common emphasis on rationality and restraint that linked Greek aesthetics and philosophy. (Of course, they can't help but be linked, considering that aesthetics was considered one of the branches of philosophy, along with ethics and metaphysics.)   Cantor holds the Roman empire in especially high regard, declaring that it was the most harmonious and stable multiethnic society in history. 

Although I enjoyed this quick romp through the ancient and classical world well enough ,  it has its quirks -- the unusual approach to reviewing Christian thought, for instance, and the fact that Cantor believes that imperialism and  plutocracy  were passed down not by human nature, but by the classic heritage.   I'm preee-eety sure they had war and imperialism in China, Africa, and...oh, everywhere else.  Those who have a serious interest in repairing historical blind spots can probably find better works.

Romans Without Laurels

Romans Without Laurels
© 1962  Indro Montanelli
352 pages

In Romans Without Laurels, Indro Montanelli delivers an affectionate history of the Roman Republic and the empire which followed. Although a work in translation, it succeeds wonderfully as narrative history, reminding and entertaining the reader with stories from Rome's rise and fall. The author declares at the beginning that his intention was to deliver a history of the Romans as people, warts and all, avoiding the temptation to put them on a pedestal. Their own historians depicted themselves as hysterically flawed at times; why should we not do the same? Politics is the main course here, of course, but Montanelli is never far from working in literature or economics. He works these in rather cleverly, too: after the chronological history arrives at the eruption of Pompeii, he pauses to write about daily life for ordinary Italians -- their work, their habits, their passions. Similarly, when Rome is transitioning, he pauses to reflect on the evolving culture, as Rome passed from dicipline to decadence. Montaelli is a laudably fair author, one who can't bring himself to demonize anyone -- not even Nero or Caligula. He reflects sadly on their few virtues before recounting the ludricrous and obscene antics of both. Montanelli even appreciates the pre-republican kings of Rome, who (aside from the infamous Tarquins) had the same essential powers as Roman consuls. As he is operating from the original Roman histories, some stories are passed to the reader verbatim -- including the rumor that Caligula made his horse consul. He does offer caution from time to time, however, reminding the reader that Roman historians had their biases just as modern writers do.

For a narrative history of Rome, this is hard to find but enjoyable reading for popular audiences. The popularity of Mary Beard's SQPR indicates that Rome continues to fascinate us, and this has the additional attraction of having been written by an Italian.

Related:
Rubicon, Tom Holland

The Greeks

The Greeks
© 1950 HDF Kitto
256 pages

HDF Kitto's history of the Greeks came highly recommended to me by another author, and I found it utterly delightful.  Here we have history written not by an archaeologist, but by a classicist whose head is brimming over with the life of his subject, who knows not only their stories but their language.  Kitto begins with a political overview,  from the first settlers to the rise of Alexander the Great, before covering the Greek mind in philosophy and myth.  Kitto brings to this little history great affection for his subject, praising the Greeks despite their faults, as he might a friend.  His style makes the reading enjoyable -- affable, readily knowledgeable, and with just the right amount of wry self-deprecation.

Most fundamentally, Kitto appreciates the Greeks for their rustic well-roundness. They valued autarchy, not specialization, which was one of the reasons their governance often filled important positions with amateurs, choosing citizens by ballot to assume offices.  Related to this is the Greek concept of the polis; for them, the polis wasn't merely a city in which they lived, it was the community through which they fulfilled human nature itself.  The polis was a place in full, supplying its own needs, just as the people it created were men in full. Odyessus, the king of Ithaca, prides himself not on his palace but on his straight furrows: he is a farmer first, a man whose own hands produce works he can take pride in.  Greek appreciation for the fullness of the human condition is exemplified by  art and philosophy which took the body seriously, delighted in the senses while never forgetting the higher things. (Plato would change things, of course, with a dualism that scorned the flesh.)  If we condemn them for not abandoning the free nature of the poleis for a greater empire,  Kitto warns his readers, then we should consider how the Soviets view the west. We have refused their planned society in the name of our liberty, so did the Greeks.  And when we hail the Greeks, is it Alexander's underlings we have in mind? Or is the multitude of men who flourished in Ionia and Athens' golden age?  There's a trace of sadness with Kitto; having judged postwar England against Athens, he finds it inferior -- not in material terms, but in those of human flourishing. Specialization brings with it enormous material prosperity, but men are narrower, less experienced with life in the main;  lost is the Greek man in full, one who could farm and think and craft and love, who put to the test every sinew of his body and mind.  GK Chesterton and Wendell Berry's judgment of modernity is much the same.


Related:

• Edith Hamilton's works, especially The Echo of Greece and The Greek Way. 
• The Life of Greece, Will Durant. Durant's epic history. 
• Who Killed Homer?, Victor Davis Hanson

When the Eagle Hunts

When the Eagle Hunts
© 2002 Simon Scarrow
274 pages

The Emperor Claudius is determined to make good the conquest of Britain, but his supply fleet sleeps with the fishes. The only Romans to survive a wintry crossing of the (English) channel are one officer, one woman, and two small children. Drowning might have been a better fate for them, however, as on shore they fall into the hands of an incredibly gruesome and violent sect of Druids. Used as objects of ransom, the royal family is threatened with death-by-bonfire if Rome doesn’t meet the druidic demands...demands which might compromise the whole expand-the-Empire dream.  Enter the grizzled Centurion Macro and his peach-fuzz faced second, Cato,  who have in the past proven quick enough on their feet to infiltrate barbarians and walk out alive.

When the Eagle Hunts is third in Scarrow’s Roman historical fiction, and features cloak-and-gladus operations more than larger battles.  Not that Hunts is without legion-wide brawls, for the first half of the book features the Second Legion patrolling the border and being brutally harried by the Durotriges.  Scarrow uses this to create a sense of dread about the Black Moon Druids, who expect some deity to arrive and consume the world, beginning with their enemies. The druids wage savage war against anyone who draws close to Rome, and if they spare women and children from being killed in battle, it is only so the captives can be tortuously executed at leisure. Scarrow still provides comic moments, here principally in the Romans' interaction with their Iceni guide, but Hunts is darker than the previous novels in the series. Of great interest is the role played by a red-haired Iceni named Boudica, who both Macro and Cato have a certain fascination for. She moves like a tiger, a fount of hidden and fierce strength, and she most definitely will feature in this series again, I'm sure.  The druidic horror show also has some interest given that Scarrow penned his afterword on fanaticism and violence  on September 12th, 2001.  Hunts is also a series milestone, a coming-of-age for  young Cato, who must attempt a rescue on his own after Macro is incapacitated.

Lost to the West

Lost to the West: The Forgotten Byzantine Empire that Rescued Western Civilization
© 2009 Lars Brownsworth
329 pages

The Roman empire not not fade quietly into history in 474, when a Gothic warlord decided to run the city of Rome directly instead through a faux-imperial proxy. It went out in a blaze of glory, in an epic battle in which an Emperor himself stood in the line and bid a massing enemy to do its worst.  For Rome continued long after the Empire faded from Italy, and it not only prevailed but flourished against a host of enemies until finally falling a millennium later.  Lost to the West is highly storied introduction to the eastern Roman empire, one that reduces eleven hundred years of war, politics, and religion to three hundred pages. I learned of this book through the author's podcast, "Twelve Byzantine Rulers", and Lost to the West improves on it. Instead of having twelve distinct episodes, Brownsworth moves smoothly through an entire epoch, lingering on leaders and events which were especially impactful. It's essentially a shorter Short History of Byzantium,  even more storied.

For those completely in the dark, the 'eastern' Roman story begins in the third century A.D., when the Emperor Diocletian decided that an empire that wrapped around the entire Mediterranean was more trouble than it was worth, and divided it into administrative halves. His intentions were good, but the move didn't save Rome from the curse of dynastic wars, and when Constantine the Great seized total command, he transformed the entire Empire. Not only did he established a new capital in the east (Constantinople), the better to focus on the realm's Persian foes, but he began the process that turned classical Rome into Christian Rome. His unity didn't hold for long;  distracted by the constant problems of the Balkans and Persia, the Emperor was unable to come to the rescue of the badly-led western realm. Weakened by its own civil wars, the west fell easy prey to rampaging barbarians.  Constantinople would reclaim bits of Italy later on, only to lose them again as the centuries passed, but the heart of the Empire, the heart of western civilization, was fixed in the east.  In comparison, old Italy was a dump, and Europe little more than a wilderness with a few wooden forts occupied by belching brutes.

Religious unity took longer to destroy.  The Bishop of Rome held an esteemed place in Christendom, being one of the five great metropolitans of the Empire with Jerusalem, Antioch, Alexandria, and Constantinople. After the first three fell to the Arabs, however,  Rome and Constantinople were a rivalry of two. While their respective Latin and Greek cultures were different, eventually it was politics that sundered Christendom. The iconoclastic epidemic, for instance, saw the eastern emperor attempting to order Christians throughout the empire to destroy their religious art, either by breaking it or whitewashing murals.  This originated in the emperor's belief that the Empire had become idolatrous, and was being punished by God. To regain divine favor,   Christians should purge themselves of representational art in the manner of the triumphant Muslims and in the ancestral way of the Jews.   The eastern church was coerced into going along with the emperor, but the Roman bishop was incensed that a secular figure would dictate doctrine to the church -- and order the destruction of soul-edifying art, to boot!  So began a merry round of excommunication and growing hostility between east and west, politically and religiously, that was made permanent when a western army sacked Constantinople on its way to redeem Jerusalem yet again.  That tragedy, the Fourth Crusade, came after the 'official' schism, but the eastern Romans suffered so at the hands of the west that they would never submit to the Roman papacy. "Better the Turk's turban," they snarled, "than Rome's miter."

Lost to the West is a story of long, gradual decline, occasionally arrested by great leaders like Justinian, and occasionally hasted by abysmal ones and the plague.  The sporadic maps tell the story; from an empire that appeared to be united Rome at its height, the east declined under constant outside attack and civil war to controlling the  city of Constantinople, a bit of Greece, and bits and pieces of Asia Minor's shoreline. Constantinople would beat foes again and again, but so long lived was it that it would have to face them as they revived, zombie-like.  Eventually woe came from the east: despite surviving the Persians, Arabs, Mongols, and Seljuk Turks,  the Ottoman Turks were able to wear down the great walls of the city with cannon and seize a prize lusted after for centuries by the Islamic world.  New Rome went down fighting, however, achieving an end far more glorious than both  western Rome and the Ottoman Empire which succeeded it.

This is a fast run through a millennium, and for me it was mostly review. I enjoyed Brownsworth's voice, though his title is curiously chosen. He hints at the topic from time to time; in both the defense of Europe against eastern armies and  Constantinople's preservation and increase of knowledge lost to the west during its brooding Gothic phase, but never devotes a lot of attention to a thesis that Byzantium 'saved' the east.  Influence is  covered a little more in books like Sailing from Byzantium, though.


Related:

• Constantinople: the Forgotten Empire, Isaac Asimov; Sailing from Byzantium, Colin Wells; A Short History of Byzantium, John Julius Norwich; The War of the Three Gods: Rome, Persia, and the Rise of Islam, Peter Crawford.
• The Lost History of Christianity, Philip Jenkins

The Egyptians

The Egyptians
© 1997 Barbara Watterson
368 pages

"We stand where Caesar and Napoleon stood, and remember that fifty centuries look down upon us; where the Father of History came four hundred years before Caesar, and heard the tales that were to startle Pericles. A new perspective of time comes to us; two millenniums seem to fall out of the picture, and Caesar, Herodotus, and ourselves appear for a moment contemporary and modern before these tombs that were more ancient to them than the Greeks are to us. " (Will Durant, Our Oriental Heritage) 

The Egyptians surveys the entire course of Egyptian history, from ancient settlements to the 1990s, in a mere 300 pages. Were this not ambitious enough, Watterson does not limit herself to mere politics, but includes separate sections on religion, architecture, law, and economy.  The approach is reminiscent of Will Durant's symphonic history. Pyramid-like, The Egyptians is bottom-heavy:   two-thirds of the book is devoted to the ancients, with the Roman, Christian, Islamic, and modern periods sharing the last third together. The scale is immense, as it has been Egypt's fortune or misfortune to be an combatant or an object of interest to nearly every great power around the Mediterranean. Egypt's longevity is such that she has been conquered by two wholly different Persias, an epoch apart.  In the beginning Egypt was star of her own story, an insular union of two kingdoms fixed on the Nile; after outside invasion by the Hyksos, Egypt overcame her conquerors and became an empire in her own right. The land of the Nile would go the way of all empires, however, falling to Persia, then the Macedonians and their successors -- Rome, Constantinople, the caliphate, and Turkey. Through history Egypt has also been the plaything of other empires, like the French and British. Even Hitler attempted conquest, while trying to rescue Italian pretensions of a resurrected Rome.  Aside from a brief interlude during the Islamic civil wars, Egypt had to wait until the 20th century to be ruled by her own people again. Despite the generations of new reigning powers and the trauma they inflicted --  Ptolemies are utterly horrifying in their abuse, what with one king marrying his sister, then his niece, then murdering his own child and sending the body to his sister--wife to taunt her --  Egypt endures. Given the chaos of Egypt in recent years, such resilience is a hopeful sign.  

The Eagle's Conquest

The Eagle's Conquest
© 2002 Simon Scarrow
320 pages

In Under the Eagle,  Simon Scarrow introduced readers to two legionnaires:  Macro, a grizzled veteran, and Cato, a young bookish sort straight from Rome , a boy made an officer  because of his father’s influence. No one though Cato would make it as a soldier, let alone as a leader of men, but in Germania and the beginning of the invasion of Britain he proved himself. Now the Romans are moving further inland, where some scattered tribes are uniting under  the Catuvellauni banner, whose leader intends to crush the small but stubborn invasion force.  In The Eagle’s Conquest,  Rome struggles to make a decisive strike against the barbarian horde,  even as our two officers find evidence that points toward someone within Rome working to undermine the invasion. Worse yet, the Emperor is coming to take personal charge of the campaign, and Rome’s enemies may find the murky bogs and chaotic wilderness of Britain an ideal spot to induce a little regime change.  As the plot thickens, Rome’s forces crashes through thickets and wade through bogs, constantly fighting the natives and hovering on the verge of utter fatigue.   Rome’s goal is to crush the opposing army outright, as other as-yet neutral tribes may join if the legions falter; their opponent, however, stays on the run and likes to rest near terrain that puts paid to any ideas about maintaining any kind of troop cohesion.  Cato continues to mature as a man, taking command of his entire cohort during an especially frantic bit of fighting and  vying with a personal enemy within the ranks, one who costs him dearly. Humor abounds, more in the dialogue than with physical humor this time, and the author unintentionally adds to this by writing the invading Romans in his own vernacular. It’s “bloody hell” this, and “jolly good” that,   as our Roman chaps brave painted stinking hordes,   a landscape not kind to invading armies, and the fickleness of woman.  The book ends with one word – “Boudica” – that promises all kinds of fun to come.  

The Devil Knows Latin

The Devil Knows Latin: Why America Needs the Classical Tradition
© 1999 E. Christian Kopf
327 pages

Earlier in the week I read The Devil Knows Latin, which like Who Killed Homer? contends for the value of a classical education to western civilization.  His argument, appropriately enough, is trinitarian; he argues on behalf of tradition itself, argues for the classics' place as the bedrock of the western tradition, and argues for Latin and Greek's importance in imbibing the west's heritage most fully.  Kopf is a partisan of the west who regards attempts at emphasizing multiculturalism in education as dodgy; not because other cultures don't have value, but because they cannot be appreciated piecemeal.  A cultural tradition is, like a great house or a city, a thing built across the ages by succeeding generations; the work laid down by the dead is used and advanced by the living; each piece connects to the other. One generation of Greeks makes written stories out of another's myths;  Shakespeare takes those stories and makes them the background for his own; even a 'modern'  mind like Freud uses Greek mythic language to communicate his ideas. Attempting to teach culture through random stories from across the world would be tantamount to constructing a house by grabbing diverse elements -- a Japanese roof, Igloo walls, French doors -- and pushing them all together.  It doesn't work, and nor does modern western education work in presenting children with a slate of wholly seperate subjects without connection to one another. Kopf's understanding of education is more integral; for him, subjects should be learned together, like Roman schoolboys learning philosophy or history as they translate or read Latin in their mastery of it.

Regrettably, Kopff doesn't dwell on the Greek worldview the way Hanson does, though a conviction that education is less accumulating facts and more the cultivation of an individual undergrids his perspective.  The book doesn't have the cohesion its author admires; between an essay on the importance of language and several fascinating pieces of movie and literary criticism lays an argument for protective tariffs.. This is really more a collection of articles, linked by highbrow cultural defense.  If The Devil Knows Latin succeeds, it is in its first argument for culture, specifically the fact that culture is not a thing in itself, with its own life, but something which depends on the living to preserve and build upon.  Russell Kirk made an identical argument in America's British Culture, where he sweetened the pot by  contending  that  the classical tradition was one that Americans of all ethnicities and religions could use to bind one another together, instead of falling apart in cultural balkanization. Though I'm an ardent lover of the classical tradition, for me The Devil Knows Latin will be more memorable for the movie reviews.  Hanson's work, which predated this by a year, is much superior.

For the curious:  the title is taken from the story of a bishop who insisted a child be baptized in Latin instead of English, because "the baby doesn't know English and the Devil knows Latin."


Related:
Who Killed Homer? The Demise of Classical Education, Victor Davis Hanson
The Roots of American Order and America's British Culture, Russell Kirk. Both not only include reviews of the west's classical heritage, but stress the importance of cultural continuity.

American Cicero

American Cicero: The Life of Charles Carroll
© 2010 Bradley Birzer
230 pages

When Charles Carroll of Carrollton signed the Declaration of Independence, he was risking the biggest fortune on the American mainland.  But Carroll had yearned for independence for more than a decade before he put pen to paper, before strife ever disrupted the happy relationship between British America and Parliament.  Whatever the risk, if the cause was right Carroll could have taken no other course;  more than any other founder, he was steeped in the classical tradition and its traditions of civic virtue. When he died in 1832,  having outlived all the other founders, he was hailed as the Last of the Romans.   In  American Cicero, Bradley Birzer presents a study of his life, the tale of a Roman in a nation of would-be Jacobins.

 Many of the founding generations were besotted with the classical world;   they studied the classics not as segregated and dusty literature to be discussed in clubs with other eccentrics, but as the fount of worldly knowledge. Metaphysics, politics, natural philosophy, and even farming wisdom were the gift of Greece and Rome to the American frontier, and a study of classical political constitutions would later inform the creation of the American bedrock.   Educated for fourteen years in England and France, Carroll was even more formed by the classics than his contemporaries, who all adopted Latin pen names whenever they wrote in public forums. He considered the ancients to be not only teachers, but friends – especially Cicero, whose Stoicism would undergird Carroll’s political philosophy.

 Though he is little remembered today, Carroll’s early career was accomplished; after creating a reputation as a champion-patriot in  furious exchange of letters, he served as an emissary to Canada; later he attended the Second Constitutional Convention and signed both it and the Articles of Confederation; still later, when the Constitution supplanted the Articles, he was elected Maryland’s first Senator.  This was, Birzer writes, utterly appropriate given how much ink Carroll had spilled in the service of creating a genuine Republic, especially concerned with the role that  a Senate would play in maintaining an even keel amid populist furor.  If he is forgotten today,  it may owe to his  well-deserved reputation as a critic of mass democracy: like John Adams, he regarded pure democracy as dangerously unstable, a threat to the liberty of minorities and the right of property.

 Carroll was especially conscious of the threat of mobs given his status as a Catholic in a predominately Protestant world.  In a list of the signers of the Declaration, Carroll is alone in his Roman devotion.  Despite Maryland’s birth as a safe haven for Catholics fleeing the persecution of the Reformation, the state was heavily settled by Protestants and actually became one of the most hostile to Catholicism. In this age, hostility toward a man’s religion didn’t mean calling him names. Seizing his land and setting him on fire were more likely. The despoiling of Catholics had happened in England, and could very well happen in America were the Rule of Law not enthroned.

 Carroll feared the rage of a mob, and he had a great deal of property to lose – but he was a man who lived in hope.  His faith was more cosmopolitan than most, as he believed all those followed the moral laws of Jesus would see his face regardless of their doctrinal differences with the Church.   This universal stance was not sheer pragmatism on Carroll’s part, though he could not expect to live in peace with his neighbors, let alone play a part in the public sphere, were he antagonistic toward his Protestant brethren.   The Stoicism of Cicero also deeply informed Carroll’s beliefs, especially the belief that each man was imbued with a divine spark, a piece of the Cosmic logos,  and that this made every man and woman kin in a fundamental way, and opened the possibility of a universal republic.

 A genuine Republic was possible only if people conducted themselves with virtue, however, obeying the laws of Nature and its God;   let passion reign, and the fruits of civilization will be felled under a barbarian storm.  Carroll’s staunch belief in the need for virtue predisposed him to favor administration by a relatively small group of men, chosen for the strength of their character and themselves limited by government that kept the inherent abuses of government to a minimum. (The choosing of an American president by Congressionally-appointed Electors reflected the value other founders saw in a moderated  national democracy.) He believed in genuine aristocracy, but not the arbitrary sort.    Men’s characters were to be judged by their submission  to law, both divine and civic. Before the law that bound the cosmos and the republic together, no man could stand superior.

 Like Marcus Aurelius, Carroll is an easier man to admire from afar than to enjoy having supper with. John Adams thought him a marvelous specimen of humanity, but Mr. Adams had a moral severity of his own. Contemporaries marveled at his intelligence and devotion to the Patriot cause, arguing as he did against the abuses of the king and Parliament with respect to the common law, but his long education and affluent upbringing seemed to deny him that charismatic common touch that so endeared the public to men like Jefferson, or later Lincoln. He was highly esteemed by his peers, and sometimes admired by the people, but when he passed away he was mostly remembered as a historical curiosity, the last living signer of the declaration. Like Dickinson, he helped to shape popular rage against taxes and government meddling into a respectable cause,  and is thus worth considering even if the cause took on a more incautious nature than either man cared for. 

Gates of Fire

Gates of Fire: An Epic Novel of the Battle of Thermopylae
© 1998 Steven Pressfield
442 pages

When Xerxes, Ruler of Asia, god-king of men, finally stood over the bodies of the few Greeks who had withstood his hordes drawn from half a world, he could not understand. Hailed as all-knowing,   he could not fathom why a few hundred men would have opposed his army of millions, even after they were offered the greatest seats of influence in the Empire.  Finding a Greek still holding on to life,  the Persians looked for answers; nursing him back to health, they coaxed out this, the story of the Spartans. The story of an orphaned boy who fled to the strength of Sparta after his parents and home were destroyed by the Argives, Gates of Fire is his growing up among them, his quest to become like them, to be the quintessence of strength and valor, unbreakable.

Though not born of Sparta, Xeones lived in awe of them from his youth. So fiercly did he admire them that after war turned him into an orphaned child, wandering the wilderness with a cousin, he left her behind to pursue the Spartan way.  He could never be one of them; criminal violence had robbed him of the strength needed to wield the heavy oaken shield and the lance. He could string a bow, however, and let it fly with accuracy, and so he devoted his life to the service of Sparta.  He is motivated by youthful admiration, but also haunted by the memory of his parents, ashamed of not having been there to defend them,  agonized by knowing he ran away from his conquered city. In the Spartans he looks for the strength and fortitude he missed in himself, and when he takes his stand among them at the last, it is quite personal.  

Through Xeo the reader is introduced first to a harsh world in which children can be reduced to scrounging about the countryside, begging and stealing food, and then to the Spartan soul. The Spartans are different than other Greeks;  even when the Persian hordes threaten to reduce Hellas' cities to ashes, its women and children to slavery, the Spartans sneer and laugh while other cities kneel in the dust in homage. There are fates worse than death for a Spartan.   The proud city is a severe place in which the souls of men are tempered like steel against the vagaries of fate, against pain;  these  cannot be avoided, but they cannot be allowed to rule. Discipline must rule; loyalty to the clan must prevail.  Xeo, like all men of the city, becomes subject to Spartan law, a demanding law that forces greatness of the soul even from the lowly.  Having found a place in the ranks as a squire to one of Sparta's knights, Xeo lastly becomes the narrator of the battle of Thermopylae This is the finale, a last  stand so audacious in courage that its telling has survived through the centuries, wherein 300 Spartans and a few thousand Allied Greeks attempted to stop the Persian millions in their tracks.

Although it lives on in the western imagination like no other battle, Thermopylae was for the Greeks a defeat: the Persians broke through after losing thousands upon thousands every day of combat to a mighty, valiant few heavy infantry, and Xerxes swept across Greece, burning even proud Athens. For those who remain, however, for those who later rose against the Persians, for any number of people who have protected a flicker of hope against the gaping maw of darkness--   the British expeditionary force standing in Belgium against the German invasions of 1914 and 1940, for instance -- Thermopylae was a triumph of the human spirit. Pressfield does a magnificent job of giving it poetic due; perhaps, considering the drama of the situation, an artful rendering of it is unavoidable. Time and again Pressfield ensnares the reader in the glorious action, or awes the soul is descriptions of the great slaughter. This he does without much hyperbole; the Persians are not demonized, nor are the Spartans lionized; the two sides meet repeatedly before the slaughter, emissaries hailing on another as brothers. The Spartans, whom  we grow to know through Xeo,  have a severe discipline, but even though they seem to fight like demigods they are still human, and herein they weep, laugh, and love fiercely Their antidote to the fear of battle is fear of failing one another, of failing to give selflessly to their brothers-in-arms.  It's an extraordinary work, as gripping for the martial telling as for the exposure to a culture whose stoic-like dedication is staggering.

A Short History of Byzantium

A Short History of Byzantium, John Julius Norwich
© 1997 John Julius Norwich
431 pages

            Rome fell in a.d. 474? Tell that to the Byzantines, who for centuries persisted in being an afterimage of the classical world, evolving through the medieval before their collapse a century after the west had fallen to barbarism. A Short History of Byzantium takes in over a thousand years of history, from Diocletian’s administrative division of the Roman Empire into two halves to the fall of the great city Constantinople to the Turks.  There is great difficulty in a hurried survey like this,  subjecting the reader to a tide of dates and names, but John Julius Norwich is a storyteller; under his pen, some  events, and some people,  are so outstanding that they serve as landmarks for the rest.

            A Short History of Byzantium begins with a story more familiar, for the first chapters are a history of the Roman Empire as the west remembers it: Roman. Constantine the Great moved the center of the Roman Empire to  the  east, founding a new Rome on the site of an old trading-city, Byzantium,  a city that would later assume his name: Constantinople.  The move created a fresh start, but allowed the Emperor to focus on the nation’s rising threats:  powers to the east, especially the Parthians. Rome vs. Persia; it’s a battle between titans of the classical era.  The book’s scope is such, though, that the classical gives way to a world at its conclusion which is more like ours; we see here the birth of the Holy Roman Empire,  the rise of Islam, the explosive expansion of the Ottoman Turks.  Throughout all this tumultuous change was the Empire,  warring against and making common cause with these changing powers through the ages.  Byzantium was also witness and party to Christianity’s evolution.  The effective founder of the Byzantine heritage, Constantine, was the man who legitimized Christianity within the Empire as a whole, and put it on the path to becoming the binding religion of the west as a whole. But that binding could not quite stand the stressors of the ages, the gulf of cultural differences between Rome proper and the east, and Christianity once unified eventually severed into two halves, Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy. But the cut was never a clean one; instead, there were tiny fractures that opened and closed through the centuries, forever dynamic but trending in the end toward rupture.  

            The empire itself is the subject of considerable interest, somehow holding on through the centuries despite the staggering variety of challenges it faced. It defended itself from one invasion after another, from Bulgars, Goths, Vikings, and later on Arabs and Turks, and relied on the oddest allies. In resisting the Norman attack on southern Italy, for instance, it employed disgruntled Anglo-Saxons who had left England in disgusted after  the Normans conquered it. A nation surviving a thousand years of history must have some institutional stability, but it is hard to see after this survey;  only 88 people held the throne in that span,  but they seem to go with great haste,  and often bloodily. At times even western Rome appears sane by comparison, though that’s excepting monsters like Caligula and Nero. Not that Byzantium is without its characters, listing as emperor men like “Michael the Sot”.  There are utter boors and monks, noble heroes and complete, degenerate cowards.   There are women, too, some who reign through their husbands, and some who reign in their own right.  They make for a colorful cast, and though I knew the general trend of the story (an image of the Turks besieging Constantinople has haunted my mind since seeing it in grade school), the turns it took were surprising indeed. The empire rose and fell through the centuries, contending against all manner of adversaries, but the fatal dagger came at the hands of those who ought to have been its defenders; the Crusaders, who in the Fourth Crusade, sacked the city. Even the fluke victory the Turks inflicted on it years prior did not break the empire so badly as that sacking. 

    This was in short quite a treat, exposing me to a world of information previously hidden away, but of utter interest. From the word go, Byzantine history was wrapped up in the west; how its memory became lost is a puzzle, considering how important western powers viewed it almost until the last, straining to wed into its line to unite the  German 'Roman' empire and the empire of Old.  Entertaining in many respects, it also delivers a history of Europe from another aspect, and is quite commendable.

Related:

• Twelve Byzantine Rulers, Lars Brownsworth. Based heavily on the book, as it turns out.

The Odyssey

The Odyssey
© 1884 trans. George Herbert Palmer, original author Homer
313 pages

Three years ago I read The Illiad, and intended to follow it shortly with The Odyssey. Like Odysseus, however, my own attention was blown of course. This is course a classic, second only to the aforementioned Homeric poem in terms of hallowedness. Virtually everyone knows the story;  a veteran of the war against Troy, the architect of its defeat, attempts to return home, only for a quick jaunt across the Aegean into a ten-year journey, full of monsters and the ill will of the gods. An early escape from the monster cyclops Polyphemus earns our hero Odysseus and his crew the enduring wrath of Poseidon, who throws every obstacle he can at them. Fortunately the clever hero is much-loved of Athena, goddess of craft, and she offers able assistance to both the hero and his young son.They'll need it, because while the master of the house is lost at sea, his manor is filled with suitors who want his wife Penelope to wed them. Literally eating him out of house and home, they intend to kill young Telemachus and force Penelope to wed.

I know the Odyssey as Odysseus' story, but his perilous adventures only occupy a fifth of the book. Instead the tale opens with the gods considering his plight, and Athena embarking on a mission to inspire young Telemachus to go searching for news of his father.  A third of the way in, the focus switches to Odysseus, who -- captive by a goddess who wants him to bed her --  makes his escape with a little help from his divine friends. After washing up on one island and massacring its inhabitants without so much as a cross word exchanged between them,  he is driven into the sea and finds refuge among an island of friendly folk who urge him to tell his story. Enter the cyclopes and the rest.  The book by and large consists of a great deal of dialogue, of people making speeches and delivering flourished stories to one another; Odysseus himself seems to use a different name, and invents a different backstory, every time he makes land.  Even after he's home safely, he spins a yarn for his father, seemingly for the pleasure of saying "Just kidding, it's me!"

Although the speeches and such aren't exactly scintillating reading, the language makes up for that a touch;  the Odyssey began as a oral tale, we know, and the expressive language and use of repetition bear that out. Athena is ever the grey-eyed, Odysseus lordly, the dawn rosy-fingered. (In one stance it is also fair-haired.)  The amount of names,  people and place, dropped here is staggering, putting even The Illiad to shame. I'm glad to have finally read the Odyssey, considering its place in western literature, and enjoyed much of it, but I think I have to count The Iliad my favorite of the two.

Who Killed Homer?

Who Killed Homer? The Demise of Classical Education and the Recovery of Greek Wisdom
© 1998 Victor Davis Hanson
290 pages

For hundreds of years, the study of the classics was at the heart of a liberal education, thought essential to the cultivation of free men.  Yet today speaking Latin would be regarded as a sign of eccentricity, not erudition. People now attend university for technical  expertise in fields like business, engineering, or nursing, and such a focus is lauded as practical.  A degree in Greek literature would be derided as useless as a degree in art history, the epitome of wasted public finance.  Victor Hanson argues that vocational training is not the point of a university education; an education is not what you know, but how you behave. In Who Killed Homer? he examines the soul-forming virtues of the classical tradition and contemplates their reason for their unnecessary but imminent demise.

Hansen begins by arguing that the greatest virtues of western civilization have their origin, and sustaining permanence, in the Greek tradition.  Drawing from philosophical treatise (to the Greeks, a category broad enough to cover politics, science, and more) in addition to extant literature, Hanson reviews a spectrum of values with origins in Greece.  These range from concepts given overt legal protection (consensual government and the open criticism thereof, armies subordinate to civil power, free enterprise, etc) to ideas understood at a deeper level, and contributing to the others.  These more fundamental appreciations include the belief that every polis' wellbeing depended on the average middling citizen, not the aristocracy or the mob, and that the world was fraught with meaning. Mysterious yet rational, the world was a place imbued with limits -- limits that extended to man. Part of the Greek heritage are more obvious than others; the very shape of US government structures bears witness to their past, and most histories of science will begin with the Greek enterprise. Other appreciations have been forgotten;  like the belief that man was nothing without the polis;  only the power of culture and threat of sanction by others kept the human animal from behaving worse than beasts.  It is in civilization than man finds salvation from his own destruction. This is a hard lesson given an obscene and brutal summation by Hanson: "Man is nothing without the state."  Ultimately, classical education imparted a cohesive view of the world in which science, politics, and philosophy were knit together, a part of the whole.

If these truths are indeed timeless, how have they fallen by the wayside during the 20th century? Hansen lays the blame solely at the feet of the Classicists, who have thrown away the responsibility of their tradition in the pursuit of status and fortune. They ought to know better, and here Hanson's attitude reveals how seriously he takes his belief that education was the moulding of character, not acquisition of knowledge. To Hanson,  those who have committed themselves to knowing the Greek mind, who have studied it in earnest, bear responsibility for practicing it. Just as we expect a minister to conduct himself with greater care than the average parishioner, so to does Hanson expect classicists to be, if not moral champions, at least contenders;  he expects them to live the values of the Greeks, to take their place in the hoplite ranks of the mind and defend what is theirs, to rise to the challenge of revealing the classics' enduring relevance. Instead,  they focus on increasingly more pointless esoterically in pursuit of esteem,  viewing fellow classicists as competition to be beat for choice university positions in which they can focus on their 'research' and leave the actual teaching to grad students, producing not keen minds but papers on mathematical relationships governing the use of similes in The Illiad.  The comprehension of the whole is lost, and insult is added to injury when said scholars apply tortured modern interpretations,laying waste to The Odyssey by accusing it of being the wellspring of western sexism. Instead of defending and advancing the Greek way, classicists have allowed it to become the scapegoat for every moral self-doubt of the west. After outlining his case against his colleagues, Hanson proposes ways to put the focus back on the meaning of the classics,  in part by forcing classicists to teach."Publish or perish" is anathema to this professor who sees his primary vocation as  giving young people a structured education, not advancing his own  prestige. The work ends on a bitter note, however, as he does not expect the modern world's slide into the moral abyss to be arrested. Instead,  we will probably have to wait for civilization to collapse and demand strong men again, men who will rediscover the Greek truths.

That final bitter retort casts a pall over a strongly-argued book already shadowed by contempt for the modern world, especially ideologies like multiculturalism and relativism. The Greeks understood nuance, but in Hanson's view they stood by everlasting truths. Hanson's own stand is strident at times, to the point that he's less a Pericles calling forth citizens to stand with him and more a Leonidas rallying the troops before a final stand. His appraisal of Greek contributions is surpassed by the analysis of why classical studies have faltered, but Who Killed Homer does double duty as a traditionalist critique of modernity and a passionate appraisal of how much value the tradition still holds, even for moderns overawed by their own cleverness. As a classical partisan myself, I found it invigorating, but Hanson's zeal may spook the unconvinced.

Related:

• The Echo of Greece, Edith Hamilton
• The Way of the Greeks, Edith Hamilton
• Greek Ways, Bruce Thornton
• The Life of Greece, Will Durant

Captain of Rome

Captain of Rome
© 2010 John Stack
400 pages

The Mediterranean is awash in blood as the first Punic War steeps in intensity.  Having risen to the challenge and successfully confronted Carthage on the high seas,  the Republic of Rome  is swaggering under the influence of expected victory. Its fleet greatly enlarged, its sailors gaining their sea legs, the early humiliating losses seem to have been left behind. But Hamilcar Barca is far from beaten, planning a brutal counterstrike that will imperil Italy itself.  None in Rome are wise to the danger, its politicians fighting to claim credit for the presumed victory. To the laurel-seeking politicians, the military is a route to glory, including the men of the good ship Aquila, its crew and the Ninth Legion which it serves.   Its captain, Atticus, is an outstanding tactician, having snatched victories from the teeth of defeat and prevented some losses from turning into catastrophes. His success is resented, however, by some Romans who see in him nothing but an uppity Greek, a wily Ulysses with suspect loyalty. His reputation highlights the failures of others; if a Greek can do it, why can't they? Such a failure is Tribune Varro, a  pup given high rank by his daddy's gold, who makes Atticus the object of resentful sulking. As Carthage's plan ripens and the hour for a crushing blow to Rome arrives, Atticus is deep in the snare of petty politicians and endangered not only by Barca's great fleet, but assassins from his own lines.  In Captain of Rome,   Atticus must survive not only the threat of enemy ships, but the aftermath of his own earlier successes.

 The promising setup is fulfilled by Stack's execution, delivering action not only on the sea, but on land and in political chambers.  Atticus isn't the only officer whose future is threatened by others' ambition; the Carthaginians have their own Varros.  The ongoing tension between Atticus and his counterpart in the Ninth, Septimus, is especially well done; although the two are comrades-in-arms and fast friends, Septimus' hostility towards his sister's romantic relationship with Atticus threatens to drive them apart. The tension is never dispelled in one big confrontation; whenever  their repartee declines, circumstances impel the two to work together and ally again. It's not a clean back and forth, either, but an area of muddy water the two are never quite out of, even during the epic-scale battle at the end.  The strength of their friendship amid these stresses is an unexpected and added strength to a novel that already has plenty of appeal, considering the familiar-yet-exotic nature of classical-era naval combat, and the scheming (Carthaginian and Roman) that delivers a series of crises for the characters.  Readers will also appreciate the handling of the Carthaginians, who aren't villainized, though there are villains among their ranks;  instead, through Atticus' experience we see in the war's contenders  two powers alike in ambition, served by both honorable warriors and loathsome cretins.  Captain of Rome is another triumph in this fascinating trilogy of historical naval fiction.

Ship of Rome

Ship of Rome
© 2009 John Stack
368 pages

            Three hundred years before it became an empire, the Roman Republic started its ascension toward power when it took on the Carthaginian state  for control of first the island of Sicily, and then the entire Mediterranean. Their struggle unfolded over the course of over a hundred years and ended with the complete destruction of Carthage, but it began with an ignominious Roman defeat. As mighty as Rome’s legions were on land,  the war with Carthage made control of the sea a must. Ship of Rome is a tale of naval warfare set during the first Punic War, as mighty yet humiliated Rome sought to find a way to  make good on its naval weakness.  It’s the story of two men, a Roman legionnaire turned marine named Septimus, and his friend and brother-warrior, the  Greek captain of the good ship Aquila. Together they attempt to save Rome from defeat, and redeem  their lost comrades.

            Roman historical fiction is typified by political intrigue and battles on land, not naval stories;  Britain was a naval empire, not Rome. But the war with Carthage made sea superiority a must, just as Britain’s war with Germany made air dominance a requirement, regardless of English naval accomplishments. In Ship of Rome, a Roman army officer and a Greek sea captain serving on the same ship are key players in the opening battles of the first Punic War, when Carthage decides to turn the delicate balance for power between the two states’ holdings in Sicily into open war,  first blockading a supply port and then luring the Roman fleet into a disastrous battle.  The Carthaginians are skilled at naval warfare, and Rome has no time to train its men sufficiently to surpass their rivals experience. But a way must be found, or the legions in Sicily will die a slow death of disease and starvation. Complicating matters is the rivalry between the two Roman consuls over who will get the glory for turning the side, and their mutual treachery of one another is only given spice by the wiles of the merciless Carthaginian admiral, who early on is thwarted by the Aquila and wants revenge.   At least Atticus and Septimus can count on one another to cover the other’s back – at least, when Septimus isn’t distracted by his little sister making goo-goo eyes at his comrade, who for all of his virtues can’t help not being properly Roman, but only merely Greek.

            Ship of Rome is a fantastic read, novel both for being Roman fiction set on the high seas, and for being a sea story set in the classical world. Naval combat during the Punic War bears little resemblance to that of the Age of Wooden Ships and Iron Men that has produced series like the Aubrey-Maturin novels or C.S. Forester’s Horatio Hornblower. There are no cannon broadsides here; combat consists of ramming and boarding;  these ships’ weapons are the six-foot long bronze rams on their front ends and the swords, shields, and arrows of the men aboard her.  Readers of sea stories will find it engaging, but there’s combat on land and in the courts as the consuls vie for power, not to mention the interpersonal conflict like that between the senior consul and his slave, a gladiator who is biding his time and waiting for an opportunity to strike for freedom – but not before taking the consul with him.  For all this strife the plot matures nicely, and even gives a slightly villainous character some sympathetic development.  John Stack has delivered here a book with a lot of appeal; for my own part, I’ve already ordered its sequel, Captain of Rome.

Related:
Review of same at Seeking a Little Truth
Armada, John Stack

The Other Side of Western Civilization

The Other Side of Western Civilization: Readings in Everyday Life,
© 1979 ed. Stanley Chodorow
363 pages

The Other Side of Western Civilization collects readings in social history ranging from antiquity to the Renaissance. Its subtitle Readings in Everyday Life is largely accurate,  for the articles contributed by diverse authors largely ignore the halls of power and tell instead the stories of the common man, or detail the historic aspects of everyday life; there are pieces on the  adventures of traveling on medieval roads, for instance, and on family life in Renaissance Italy. Others move near ‘traditional’ historiography – one article covers the Battle of Agincourt – but maintain the 'everyday' focus;  "Feudal War in Practice" examines Agincourt from the perspective of the foot soldier,  taking into consideration how much room for movement there might have been if every archer in the English line had planted a stake in front of him, as official records of the battle establish. Principally, the collection covers trade, city planning, family life, social relations, and religion. Each piece is introduced by the editor, whose commentary attempts with some success to connect them together,  comparing different articles’ coverage of medieval women for instance. While readers will no doubt find some pieces easier reading than others based on their individual interest,  it's generally accessible. Also of note is the fact that this collection doesn't have a political edge to it; the 'other side' of western civilization  simply concerns topics ignored by  conventional military-political histories, like "Ancient Ships and Shipping" or "The Operation of a Monastery".  This is accompanied by a second volume, which covers the Renaissance to the early modern period.

Contents:
"Ancient Ships and Shipping"
"Cities of the Roman Empire"
"Women in Roman Society"
"The Appeal and Practice of the Mystery-Religions"
"The Conversion of the Germans"
"German Tribal Society"
"Peasants and the Agricultural Revolution"
"Jews in a Christian Society"
"The World of the Crusaders"
"The Training of a Knight"
"The Role of a Baron's Wife"
"Mother and Child"
"Traveling the Roads in the 12th Century"
"The Workday of a Bishop"
"The Operation of a Monastery"
"Hunting Subversion in the Middle Ages"
"The Peasants in Revolt"
"The Organization of the Late Medieval City"
"The Relevance of a University Education in 14th Century England"
"Touring the Holy Land"
"A Community Against the Plague"
"City Women and the French Reformation"
"Cultural Patronage in Renaissance Florence"
"Parent and Child in Renaissance Italy"

This week at the library: Jesus, bikes, and Greeks

In recent weeks I've finished up an unplanned series of readings on first-century Judeo-Christianity.  Shortly after checking out The Origin of Satan for some historical research, two seperate people happened to reccommend Misquoting Jesus and Zealot at the same time, meaning my head is just swimming with facts on the destruction of the temple. Comments for Zealot will follow tonight.

Outside of those, I read Bruce Thorton's Greek Ways, which defends the primacy of Greek contributions to western civilization. His basis is that while many cultures had similar ideas to the Greeks -- a semblance of science, the beginnings of democracy, and so on -- none of them developed as fully or magnificiently as they did in Greece. Further, while the Greeks were seriously flawed, their limitations were those of the human race, while their triumphs were culture-specific. He draws extensively on Greek poetry and prose to put their ideas and behaviors into historical context, and to argue that ideals of western civilization, like political liberty and religious skepticism, were first expressed in their fullest form in Greek minds.  Being hopelessly biased toward the Greeks,  I don't trust myself to do a proper review, but I was impressed by his research.

Additionally, I read through Just the Two of Us, a travel memoir by Melissa Norton, who with her husband  cycled across North America, from the Pacific to the Atlantic. I enjoyed it well enough, but it wasn't a standout for me, at least not when compared to Hey, Mom, Can I Ride My Bike Across America?  I'd been told that Just the Two of Us contained a lot of information on bike mechanics, but my source must have been thinking of another book altogether;  this is a travel diary, and rather complete at that, with the inclusion of mileage logs. (David Lamb's Over the Hills was bike-info heavy, because it had to be; aside from a dog chasing him, nothing happened on his journey. Compare that to John Siegel-Boettner's trip with middle-schoolers, where they were chased not by dogs, but by tornados!

Yesterday I finished Bill Bryson's The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid, a memoir of a baby-boomer childhood. I'd say it's one of Bryson's funniest pieces, but they run together in one long string of belly laughs. More comments on it may follow later.

This week I am attempting to finish, or at least make some progress in, Lewis Mumford's The City in History. After that I have The Consumers' Republic and The Last Humans, and I'm intending on reading a bit more fiction as the year is winding down. I'll probably be resuming Sharpe's series; I believe I left the good rifleman perched at the edge of the Pyrenees, poised to invade France and send Napoleon packing.

The Seven Wonders

The Seven Wonders
© 2012 Steven Saylor
332 pages

A few years ago, I read through the Roma sub Rosa series in which a first-century Sherlock Holmes named Gordianus the Finder made his living investigating murders and other sundry mysteries which were in great supply during Rome's transition from republic to empire.  The Seven Wonders marks the return of the Finder, or rather his beginning as a freshly-togaed young man touring the world with his tutor, Antipater of Sidon -- a poet who fakes his own death, and not just to get out of town. Although Gordianus will encounter mysteries in every city he visits, the greatest intrigue is in his own camp. The stars of The Seven Wonders are the wonders themselves, as Saylor's story is a fictional travelogue of the ancient world. Today, of course, only one of the "Seven Wonders of the Ancient World" remains standing, the Great Pyramid. The others have been lost to natural disasters or human neglect. In Gordianus' day,  most of them dominate the landscape of their cities. The Colossus of Rhodes has already fallen from earthquakes, but even partially submerged it's magnificent -- and the Hanging Gardens, though largely a pile of rubble, are a very impressive pile of rubble protected by the staggeringly beautiful Ishtar Gate. Gordianus invariably arrives in each city just as something special is going on: the Olympics, for instance, or a fertility festival.   The Seven Wonders is a cultural tour of the classical world punctuated by death, theft, and skirt-chasing. (Gordianus was a responsible family man in virtually every other Roma sub Rosa series, but here he's young, knows no fear, and is randy as a goat in springtime. He even manages to be seduced by a goddess while sleeping in the Great Pyramid.)   I daresay the novel is more enjoyable for the setting than the actual mysteries, since most of the time the reader is kept clueless until Gordianus reveals what he's been noticing and mulling over without letting the reader know. Had the work been longer, the mysteries might have been more enticing -- but 300 pages is brief considering the scope of his travels.

The Seven Wonders is enjoyable enough, though nothing on the order of Roma or Empire.

A History of the World in Six Glasses

A History of the World in Six Glasses
© 2006 Tom Standage
311 pages

A toast to human enterprise! Pick your poison -- beer, wine, rum, tea, coffee, or Coca-Cola. Three are alcoholic, three are caffienated: all were the stuff of empires, and the story of those empires is one Tom Standage is intent on telling. He begins with beer and wine in Mesopotamia and Egypt and moves to wine in Greece and Rome. The focus then shifts to Europe and the rum-fueled Age of Discovery that saw European nations expand across the world and remake it in their image. While distilled spirits ran the high seas, the intellectual minds of Europe stayed keen with coffee from Arabia. British and American imperialism are charted through Asian tea and Coca-Cola, respectively.

The result is light popular history that succeeds based on the author's lively tone and the perspective, which takes the lofty subject of World History and brings it down to the tavern table, supplying readers with both interesting tales about their beverage of choice as well as a greater appreciation for the role those drinks played in world history; some of the connections Standage reveals surprised even me. The importance of each drink varies; some are material, like the beer which was tied to agriculture, the basis of society, and the tea which drove British foreign policy and led to the opium wars. In the case of wine and coffee, the relevance is more ethereal: Standage champions wine-wet symposiums as an instrument of Greek excellence.  The section on Coca-Cola is an odd duck, the only one to mention a brand name. Perhaps this is because Coca-Cola succeeded like no other brand,  but it still sits oddly, and its chapters almost read like history with product placement. Standage is delightful to read, but his narrative isn't quite as thorough as I might have liked.There's no mention given to Coca-Cola's connection to the spread of fast food restaurants, for instance, though I had no idea how instrumental the Second World War was to its success.

Light, but fun; I'll probably be trying Standage's similar work, An Edible History of Humanity.


Related:
The Coffee Trader, David Liss
Salt: A World History, Mark Kurlansky
Fast Food Nation, Eric Schlosser
And a Bottle of Rum: A History of the New World in Ten Cocktails, Wayne Curtis

Marcus Aurelius

Marcus Aurelius: A Life
© 2009 Frank McLynn
684 pages

Few figures in history can compare to Marcus Aurelius, and fewer still favorably.  Adopted into the royal family, this last of the Five Good Emperors has sat in silent judgment of politicians for over fifteen hundred years, his life a standing reproach to their selfishness and indulgence. In the opinion of biographer Frank McLynn, he remains the greatest of Rome's leaders despite the limitations of his reign. In Marcus Aurelius: A life, McLynn examines the life of this dour philosopher-king as it played out in the late second century -- a time of great wars, famine, and pestilence that demanded a leader of a great character. Such was Aurelius.

This biography is outstanding for its thoroughness, examining the full context of Aurelius' life.  The story of the Roman emperor is the story of Rome, and this biography could serve just as well to educate someone on the late 2nd-century Empire as it would on the emperor himself. McLynn offers lengthy treatments of Rome's economic status and deterioration, its history of relations with the German tribes and reviving Parthian empire, and of course an exploration of Stoicism, where McLynn compares Aurelius' influences and contributions as a philosopher. After the death of the emperor, the focus shifts to his enduring legacy -- to the black mark on his record left by allowing his wretched son Commodus to succeed to the throne, to the literary influences of the Meditations throughout the centuries.

McLynn is both sympathetic and critical of his subject. While not a fan of Stoicism -- he criticizes its emphasis on detachment even from family members as inhuman -- McLynn  clearly admires the standards the emperor set for himself as a leader and a man. He has a somber respect for Aurelius, who seems like something of a tragic, but great figure: an Atlas who takes the burden of the world on his shoulders, even though he'd rather be reading, but never complains about it. Aurelius is the model of composure and self-discipline, always counseling himself to take the failures of others in stride, but pushing himself to grow beyond his own.

If you are interested in Aurelius, I heartily recommend this book -- especially notable for its context -- but  a five-part lecture on him that is available on YouTube.  I have them arranged in a playlist you should be able to access here. If not, the first video is here.