History

For an eighth-century Greek, the past was a measureless ocean with no port of call beyond a few generations – no chronological anchorage except for the Trojan War and its aftermath. The vanishing point on the horizon was a city in flames against which could be seen the silhouettes of heroes, both winners and losers, on their way to found new cities. This vision of destruction and new beginnings is at the heart of European identity. Those heroes got everywhere – even to Britain, according to Geoffrey of Monmouth. Whatever caused the collapse of the Bronze Age Mycenaean civilisation, the Trojan story encapsulated the collective experience of disaster and the sense of living subsequently in an impoverished world. While the Assyrians and Egyptians had written records, the Greeks of the earliest city-states had only ruined palaces, burial shafts, bones and old songs. Formulaic elements in the Iliad “carry the imprints of earlier societies as in the inner rings of a tree trunk”. The Greeks claimed the heroes of the Bronze Age as their direct ancestors but, as the authors of this excellent first volume of the “Penguin History of Europe” point out, the development of Greek society between the seventh and fourth centuries BC was driven “not by what we know about their early history but by what they thought they knew”.

As well as exploring “communal identities” and shifting “spatial and conceptual ideas of Europe and Asia”, Simon Price and Peter  Thonemann take memory as their ­underpinning theme. We encounter here a series of “rolling pasts”. The Bronze Age had its own heroes, commemorated in frescoes still visible today. They show scenes from what was already to them a remote prehistoric past: warriors in antique horned helmets defeating skin-clad savages and giant animals. Their supposed descendants actually derived far more, culturally, from the oriental influences of the mid eighth century but it was necessary for any self-respecting city state to establish its connection with the mythic past.

For Herodotus, the difference between Minos the mythical king of Crete and Polykrates tyrant of Samos BC was a hazy one. Even we might be a little in doubt as to whether or not King Midas was just a fairy tale. In fact his existence is confirmed by Assyrian texts in the improbable guise of “King Mita of Mushki”. The sense of history and myth being on the same continuum – myth generating history and history generating myth – is pervasive. The arrival upon the scene of historians and fact-checkers did nothing, clearly, to curb a creative approach to the past. In a fascinating case of “ethnogenesis”, the Helots, newly liberated by the Theban Epaminondas in 371 BC, tapped into local folklore and reinvented themselves as the ancient Messenians, descendants of a Heraclid hero – another offshoot of the Trojan War. As large swathes of Asia and North Africa fell under the domination first of Alexander the Great, and then the Roman emperors, the more enterprising city states dug deep into their ancestry and pulled out Greek heroes. Did their imperial benefactors really believe these far-fetched stories or did they just give out prizes for chutzpah? But then, a glimpse of ivy in the Khyber Pass was sufficient to convince Alexander that his ancestor Dionysus had been there before him, and Augustus was descended from Venus (via Aeneas) and Mars (via Romulus and Remus), so perhaps all were united in a po-faced suspension of disbelief.

A brisker attitude had been shown by Sulla when he arrived at the gates of Athens in 90 BC to quash the Mithridatic rebellion. To the fawning deputation who came to remind him of Athens’ glorious classical past he replied that he had come “to teach them a lesson not to be taught ancient history”. Nonetheless, the past of the eastern Roman empire was preserved and enshrined. Galen deplored the “pestilential pseudo-erudition” of grammarians who couldn’t even say “cabbage” without resurrecting some fancy archaism. Sparta, an olive-growing backwater by the late second century AD, had a full-time tourist guide or “expounder of the Lycurgan customs”. By contrast, cultural memory in the western half of the Empire was obliterated. The Celts didn’t cave in without a struggle, but possibly the pleasing novelty of Roman bread and wine after an eternity of gruel and mead facilitated amnesia.

This book soars unhurriedly and lucidly, over vast tracts of time and space, alighting gracefully upon telling details, and marshalling impressively up-to-date archaeological finds. The plentiful maps appear just where you need them. There is a time chart, a huge index, lists of suggested further reading for each chapter and some well-placed inset boxes offering digressions on the uses and abuses of classical civilisation up to the present time – for example, Freud’s preoccupation with Roman archaeology as a metaphor for layers of memory in the human mind, or the afterlife of Leonidas’ famous Thermopylae epitaph in Goering’s speech to the Sixth Army in Stalingrad. Particularly enjoyable is the focus on words that crystallised elements of dis­appearing national identities. The Galatian Celts who, after decades of marauding, settled in the parched steppes of Asia Minor, still used the word drunemetos for assemblies, though it literally means a sacred grove of oak trees. The Italian rebels in the Social Wars of 90 BC stamped the word vitelliu (land of calves) on their coins, along with an Italic bull goring the predatory Roman wolf. The ancient Celtic word “moritix”, meaning seafarer, is found intriguingly marooned in an otherwise impeccable Latin dedication by a Gallic shipping agent of the late second century AD – wistful nostalgia perhaps?

The Romans razed Carthage to the ground in 146 BC. In 410 AD Rome itself was sacked by Alaric. In the same year Augustine, Bishop of Hippo in North Africa, preached to a congregation many of whom still spoke Punic. Also in the congregation were refugees from Rome who, under pressure from the long barbarian siege, had – in spite of their nominal Christianity – not been above consulting Etruscan soothsayers. These flaky “believers” prompted Augustine to write his masterpiece. The mental map of the past was now much changed. Abraham, not Troy, now stood at the base of all chronologies. The stories emanated from Jerusalem. Cities hoping for special treatment need only vaunt their allegiance to “the most holy religion”. Troy, Athens, Carthage, Rome – these were interchangeable, human, “unreal” cities, destined for fire and slaughter. The only city that could endure was “The City of God”.