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The Golden Mean by Annabel Lyon is narrated by Aristotle and tells the story of his time spent teaching Alexander soon to be “The Great.” In the process we also get some flashbacks of Aristotle’s boyhood and how he came to be the great philosopher.

As with all historical fiction one must remember this is, well, fiction, and not history or biography. Curious about Aristotle’s real life, I checked out his entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (a fantastic and reliable resource by the way). In the novel liberties are taken with Aristotle’s timeline and just how close his relationship with Alexander was. According to the encyclopedia, Aristotle was 38 when he became the teacher of 13-year-old Alexander (my math on Aristotle’s age) and taught him for only two or three years, though some scholars dispute this and say it was as long as eight years. But we do know that by the time Alexander was 15 he was already going out on campaigns with his father, Philip II. The book takes what seems to be the eight-year number approach.

In the book Aristotle sees himself as providing a balance to the martial education Philip is providing Alexander and insists that to be a good ruler, Alexander must find the “golden mean,” the balance between extremes. Aristotle is presented as a pacifist of a sort, but some sources I read in addition to the Stanford article, indicate that Aristotle encouraged Alexander to conquer Asia. Whatever the case, little concrete information is known about what Aristotle actually taught Alexander and what kind of relationship they had.

A very curious change was made to one real historical figure in the book, Alexander’s half brother, Arrhidaeus. In the book he is made to be severely mentally disabled and Alexander hates him. In the book Aristotle takes Arrhidaeus under his tutelage, treats him like a person, teaches him letters and music, how to ride a horse, essentially lifts him up from being an animal into being the mental equivalent of a young boy with the body of an adult. However, in reality, Arrhidaeus had only a mild mental disability and Alexander lover him dearly. On Alexander’s death, Arrhidaeus became Philip III of Macedon. Granted, he was more a figurehead than anything and neither his life nor his reign lasted long, but why the big change about this in the book? It really doesn’t serve any purpose to have written Arrhidaeus and Alexander’s relationship to him so very differently.

Ok, so like I said, The Golden Mean is a novel, fiction, it doesn’t have to adhere to reality. But even forgetting all of the historical transgressions, I didn’t much like the book. When I was still in the first third of the book a coworker asked me what I was reading lately and I mentioned The Golden Mean and what it was about. She commented that it sounded interesting. I replied that I had thought so too but that it was actually a boring book. If it weren’t for the fact that I read it for the Slaves discussion, I would not have finished it. It got marginally better by the end but I still didn’t enjoy it. Nothing happens in the book, which isn’t a bad thing, but if nothing is going to happen in a book it needs to have interesting characters. The characters should be interesting, I mean Aristotle and Alexander, but they are not. Nor is their relationship. Nor are there any secondary characters or relationships that are interesting.

Nonetheless, when I finished the book and read all the glowing blurbs on the back cover I feared I had missed something. I mean, it was a bestseller in Canada, published in six languages, was nominated for the Giller prize and won a few other prizes. Maybe the book was better than I thought? But after I did a little research on Aristotle and Alexander I began

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Plato's Republic is the central work of the Western world's most famous philosopher. Essentially an inquiry into morality, Republic also contains crucial arguments and insights into many other areas of philosophy. In these videos Robin Waterfield, editor of the Oxford World's Classics edition of Republic, explains why we should read it, and what makes Plato so interesting.

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A co-worker mentioned that this audiobook has "a slightly campy feel."  That sums this one up perfectly.  Not that campy is a bad thing. (How else can you portray Aeolus, God of Wind, who is insane, living in palace offering a one-man, 24/7 Olympian version of the Weather Channel?!)

The point is, readers and listeners will likely have different experiences with The Lost Hero.  Text offers much more room for interpretation than does audio.  The sheer number of characters - gods, goddesses, demi-gods, oracles, satyrs, wind spirits, centaurs, cyclopes, kings, wolves and more (!) make it an extremely difficult book for one reader, especially with a length of sixteen and a half hours.  That being said, however, Joshua Swanson does an admirable job, though the voice of Leo Valdez (a new arrival to Camp Half-Blood and a main character) did remind me a bit of Cheech Marin.

I'll skip a summary of the book, but here's a quick run-down:  Percy Jackson is missing, Annabeth is searching for him, three new demi-god campers (Jason, Piper and Leo) arrive at Camp Half Blood under peculiar circumstances and are sent immediately on a vague and dangerous quest, there is definitely more to come in future books. Chapters alternate between the perspectives of the three demi-gods.

I was sufficiently intrigued.  I'll probably see this one through 'til the end.

Listen to an excerpt here.
Another review @ Dog Ear

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Euripides’ play Alcestis is – er – interesting. It is the earliest of Euripides’ surviving plays. Performed at the Dionysian festival in Athens in 438 BCE, it took the place of a satyr drama as last in a group of plays by Euripides. While we no longer have the three tragedies it followed, we know their titles at least, Cretan Women, Alcmaeon in Psophis, and Telephus.

Alcestis is a play that isn’t performed much these days because it isn’t exactly woman-friendly. Women in Athens were supposed to stay indoors, not be discussed in public, be thrifty, never have sex with anyone but her husband, and produce many healthy children, preferably boys. Alcestis, the title character of the play, is everything the perfect wife should be, including beautiful.

When the play opens Alcestis is on the verge of death. Her husband, Admetus, was supposed to die earlier that year but managed, with the help of Apollo, to make a deal with death. If Admetus could find someone willing to die in his place, then he would be spared. Admetus asked his aging parents and they had the temerity to refuse. He asked other family members and friends. No one would die for him. So his wife, Alcestis, stepped up and offered to die in his place. Now her time has come and she dies the noble death deserving of the perfect woman, lauded for her sacrifice by all who knew her.

Admetus, the selfish bastard, is sick with grief. He begs his wife not to die. Oh, how I wanted to punch him in the nose! Dude! She’s dying because of you! Maybe you should have thought things through a little better!

While Alcestis is being prepared for burial, Heracles shows up on his way to Thrace to perform one of his labors, fetching the four-horse chariot of Diomedes. He shows up at Admetus’ place looking for a meal and a comfortable bed. Greek customs of hospitality come in conflict with the requirement that Admetus mourn his wife. Admetus is in a pickle. He can’t turn Heracles away but he shouldn’t be welcoming him into his house either.

Heracles is astute enough to notice that someone has recently died but when he asks Admetus who it was, he tells Heracles it was no one of importance. He then has Heracles whisked away to so he doesn’t see Alcestis being carried out of the house to the family tomb.

In comes Pheres, Admetus’ father, offering condolences and finery to bury Alcestis in. But Admetus will have nothing to do with his father, even goes so far as to disown him, all because he blames him for his wife’s death. If only his father who, while he is getting old is certainly not about to kick the bucket, if only he had given up his life for his son, then Alcetis would still be alive. While everyone had been praising Alcestis’ sacrifice and mourning with Admetus, not one person pointed a finger at him and said things wouldn’t be this way if it weren’t for him. But Pheres refuses to be Admetus’ scapegoat:

I gave you life and brought you up to be master of my house, but I am not obliged to die for you. My ancestors have not handed down to me the rule that fathers should die for their sons, and this is not a Greek tradition either. [...] You enjoy being alive – do you think your father doesn’t? By my calculations, we spend a good long time down below, while life is short but sweet. At any rate, you fought shamelessly against death, and you’re living now beyond your appointed time because you condemned her to death. And you accuse me of cowardice – you, the ultimate coward, who proved worse than the woman who died for you, her fine husband?

While personally I was cheering Pheres on during his long rant at Admetus, the Greeks wouldn’t have been. No, there is no tradition or

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Never fear! Here's a handy link to both his interview (with a transcript!) and an excerpt of the professor's wonderful book MARATHON: HOW ONE BATTLE CHANGED WESTERN CIVILIZATION.

Our favorite part of the interview with Guy Raz actually occurs right at the beginning, and is a great summary of why the Battle of Marathon is so crucially important to our civilization, besides giving us 26.2 mile runs.

RAZ: Aeschylus was a veteran of the legendary battle at Marathon. It happened exactly 2,500 years ago, and it pitted a heavily outnumbered band of mainly Athenians against the far mightier Persian army. It also lent its name to the famous race, which we'll hear about in a moment.

Historian Richard Billows writes about the battle in a new book called "Marathon." And he says that that one day in 490 BC actually changed the course of Western civilization.

Mr. BILLOWS: What we can tell from the way the Persians treated other cities -Greek cities that they attacked in this same period is that if the Athenians had lost the battle, the city of Athens would have been destroyed. The Athenian citizen population rounded up, put on ships and transported to Persia to be interviewed by the Persian king, Darius, at that time and then probably resettled somewhere near the Persian Gulf where they would've been lost to history.

And as a result, all those great Athenians of the fifth and fourth centuries -the likes of Thucydides and Socrates and Plato, one could go on - simply would never either have been born or their works would never have been written and would not have been able therefore to shape subsequent classical Greek civilization and Western culture as we know it.

RAZ: I mean, you say that had the Persians defeated the Athenians at Marathon, democracy would never have flourished.

Mr. BILLOWS: The first democracy that we know of in world history was created by the Athenians just 15 years before the battle of Marathon. It was established as a result of a kind of coup d'etat against a tyrant who had been ruling Athens. And that democracy was a very young and new experiment when the Athenians faced the Persians.

We also love how Mr. Raz chose to end the interview.

RAZ: I'm curious. You emphasize the importance of democracy in the Athenian victory. Why?

Mr. BILLOWS: The way that the Greeks fought was very egalitarian. Every individual soldier fought at his own expense. He paid for his own equipment and for his own upkeep. And essentially voluntarily, they were participating members of the social and political community. They felt that this community, because the democratic system, was theirs, they governed themselves very directly.

We tend to make a distinction between the government and the people. There was no such distinction in Athenian democrac

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We left our story yesterday with Odysseus and Neoptolemos arriving on the island of Lemnos to try and convince Philoctetes to sail back to Troy with them. Odysseus is quite aware that Philoctetes probably hates him for abandoning the guy and his smelly foot on Lemnos ten years prior so comes up with a plan that Neoptolemos will do all the talking while Odysseus waits back at the ship. But of course Odysseus can’t let Neoptolemos tell the truth to Philoctetes, goodness no! Instead Neoptplemos is supposed to tell a story of woe about how he hates Odysseus because he was awarded Achilles’ armor and how he wants Philoctetes help to take revenge.

Neoptolemos rightly flinches at this tale and tells Odysseus,

I wasn’t born to act by deception,
nor, so they say, was my father before me.
I’m willing to take the man by force,
not by trickery — he can hardly take us by force, on a single leg.

Odysseus is miffed that the young pup has the nerve to challenge him and tells him that now is the time for words not deeds. Neoptolemos tries to stand up for himself and asks, “Don’t you think it is shameful to tell lies?” Odysseus replies, “No — not if lying is a means to safety.” They go on a bit more and Odysseus manages to win the argument and get Neoptolemos to agree to lie.

Odysseus exits stage left and Neoptolemos and a small chorus of sailors start looking for Philoctetes. They find him emerging from the cave where he had been living. Philoctetes and Achilles had been friends so right off Philoctetes has special feeling for Achilles’ son. And Neoptolemos tries to be true to his father, a man of deeds, while obeying Odysseus. He lies, but more by omission than anything. Most of all, however, he listens to the grief of Philoctetes with respect and sympathy. He agrees to take Philoctetes home and Philoctetes gives Neoptolemos his bow to carry to the ship.

At this point Odysseus shows up dressed as a trader who just happened to pull into the island for a little stop over. What he really wants to do is check up on Neoptolemos and he does not like what he sees. He makes a few pointed remarks and then departs. Afterwards Neoptolemos’ conscience begins gnawing at him and he tells Philoctetes the truth. Odysseus shows up a bit miffed to say the least. Philoctetes is doubly upset having been betrayed by Achilles’ son and Odysseus. Of course he refuses to go to Troy, so Odysseus has him seized by some of the sailors. But Odysseus knows Philoctetes has to come of his free will and not by force for the prophecy to be fulfilled so generously lets Philoctetes go.

Much arguing ensues and Neoptolemos and Odysseus are going to leave Philoctetes on Lemnos when Heracles appears above the cave! Heracles, the deus ex machina, tells Philoctetes to go to Troy and that’s that.

A few interesting things about the play. There is much made of who everyone’s father is. Apparently the Greeks believed that character was passed on in a like father like son way. Therefore the debate between words (Odysseus) and deeds (Achilles) is carried on between Odysseus and Achilles’ son Neoptolemos. This debate on Lemnos over Philoctetes is a draw and requires the appearance of Heracles on a visit from Mount Olympos break the impasse. It is clear in the play that Sophocles doesn’t think much of Odysseus, but yet he is unable to write the play so Odysseus loses. It is not surprising really since Sophocles himself made a career of words (writing) and deeds (acting) so must have felt rather conflicted. The appearance of Heracles meant he didn’t have to decide in the end.

I really enjoyed this play. It felt different from the other Sophocles plays I read, less stylized and formal and more natural. The translation by Carl Phillips is well done. Phillips is not a classicist but a professor of

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Sophocles’ play Philoctetes was entered into the Dionysia competition of 409 BCE. It won first prize. Also entered in that competition was Euripides’ Medea which won third prize. I’ve seen Medea acted before but never read it and while I thought Philoctetes was quite good, I would have given first to Euripides. But of course, no one asked me.

I had thought I had never heard of Philoctetes before but since I read The Iliad I have and just didn’t remember because he had such a bit part. A little background is in order.

Very important for Sophocles’ play, Philoctetes has Heracles bow. He acquired the bow because he was the only one who was willing to light Heracles’ funeral pyre while Heracles was still alive and suffering horribly from that poisoned shirt. In return for the favor of lighting the pyre, Heracles gives Philoctetes his bow.

Then Philoctetes is off to fight in the Trojan War but he makes the mistake of walking on sacred ground on the island of Chryse and is bit in the foot by a snake. The wound does not kill him, only becomes infected, puss-filled and smelly, and, of course, terribly painful. And so, at the orders of Menelaus and Agamemnon, Odysseus dumps Philoctetes off on the uninhabited island of Lemnos (it wasn’t really uninhabited in real life but the magic of Sophocles makes it so).

Ten years have gone by and the Trojan War is winding down but the Greeks, it turns out, cannot win unless they have Neoptolemus, son of Achilles, and Philoctetes and his bow. Conveniently, Neoptolemus, who has never seen Achilles having been conceived and born not long before the Trojan War, heard of his father’s death and shows up at Troy to claim his father’s armor. Of course it has already been awarded to Odysseus instead of Ajax and Odysseus will not give it to Achilles’ son. Odysseus, having heard the prophecy, manages to sweet talk the young Neoptolemus into not being angry about his father’s armor, convinces him he is necessary to win the war (which he is) and then persuades him to go collect Philoctetes who must be made to come by persuasion not by force (prophecy’s orders).

Whew. And now the play opens with Odysseus and Neoptolemus arriving on Lemnos. Neoptolemus is all young and innocent and Philoctetes has had ten long, lonely years of festering hatred for Odysseus, Agamemnon and Menelaus to go along with his festering foot. How well do you think things are going to go? Tune in tomorrow to find out.

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No, not the soap or the programming language, any number of football clubs, nor several different automobiles, but Ajax the Greek hero and subject of a play by Sophocles. Ajax, you may or may not recall, is one of the heroes in Homer’s Iliad. There are two Ajaxes in that story. The one we care about it Telamonian Ajax or Biggie A as his friends called him because well, he was a big guy. Tallest and strongest of all the Greeks, he kicked Trojan butt. He is remarkable for his ginormous shield made of seven cow hides and a layer of bronze. He was also never wounded in any of the battles in the Iliad nor does he receive personal help from any of the gods involved in the battles.

After Achilles is killed by Paris it is Ajax and Odysseus who fight back the Trojans to retrieve Achilles’ body. Both Ajax and Odysseus claim rights to Achilles’ armor. So they have a competition between the two that lasts for days in which neither one can best the other. Finally, Agammenon and Menelaus decide that they each need to present oral arguments and whoever is the most persuasive will win. Now while Biggie A makes a right fine wall, he’s not as sharp in the wits department as Odysseus.

Sophocles’ play opens the night of this competition. Ajax has lost and is more than a little miffed. He has decided that he is going to kill Agamemnon, Menelaus, Odysseus and whoever gets in his way. But Odysseus and Athena are BFF and the goddess sends a little insanity Ajax’s way. Instead of slaughtering the Greeks he hacks into the livestock that the Greeks had taken from the Trojans and hadn’t divided out as rewards yet. But Ajax thinks he is decimating the Greeks and hauls a huge ram back to his tent thinking it it Odysseus and proceeds to torture it. Athena tries to get Odysseus to laugh at Ajax and his misfortune but Odysseus, showing somewhat uncharacteristic restraint, refuses to even chuckle which causes Athena to call him a party pooper but which also gets her to release the poor Ajax from his madness.

When Ajax comes to his senses he is horrified at what he has done. Great hero that he is, his honor is gone and the Greeks are already making fun of him. Nonetheless, his wife, Tecmessa, a Trojan prize and with whom he has a son, begs him to think of her and not do anything rash. He needs to hang around or she’ll end up a slave in the household of one of the other Greeks. She is a silly woman because she cares more for her own wellbeing than the honor of her husband. The chorus of Ajax’s men also worry about what will happen to them if Ajax kills himself like he is threatening to do. Nobody sympathizes with poor Ajax.

Biggie A finally says, dudes! Enough! I am going to go out into the woods with this really sharp sword I got from the hand of Hector himself and perform a purification ritual to the gods. The most astonishing thing is that everyone believes him. Off he goes, alone.

We’ll fast forward through all the Oh my gosh how could we have believed hims to everybody showing up in the woods to find the mighty Ajax impaled upon his sword. Then we have a little Antigone moment when Agamemnon says no one will bury the body and Teucer, Biggie A’s half bro, tells Agamemnon to bug off. Then Odysseus shows up and plays the mediator and offers to help Teucer bury Ajax because Odysseus at this point is feeling rather guilty about things. Teucer nicely says thanks but no thanks. And after a few more lines the curtain falls.

The most interesting thing about the whole story is that the point of it seems to be a reminder that humans can’t do anything without the help of the gods and if they do manage to be successful without the gods they shouldn’t boast about it or they will be sorry. Ajax made the mistake of boasting. According to a messenger:

But as soon as he left home, ajax proved
Himse

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I’ve read bits of Sappho before and was never impressed enough to pursue reading more. I thought someday I would but someday was in the vague and indeterminate future. Maybe it was the translation. Or the right book at the right time. Or that I didn’t think about it much, just picked it up on a whim and read it. Whatever the reason, I was awed by If Not, Winter translated by Anne Carson.

Carson seemed to just step out of the way and let Sappho and the poem fragments speak for themselves. She doesn’t try to dress them up as anything other than what they are whether it is one word or a dozen on the page. I found the ones I liked most often were among the shorter fragments. I mean, is this not gorgeous?

I would not think to touch the sky with two arms
(52)

I never imagined that the fragments could be so evocative. This one seems so sad to me:

I used to weave crowns
(125)

I suppose that could be part of something joyous, perhaps the crown weaver no longer weaves because she wears the crowns now. I think that is part of why Sappho is so beloved by so many. Because her poems are fragments and we have no complete context for many of them, the reader is required to fill in the gaps, to bring to the poem a piece of herself. A complete poem will tell you how to feel about it, it intentionally creates and provokes a mood or emotion. But when we are faced with this:

I long and seek after
(36)

What are we to make of it? What is being longed for and sought? It doesn’t matter, the longing and desire that oozes from the words is enough. Not having anything more makes the poem more intimate, as if Sappho knew exactly what I long for.

Reading this book filled me with pleasure and happiness. There is a certain feeling I get when I read a beautiful poem or line of prose, it is a feeling both contained and expansive. I am myself but more than myself. The air is heavy and solid but breathing is easy and I am light and floating. Does anyone else get a feeling like that? I felt it every time I sat down to read Sappho. I will definitely be reading these poems again. It is a good book to have around and just dip into now and then.

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Those ancient Greeks, they really like blood. Elektra by Sophocles (translated by Anne Carson) was a sort of different take on Orestes’ return from exile to avenge the death of his father Agamemnon. As you probably recall, Agamemnon’s wife, Clytemnestra, with the help of Aegisthus, Agamemnon’s cousin and Clytemnestra’s lover, murdered Agamemnon on his return from Troy in revenge for his murdering/sacrificing her daughter Iphigenia to get the gods to send the winds so the Greeks could sail to Troy. One good murder deserves another, eh?

A good number of years have passed and Elektra is the thorn in her mother’s side. She won’t stop moaning and grieving for her father. She makes a scene whenever she leaves the house. She keeps threatening that one day Orestes will come back and avenge their father’s death. Elektra being a woman apparently doesn’t have the right or the courage to kill her mother herself so she has set all her hopes on her brother.

Orestes was sent into exile when he was a small child. Elektra herself rescued him and sent him away before their mother and Aegisthus could get their hands on him. Now she is out in front of the house, complaining about her fate. Her sister Chrysothemis tells her that she should just give it up. But Elektra has nothing if not integrity and she refuses to bow to what she considers evil.

Unusual for a Greek play, Elektra is on stage almost its entire length. At one point she and Clytemnestra are arguing. Clytemnestra is trying to get Elektra to see the situation from her point of view but Elektra will have none of it:

Once you had decent children from a decent father,
now you’ve thrown them out.
Am I supposed to praise that?
Or will you say
you do all this to avenge your child?
The thought is obscene -
to bed your enemies
and use a daughter as an alibi!
Oh why go on? I can’t argue with you.
You have your one same answer ready:
“That’s no way to talk to your mother!”

Talk about mother issues!

Through a couple of twists and turns, Orestes eventually shows up and Elektra goes all older sister telling him what he has to do and why. Orestes really has no choice anyway since his honor requires that he avenge the blood of his father. He also has an Oracle of Apollo on his side even though he’s about to spend several years being chased and tormented by the Furies. Elektra doesn’t care about this of course, she just wants him to kill the bitch.

Orestes goes inside the palace and Elektra stays outside, waiting. We here Clytemnestra cry out from within. And outside the door bloodthirsty Elektra shouts:

Hit her a second time, if you have the strength!

The play ends with Aegisthus showing up and being led off to be murdered on the hearth where he helped kill Agamemnon. The final dialog exchange belongs to Aegisthus and Orestes. It is strange that after all that Elektra does not get the last word. But her wishes fulfilled, I suppose she no longer needs to speak.

I can’t say if I liked this play or not. Elektra’s bloodlust and her inability/ unwillingness to do anything was distressing and disturbing. There is a very powerful scene in which she thinks Orestes is dead and the urn a stranger is holding contains his ashes. Her grief is like that of a mother losing a child but in some ways it is also like the grief for a lost lover. It is also the sign of her powerlessness to act. I think I liked Aeschylus’s version better. Euripides also has a telling of the story and I will be getting to that one eventually.

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Oedipus makes this argument in varying words no less than three times during the play. He is not to blame, his fate was decided before he was even born. The ones who are to blame are the ones, Creon to be exact, who forced him into exile and suffering. The argument works, the chorus feels bad for him and they let him stay as long as he performs a cleansing ritual for the violation of the grove. Oedipus must have used up all hi strength arguing because he has his other daughter, Ismene, who has tracked him down because she was worried about him, perform the ritual on his behalf.

In the meantime, Theseus, king of Athens shows up and Oedipus offers to die there in order to benefit the Athenians who have been kind enough to take him in. Theseus says, great thanks! and exits stage left.

Then Creon shows up. Creon knows of the prophecy regarding the grave of Oedipus and wants to get him back to Thebes so they can have the benefit his grave will confer. Creon speaks honeyed words but when Oedipus refuses to comply, Creon declares they had captured Ismene while she was performing the cleansing ritual and now Creon’s men grab Antigone from Oedipus and set off with her, figuring Oedipus will give in for the sake of his daughters. But then Thesus, hearing of the ruckus, reappears, and chases down Creon and his men, retrieving Antigone and Ismene, and giving the Thebans a boot in the backside.

But wait! That’s no all! Now Polynices, Oedipus’s eldest son appears to ask that Oedipus bless him and return to Thebes with him. Polynices has been exiled by his younger brother Eteocles, and in his anger, Polynices has planned and schemed and raised an army from Argos to march on Thebes. But Oedipus is angry at both his sons who did nothing to keep him from being sent into exile or to help him afterwards. Instead of a blessing, Polynices and Eteocles get a curse- -brother to kill brother and neither to rule Thebes- -thus setting up the story of Seven Against Thebes (as earlier told in a play by Aeschylus, but of course all these stories are much older than the plays). As Polynices leaves, he begs his sisters that if he is to die, that they please see he g

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Paul Cartledge is A.G. Leventis Professor of Greek Culture at the University of Cambridge. His new book, Ancient Greece: A History in Eleven Cities, provides a highly original introduction to ancient Greece that takes the city as its starting point. He uses the history of eleven cities – out of over a thousand – to illuminate the most important and informative aspects of Greek history. In the original post below, Professor Cartledge talks about the recent publicity surrounding his claim that the ancient Greeks introduced the grape-vine and viticulture to what is today’s South of France.

Recently I have been interviewed on BBC Radio 4’s flagship ‘Today’ programme, on the BBC World Service, on BBC Radio Cambridgeshire (my local station), and by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. The cause of all this interest? The claim that it was the ancient Greeks who introduced the grape-vine and viticulture to what is today’s South of France in around 600 BC (E). That was when Greeks from ancient Phocaea, a city that sits today on Turkey’s Aegean shore, founded the city of Massalia – which has ultimately evolved into contemporary Marseille(s).

This is just one illustration of two major points. First, that ‘ancient Greece’ was not any one country or nation-state but a cultural conglomerate – ‘Hellas’ in ancient Greek – stretching from Spain in the West to Georgia in the East and unified not by politics but by commerce and custom, especially religious custom. Second, that this enlarged Ancient Greece had – and still has – such an impact on our modern western world partly precisely because it was so enlarged.

Altogether ancient ‘Hellas’ – a cultural concept like medieval ‘Christendom’ or ‘the Arab world’ today – comprised around 1000 different Hellenic communities at any one time between say 600 BC(E) and AD (or CE) 300. Besides Massalia, there are Cnossos (where the earliest examples of Greek writing are attested, datable about 1400 BCE), Mycenae (’rich in gold’, as Homer calls it), Argos, Miletus, Sparta, Athens, Syracuse, Thebes, Alexandria, and Byzantion (which in CE 324 became Constantinople, and later, much later, after both the Ottoman conquest and the founding of the modern Turkish Republic, Istanbul).

The ultimate origins of Cotes du Rhone is not perhaps the most earth-shattering issue for most of us today, though for the ancient Greeks it was not just what wine you drank, a matter of taste, but how you drank it (with what admixture of water) that counted – a matter of civilisation that divided Greeks from all non-Greeks. But the role of ancient Alexandria (the one in Egypt) as allegedly the ‘birthplace of the modern world’, as one recent book on the city founded by Alexander the Great in 331 would have it, is no trivial issue at all. For if you consider its outbreaks of (pagan) antisemitism (or judeophobia) and of Christian fundamentalist fanaticism (that resulted in the murder of Hypatia in AD 415, say), you would have reluctantly to answer ‘yes’. On the other hand, much more cheeringly, you would give the same answer if you were looking for the birthplace of scholarship (in the Museum and Library) and were considering numerous astonishing pioneering achievements in science, literary criticism and technology (the polymath Eratosthenes, the maths genius Archimedes, and the geographer Claudius Ptolemy all worked here, and it was here too that the steepling multistorey Pharos lighthouse was constructed in the 3rd century BCE, a genuine Wonder of the Ancient World).

Massalia, though, did not only merit inclusion because it was through there that the grapevine was first introduced to the south of France. It was also the birthplace of the man who ‘discovered’ Britain (and a great deal besides) in about 300 BCE, one Pytheas. And similarly horizon-expanding feats with major contemporary resonance and relevance can be identified in every one of the eleven ancient cities selected to represent ‘Ancient Greece’. It is a privilege as well as a pleasure for me as Cambridge’s endowed A.G. Leventis Professor of Greek Culture to investigate and celebrate critically our ancient cultural ancestors in this and other ways. There is no peace for wicked Cambridge Classics dons.

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Paul Cartledge is A.G. Leventis Professor of Greek Culture at the University of Cambridge, and has written and edited many books on the Ancient Greek world. He also served as chief historical consultant for the BBC television series The Greeks. His new book, Ancient Greece: A History in Eleven Cities, takes the city as its starting point, revealing just how central the polis (’city-state’ or ‘citizen-state’) was to Hellenic cultural achievements. He tells us more about the book in the video below, made by the nice people at Meet the Author.

Click here to view the embedded video.

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