Ancient Greek History Gift Guide (Part 2): Introducing the Ancient Greeks

By Owain Williams

Seeing as though we are nearing the Christmas period, a time when many of our readers will likely be giving gifts to their families and friends, I thought I would offer a kind of guide to some books about ancient Greek history that are available.

Buying books can be very difficult. You must account for the recipient’s personal taste and, in this case, their level of familiarity with the subject matter. In order to properly offer readers a gift guide, these reviews examine these books not just through a historical lens but also through a consumer’s lens, looking at the price and quality of the book, so you can tailor your choice to fit whoever it is you’re getting a gift for, whether that is for someone on their way to study it at university or an enthusiast. In this installment of the Ancient Greek History Gift Guide, we will be taking a look at Introducing the Ancient Greeks by Edith Hall (alternatively published as The Ancient Greeks: Ten Ways They Shaped the Modern World).

To be frank, I was disappointed by this book. Much like Hornblower’s The Greek World, I felt that this book was also hampered by being overly ambitious. According to the publisher, Introducing the Ancient Greeks offers “a bold synthesis of the full 2,000 years of Hellenic history”, but you cannot exactly cover 2000 years of history in much depth in 336 pages. 

The core premise of Introducing the Ancient Greeks is the notion that the ancient Greeks were “the right people, in the right place, at the right time, to take up the baton of intellectual progress” (p. xvi). To demonstrate this, Hall has identified ten characteristics of the ancient Greeks – those being seagoing, suspicious of authority, individualistic, inquiring, culturally open, humorous, competitive, a passion for excellence, articulacy, and joyful – and charts the history of the ancient Greeks with these characteristics in mind, starting with the Mycenaeans and ending with the rise of Christianity (ca. 1600 BC – AD 400). Hall notes that these qualities were not all present at all times, and each chapter focuses on the qualities Hall deems “particularly conspicuous” (p. 2) for the period of history being discussed, with the first chapter focusing on the Mycenaeans’ seafaring abilities. 

How Hall presents these different characteristics – and Greek history more generally – varies in quality. The latter chapters, focusing on the intellectual and literary developments of the Hellenistic and Roman periods and the rise of Christianity, were, for me, the highlight of the book. The limited focus on intellectual and literary developments, rather than political developments, may have helped Hall keep a tighter focus. The rest of the book, while invariably well-written and engaging, with a conversational tone, felt shallow. It felt very much like this was an instance of style over substance. 

Moreover, much of the information Hall provides, especially in the early chapters, is misleading, if not completely outdated for modern ancient history. When discussing the Mycenaeans, for instance, Hall repeatedly mentions the Homeric epics. Now, there is certainly a connection between the Homeric epics and the Mycenaean world, but it is a delicate connection, one that requires an in-depth, nuanced discussion of all the evidence. Here, however, it felt as though any possible Homeric connection, regardless of how loose, was brought up at any opportunity. Once, when discussing the Linear B tablets from Mycenaean Pylos, Hall notes that a place called Pleuron, on the north shore of the Corinthian Gulf, “is named in the Iliad” (p. 37). While Hall does point out, occasionally, that the Homeric epics represent an “imagined Mycenaean past” (p. 30), the repeated emphasis on the Homeric epics, as well as statements connecting the Mycenaeans with Homeric figures – “The Homeric Nestor indubitably represents a type of historical Mycenaean monarch” (p. 32, original emphasis) – might give the reader the impression that Homeric and Mycenaean Greece are synonymous. Ultimately, this misrepresents the position of modern historians and archaeologists on the connection between the Homeric epics and Mycenaean Greece. Once, they were thought to be one and the same, but it is now largely acknowledged that, besides a number of terms and Mycenaean-derived lines, the Mycenaean world is, as Kurt Raaflaub wrote, “incompatible with anything found in Homer” (1997, p. 625).

Of course, the study of the Homeric epics and their relation to historical periods has generated a vast bibliography spread over various disciplines and subdisciplines. Properly conveying the nuances of this area of debate is perhaps beyond the means of a book such as Introducing the Ancient Greeks, given its broad focus. Yet there are other areas of the book where Hall adduces arguments and understanding that are long out of date. The most egregious example is Hall’s discussion of tyranny, which proposes that tyrants in Archaic Greece were populist demagogues put into power by a disaffected ‘middle class’ (pp. 84–85). There have been challenges to this position for decades. In 1995, when discussing early Greek tyranny, George Cawkwell wrote that “The People did not come into it” (p. 86; see also, Anderson, 2005). It is perfectly valid to not agree with this position, but if that is the case, an effort must still be made to demonstrate the existence of debate – something Hall does not do throughout the book. Going by the Further Reading – Introducing the Ancient Greeks has no full bibliography or notes, only a Further Reading section – Hall only consulted The Greek Tyrants by Anthony Andrewes, published in 1956, for the discussion on Archaic Greek tyranny!

There are also plenty of aspects of ancient Greek culture, elements that were present from the Mycenaean period through to the Late Roman period, that do not appear in the book. Based on its mentions in the book, Introducing the Ancient Greeks gives the impression that slavery was marginal to ancient Greek society, receiving only the odd off-hand comment, despite being central to the Classical Greek economy and present from the Mycenaean period. Similarly, there is no hint of the misogynistic attitudes Greek men held. As there is a lack of any serious accounting of the less savoury aspects of the ancient Greeks, the book feels close to advocating for the ‘Greek miracle’, which Hall explicitly dismisses at the beginning of the book, and goes so far as to – rightly, if only briefly – acknowledge the debt the ancient Greeks had to their eastern neighbours. In my opinion, one of the characteristics of the ancient Greeks Hall chose should have been ‘dominating’, which would have allowed for a more holistic understanding of the ancient Greeks. As it is, they come across as almost squeaky clean.

Ultimately, Introducing the Ancient Greeks is shallow. Admittedly, covering 2000 years of history in 336 pages was never going to produce an in-depth study that accounted for all areas of debate and nuance. That said, being shallow is not necessarily bad. After all, an introductory text, by necessity, must be somewhat shallow. Yet in this case, the lack of depth ultimately facilitated the presentation of misleading and outdated perspectives on the ancient Greek world. Unfortunately, I do not recommend this book.

References:

Anderson, G. “Before Turannoi Were Tyrants: Rethinking a Chapter of Early Greek History.” Classical Antiquity 24 (2005): 173–222.

Cawkwell, G.L. “Early Greek Tyranny and the People.” The Classical Quarterly 45 (1995): 73–86.

Raaflaub, K.A. “Homeric Society”, in I. Morris, and B. Powell (eds.) A New Companion to Homer, edited by I. Morris and B. Powell, 624–648. Brill: Leiden, 1997.