THERE'S WIDESCREEN GLORY IN the ancient world, the stuff of toga movies, Steve Reeves flexing mythically, the stories we think we know: like the ruin of Pompeii, the Roman city stopped in time when Vesuvius blew; and the travels of Homer's heroes back from fighting in Troy by way of sirens, spells and one-eyed monsters.
POMPEII
BY MARY BEARD
Profile, 315pp, £25
TRAVELLING HEROES
BY ROBIN LANE FOX
Allen Lane, 514pp, £25We have thrillers on the subject, as well as movies, grand romantic visions from Bulwer-Lytton's bachelor p
ads in Pompeii to Robert Harris's water politics and endless reworkings of Odysseus's travels, from James Joyce to the daftest Italian epic from the 1950s.
Actually, we have way too much. For these are special subjects in a quite different sense: they open wide windows on an unfamiliar world. The bodies, graffiti, gardens and pots of Pompeii are clues to the kind of everyday life that Cicero didn't often discuss, the way life was organised for Romans who weren't in Rome. The poems of Homer, if they were truly made in the eighth century BC, come from a time with scant remains and hardly anything else in writing (if you discount Hesiod, and most of us manage that).
So these two books should be quite terrific: case studies of how you use the few fragments that remain from the ancient world, tease meaning out of a lost cup and the exact place you found it – and how you avoid going wrong by building a whole city or mindset on nothing more solid than everyone else's assumptions. This is territory at least as strange as science fiction, a world physically and mentally different, and we have these few chances of seeing it whole.
Mary Beard and Robin Lane Fox are brilliantly equipped to do this; both know how to popularise without patronising, their scholarship is solid and their prose style is lucid. The sad fact is, though: one of these books is a wonder, and the other just isn't. Mary Beard's Pompeii is a forensic adventure through the back alleys and the mansions of a dead city, checking the beds, the looms, the loos, what time the carts rolled in the streets, what was for breakfast and the politics going down in the Forum. It works so well because it shows the process of thinking about what's left: it is a proper detective story.
This isn't a surprise. Her work on the Roman triumph, how victory was celebrated on the streets, is a little masterpiece of opening up a whole world with a very small, sharp piece of evidence; her book on the Acropolis in Athens is a model of how to take a monument and a place and write the story of how they've been used and seen, as well as what they were meant to be. Pompeii is the natural sequel, even if we're constantly told that nearby Herculaneum matters more: we know about Pompeii, maybe we've walked there on the shiny black pavements, started making up our own story of the city.
For it's a city where we know people's names, even faces. Someone scratched on walls that Ladicula was a thief; Secundus loved Prima; and "Atimetus got me pregnant". We have caricatures of a pointy-nosed Rufus, and a bar owner called Amarantus with a rather scrubby beard.
The names, it turns out, are only the start of what we can know. There are election posters on the walls, one over another, and high pavements which suggest both deep filth and rushing water in the streets, and stone beds which might have been for tarts or else for the poor. There seem to be a dizzying number of brothels, although as Beard points out, some of the bargirls just might have been good-natured and some of the graffiti writers optimistic.
And of course, there is the phallus, everywhere: on walls, floors, lamps. The town's been dug over and inspected and even bombed for centuries since its rediscovery, so nothing is as obvious as it might seem; which gives her detective story the odd and interesting red herring. Beard is superb at not seeing the hollowed-out houses as some kind of art museum: the great open courtyards sometimes held enough looms for a small mill, and the most inelegant cupboards held assorted pots and pans. People lived and worked there.
They also fled, desperately, which means they were taking the town apart as they died, saving what they could. That story is preserved, too, in the gaps left when their flesh withered, gaps that can be filled with plaster to show their faces and their torments. The wonder of Beard's book is that, for all the vast accumulation of detail and analysis, the drama still lives. And she never avoids the basic questions: how can we know, and can we know?
Robin Lane Fox is up to something very different. He's a brilliant populariser; anyone would be lucky to start thinking about the ancients with his The Classical World, and he never used to waste words. You'd think the world of the eighth century BC Greeks, when Homer lived, when we can start to hear their voices, would be a perfect subject. But with Travelling Heroes something has gone very wrong.
For a start, it's a book for general readers – that's you and me – whose energy is devoted to slapping down an idea we never had: that Homer's epics and the myths of Greece, were imported wholesale from the Near East. This seems to be the newfangled equivalent of the time that elements of the professoriat toyed with the notion that the Greeks nicked the lot from Africa, or at least Egypt.
This notion makes the Greeks secondhand, it diminishes their uniqueness, and it seems to make classicists very cross indeed. Fox would rather see them as brilliant jackdaws who put together what they half-understood and mistranslated and made an enduring worldview out of it. So he spends his time opening wide the world the Greeks could have known, or at least the part they could have reached in glorified rowboats, but with a rather ironic purpose: to preserve the uniqueness by showing how much they were like other people.
This would be very interesting if he could just get to the point: but he doesn't, not until page 163. Up to then we've been told that things were smelly in the ancient world and many people actually wore clothes; we've bumbled back and forth across the Mediterranean with the good folk from Euboea (the large bar of land offshore from Athens and south of Thessalonika), we've dug through burial mounds, debated the meaning of gold bras, scuttled through a millennium and a half inside four pages. It's like being frogmarched through a vast, rather cobwebby, library.
But on page 163, Fox confesses: we have been travelling because the myths we know depend on particular landscapes, place names, the history of sites. He wants to show how stories travelled, how they changed because a name sounded familiar or a god looked the same as a statue at home. He uses the scrappy information from archaeology, the occasional text, the geography he's seen for himself, to reconstruct the travellers' puzzlement that they reasoned into the myths we know. He wants to see inside the minds of Homer's travellers, or at least inspect their mental baggage.
The sad truth is: he doesn't find much there. The range of Greek travellers is not exactly startling and the coincidences of name and place are too alike to stay intriguing. His book is vastly complicated, an impressive scholarly argument which ends up saying some quite banal things: the great debt Greece owes the Levant, for example, is not so much poetic form as the idea of an alphabet. We knew that – and how much we owe the Greeks for their first known invention: the vowel.
Fox is good on how misunderstanding can spread an idea even faster than some organised intellectual import-export business: so he'll readily accept that the winged horses of Assyrian images helped to bring a flying beast like Pegasus to life, even as he denies that Homer owed any actual debts to the Near East. This means that his huge book is really about questions of degree, which is a shade unexciting; and, eager to biff his rivals, he saves his energy for the often testy footnotes.
He can be lively when he goes after a specific myth – Hercules, say, or Adonis – or finds an image that stays in the mind – like the right-angle clash of currents off Cyprus that sends up spray like a human form, hair streaming , like the birth of Aphrodite herself.
And it's always good to have a book which concentrates on the subtle, difficult interconnectedness of cultures, and is intelligent enough to recognise their differences. But Fox does not let us into the process of discovery; and that's what makes Beard's Pompeii a joy.
The full article contains 1508 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
