HISTORY

R OWLAND S MITH Leading the Charge into the Ancient Age

T HE C LASSICAL W ORLD : A N E PIC H ISTORY FROM H OMERTO H ADRIAN

★By Robin Lane Fox (Allen Lane 693pp £25)

C ERTAINPICTURESQUEFEATURES of classical antiquity – the gladiatorial shows, for instance, or the volcanic eruption of AD 79 that overwhelmed Pompeii – hold a perennial popular appeal, which a Hollywood director or a bestselling novelist can still hope to tap. So do certain charismatic ancient personalities – Alexander of Macedon, say, or Queen Cleopatra. But the history of Greek and Roman antiquity spans a thousand years, and the study of its political nuts and economic bolts is nowadays a specialised field in which experts tend to plough quite narrowly defined furrows. Still, whether or not modern Europeans and Americans care to notice it, the brute fact is that many of their core political and cultural presuppositions are peculiarly linked to Greek and Roman precedents, and it is tempting in this connection to apply to antiquity Leon Trotsky’s celebrated dictum about war: you may not be interested in it – but it is definitely interested in you. An outsider might consider the intricacies of ancient history a matter of no importance to anyone except a sub-Johnsonian species of scholarly drudge, but some current practitioners of the subject take a far more combative view of its contemporary relevance – and, more to the point, so did some of the neo-conservative clique around George Bush that lately pressed for military intervention and exemplary ‘regime change’ in an irksome Middle Eastern state: the portentously named 2000 Project for the New American Century, a right-wing think-tank patronised by Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld and Cheney, boasted a bigwig professor of classical Greek history from Yale among its leading lights. In 2005, as their dream of a Pax Americana dissolves in a sea of insurgents’ bombs and threadbare spin, Washington’s more reflective neo-cons may wish in hindsight that their professor’s specialist knowledge had extended beyond Greek warfare to the geopolitics of the Roman Empire. One instance of gung-ho Roman adventurism in the early second century could have provided particular food for thought. In AD 114, the emperor Trajan decided on a robust solution to the ‘Middle Eastern question’ of his day: invade

Mesopotamia, kick out its uppity ruling dynasty, and reconstitute it as an amenable Roman province. The initial invasion was easily accomplished and fulsomely celebrated. Three years later, the bulk of the native population of Iraq was in open revolt, and a fundamentalist visionary based in its southern marshes was prophesying an imminent visitation by angels and the triumph of God’s faithful over all earthly empires. At that point Trajan obligingly died, or was covertly murdered: it was left to his successor to ditch the whole enterprise and engineer a prudent withdrawal of the imperial army back to the old frontier. The account of Rome’s Mesopotamian fiasco deftly sketched near the close of Robin Lane Fox’s ‘epic history’ is one of many delightful touches in a wide-ranging book that offers a feast of intriguing insights to anyone curious about the classical world. The author is an Oxford don with extensive and long-pondered knowledge of his subject, but is emphatically not a dry-as-dust bore: a keen horseman outside the lecture-room, he recently charged across the big screen as a Macedonian cavalryman in the company of professional stunt-riders in Oliver Stone’s Alexander the Great (a movie on which he also served as historical adviser). On the page, he canters just as sure-footedly through the nine centuries or so that run ‘from Homer to Hadrian’, writing with a light touch and displaying a wonderful knack for con

the royal society of literature invites entries for the v.s. pritchett memorial prize 2006

A prize of £ 1 , 000 will be awarded for an unpublished short story of between 2,000 and 5,000 words.The closingdate is 14 February 2006 .Entries will be judged by Sebastian Barker, editor of The London Magazine ,Candia McWilliam and Piers Paul Read,and the winning story will be published in The London Magazine .Entrants must be citizens of the UK or the Republic of Ireland.

For an entry form please send a self-addressed envelope (c5) to:The Secretary, The Royal Society of Literature, Somerset House,Strand,London wc2r 1la

19

LITERARY REVIEW Dec 2005 / Jan 2006