This may sound unlikely, but, according to Robin Lane Fox, father of the internet entrepreneur Martha, Oxford don and author of the award-winning history The Classical World, ancient Greek is not that hard to learn. What is more, the rewards are many. “If you ask me what has been one of the points of my life, it is reading Homer,” says the University Reader in Ancient History and fellow of New College.
“Everyone responds to it, and you can learn Greek without that much effort. It’s not so difficult. There are clever people out there who would be more than happy to teach it, and it must be better than sodding Spanish. Oh, Spanish is a fine language, but it is not the language of Herodotus or Aristotle or Plato — and I’ve hardly started.”
Lane Fox is not alone in his enthusiasm for the ancient world of Greece and Rome, and its hugely colourful cast. The toga-clad schemers who once paced the Forum and ruled the world are basking again in the appreciation of an absorbed public. Books about the Roman empire, in particular, crowd the shelves the way Cicero once packed a courtroom with his oratory. Robert Harris follows his bestseller Pompeii with a new novel, Imperium, the first of a political trilogy; to his long line of biographers, Caesar has recently added Adrian Goldsworthy, followed by, in October, Anthony Everitt with The First Emperor: Caesar Augustus and the Triumph of Rome. Bryan Ward-Perkins’s slim, well-written book The Fall of Rome has just won the Hessell-Tiltman prize for history, and Lane Fox’s highly readable The Classical World, which won this year’s Runciman award, has been storming up the bestseller lists like an ambitious recruit in the Roman army. It recently rose to No32 on the non-fiction paperback list — not bad for a book that ends in AD117.
Nor is it just books. The BBC follows its heady drama Rome with a lavish new drama-documentary this autumn. Ancient Rome: The Rise and Fall of an Empire covers 600 years in six episodes. The stand-up comedian Alex Horne has been invited to take last year’s Edinburgh Festival show about Latin, When in Rome, into schools. And BBC4 has dusted off I, Claudius and Up Pompeii for another outing. Still to come, next year, is the film 300, starring Lena Headey, which will tell how 300 unflinching Spartans stood against the entire Persian army in 480BC.
There are fashions in publishing. Once, the likes of Caesar and Cicero would have been lucky if an editor gave them the time of day. “Thirty years ago, the serious writers who were really selling and connecting with the public were the great literary critics such as Raymond Williams, Richard Hoggart and FR Leavis,” says Stuart Proffitt, publishing director of the Penguin Press. “Now the public hardly buys serious literary criticism at all. The only great literary critic we still publish is Frank Kermode. The way academia connects with the public has been taken over by historians and, to some degree, economists and scientists. It is one of the big shifts in publishing and the public’s cultural consumption.”
The main reason the ancient world has come out of the permafrost is precisely that we know so little about it, says Tom Holland, author of Rubicon. Whereas he had a traditional classical education, most of us now have little Latin and less Greek. The closest his seven-year-old daughter is likely to come to that world, he says, is a couple of weeks spent building the Parthenon from lavatory rolls. So the current crop of books and films is satisfying a hunger in people. “They know these things are important, and they have been denied the opportunity to study them. People have this sense of terra incognita.”
There are other reasons. The Roman emperors no longer have to battle unfashionable foes from the cold war for the public’s attention, and the Nazis have, as it were, been flogged to death. Rome resonates so strongly, you can still almost hear the crunch of its army on its arrow-straight roads. Like good citizens, the Romans left voluminous, accessible records. “You can still find their jokes,” Adrian Goldsworthy says. “That’s a very human thing.” What the Romans did for us is still apparent in literature and theatre, and its ideas are so embedded in ours that Goldsworthy reckons if you read anything that was written before the mid-20th century and you don’t know the classics, you will miss half of it.
As for the language, who says Latin is dead? “People don’t realise how much Latin they use,” says Alex Horne, who wrote When in Rome because he was sick of people asking what he was going to do with a classics degree from Oxford. “Words such as ‘et cetera’, Marks & Spencer’s clothing range Per Una, ‘RIP’ — they all come from Latin. So do lots of football mottos. Everton’s is ‘Nil satis nisi optimum’, which means ‘Nothing but the best’, and Tottenham’s is ‘Audere est facere’, which means ‘To dare is to do’. All these football supporters are going round with these things on their chests without knowing what they mean.”
Then there are the political parallels. “After 9/11, when America turned all imperial, I think the Roman republic seemed to become relevant in a way that it had not been 10 years previously,” Holland says. Similarly, Matthew Barrett, executive producer of the BBC’s Ancient Rome, believes his series will strike a chord. “I think the story of a great superpower that believes it is stretching a civilised ideal across the world has a certain resonance,” he says.
Robert Harris’s new book is a kind of West Wing on the Tiber. Harris has always wanted to write a big political novel and, as a political journalist who spent the 1997 election night with Tony Blair in his sitting room, he has not been short of contemporary material. But, having tried and failed to set a political novel in the present, he suddenly realised the answer was in the past. “A popular novel about Cicero sounds like an oxymoron, but it seems to me that the characters at that time were so extraordinary, and the issues they faced so modern, it was better to write about that time than do it in the present and risk a roman à clef.”
A semi-fictionalised but gripping account of Cicero’s rise to power, Imperium is narrated by Cicero’s secretary and slave, Tiro. “I tried to write it as if you were at the Senate in Washington, or as if it were the memoirs of Tony Blair as written by Jonathan Powell,” Harris says. “I’ve always been fascinated by politics — it’s my football, and I’m trying to describe it as a contact sport. I want to convey the excitement and adrenaline of it.
An election has the most fantastic narrative drive, and people often forget that. The whole point of my book is that politics never changes. In 2,000 years, absolutely nothing has changed.”
Certainly, the dilemmas and the characters in Imperium feel contemporary. “There are neocons and some very Clintonian fixers. In fact, Cicero is quite similar to Clinton, without the sex,” Harris says. “Like him, he was a brilliant speaker and lawyer and played both ends against the middle. Both were perpetual survivors.”
Cicero, says Harris, was a first. “He was the first to approach the business of politics in a professional manner, training himself in how to speak, working out who were the important people to get to vote for you, developing his image and cultivating voters. Combined with a rather attractive if gossipy character, it makes him a very modern figure from the ancient world. He’s more accessible than Caesar and, in his personal qualities, easier to get along with.” Better still, although everyone knows Cicero’s name, few could describe his character. “That makes him attractive to me, and I’m dealing with facts that most people simply don’t know.”
Matthew Barrett believes his BBC1 series will have the same appeal. “One of the things the BBC does well is grand themes, but I don’t think there has been an authoritative account telling the story of the rise and fall of Rome for a long time — if ever — and I’ve never seen anything on Constantine.” Even Nero, famous for fiddling and for being as mad as a bunch of frogs, is not, apparently, the complete disaster he has been cracked up to be. “He is played by Michael Sheen and, though he was clearly insane, he was emperor for a long time, and a much more complex figure than is often thought,” Barrett says. “I would say that, even if you have seen everything from Quo Vadis to the HBO Rome, you will find things in this series you have never seen before.”
But even the Roman empire fell in the end, and not everyone believes the revived enthusiasm for its glories will continue. Horne’s next show will be about bird-watching — “It’s even more geeky than Latin” — and for his next book, Holland is fast-forwarding a millennium or so. Focusing on the 10th and 11th centuries, it has the working title Waiting for the Anti-Christ, “if that doesn’t sound too Dennis Wheatley”. He explains:
“The first millennium was one of the great turning points in our history, and it’s a period that is little studied, but if anything is even more crucial than ancient Rome. So many of the issues are the same as now: what it means to be European; whether it is necessary to be a Christian to be Western; the relationship between Christianity and Islam. These are huge issues that people cannot understand unless they go to the origins.”
But publishers have not finished with the ancients yet. The lead Allen Lane title for next January is Rome and Jerusalem: The Clash of Ancient Civilisations by Martin Goodman (one of the advisers on the BBC’s Ancient Rome series); Adrian Goldsworthy’s next book is on the fall of the empire; and, with his trilogy, Harris is still at the start of his Roman road. “Pompeii was my Hobbit,” he says. “This is The Lord of the Rings.”
