FROM IKARIA TO THE STARS
by Peter GreenUniversity of Texas Press £41.95 pp304
“Everyone with a bellyful of the classics is an enemy to the human race.” Henry Miller and the present secretary of state for education seem to be of the same mind. The classics, it is generally agreed, are a repository of class vanity, racial prejudice and pedantic obscurantism. Rooted in abstruse texts and concerned almost entirely with the activities of Dead White Males in knobbly-kneed costumes, the history and literature of the ancient world is good only for travesties such as the film Troy or fanciful “improvement” (as in a recent workshop-soiled production of Euripides). Otherwise, it offers no fit course for a multicultural society in which faith swamps reason and Gallup-polled “truths” are better than knowledge.
This is not to say that classical tags cannot still dignify pretentious academic luggage. Simon Blackburn, the professor of philosophy at Cambridge, recently wrote a little book entitled Lust, in which he cited something that “Hesiod said in the 5th century”. Who will care that Hesiod can have said little at that time, since he had been dead for at least two centuries?
Peter Green would, even though he never achieved high academic office either at Cambridge (where he was already an outstanding scholar in the early 1950s) or anywhere else in England. His distinguished professorial career has been fostered in America (that Great Devil of today’s British academy) and by prolonged residence in modern Greece, where he finds many uncomfortable parallels with the voluble, inglorious Hellas that his clear-headedness and lack of cant so regularly, and often uproariously, reveal.
Most classicists are obliged by calling, if not by temperament, to concentrate on either Greece or Rome, and then on limited aspects of whichever they choose. Green is that rarity, a translator, historian, critic and all-purpose intellectual who is not hobbled by specialisation: the Mediterranean is mare suum, although the Aegean remains his favourite dive.
The essays in this volume supply sumptuous mezes to give you an appetite to fill your belly with the classics. All are informed by knowledge not only of the canonical texts but, it seems, of almost every scrap of un-golden-age scribble that might be useful to Green’s unflagging purpose. And what is that? To dazzle maybe, but always to enlighten and, against all the usual odds, to entertain: in reviewing an American television Odyssey, he reminds us that “Helen saved her skin at Troy by bobbing her tits to an angry husband”.
Irreverence is the larky companion of Green’s erudition. He continues to cheek his betters, even after he has bested them. He has actually lived what careerist academics prefer to patronise and jargonise in structuralist abstraction (James Davidson is duly exempt from such stricture). In truth, the ancient world is never all that far away. Myth and reason are still fighting it out (and reason seems to be losing, as “belief” trumps tolerance and scepticism).
Modern Greek politics frequently offer a remake (or at least a travesty) of The Old Days, although Christianity has laid a mosaic of solemnity (and clerical humbug)over Zeus and his gang, whose vulgar, bullying greeds, lusts and vanities were at odds with the moralising ambitions of the great tragedians and Plato’s conflation of the Good and the Beautiful. The disparagement of the Olympians gave rise to the Aristotelian creator who — once he had given the world a kick-start — turned solipsism into the quintessential divine activity. Hence Hymns Ancient & Modern’s “immortal, invisible, God only wise”.
Green is unimpressed by the propaganda for the Golden Age of Pericles: “his chilly program of de haut en bas sociopolitical imperialism . . . another aspect of that Protagorean self-worship which he apparently takes in his stride”. For Pericles, are we being encouraged to read Blair-icles or Bush-icles? The 5th century is also now, stupid.
When it comes to ancient historians, Green votes for energetic, credulous, ragbaggy Herodotus as against the dry, Hellenocentric Thucydides. Herodotus came from Halicarnassus, Bodrum in today’s Turkey. Raised on the hinge of the Greek and the barbarian (non-Greek) world, he had the amused tolerance of a man who can see and has lived with both sides. A similarly peripatetic enthusiast, with none of the localised conceit of the bigot or the parti pris of the ideologue, Green rejoices in being what the Greeks called a “metic”, a resident alien, scholar and gypsy.
As an unredeemed liberal, Green is against all schematic certainties. In that spirit, he is perhaps too hard on Epicureans — unfairly accused of being precursors of Stalinism — and on Stoics. Against the monumental priggishness of Seneca, he might have cited Rogatianus, a Stoic senator who liberated his slaves and gave most of what he had to the poor. For the rest, Green’s obiter dicta alone are worth the price of admission: for instance, “Many may feel, as I do, that anyone capable of provoking [the historian G E M] de Ste Croix to such spluttering vituperation (‘the odious Isocrates’) must have some good in him somewhere”. Here is a collection which, on the principle of multum in parvo, is a classical education in itself.
