Robin Lane Fox, The Classical World

Robin Lane Fox, The Classical World: An Epic History from Homer to Hadrian. Basic Books. 2008. Pp. 672. ISBN 978-0465024971.

By Nathan Oglesby

Robin Lane Fox begins the preface to The Classical World: An Epic History from Homer to Hadrian with the admission of something self-evident, that presenting nine-hundred years of ancient history in a single volume is a fraught enterprise; and yet in five and half hundred pages he appears to have been manifestly successful. This reviewer had come to the book with at least a haphazard and general account of such history in his head, but had never encountered a volume of such simultaneous scope and concentration, framed at once for the novice and the initiated, and most importantly presented almost throughout as a narrative, rather than “discuss[ing] a topic…across a thousand years in a single chapter” (xv). This concerted “narrative” is told in frank and swift language, and with what appears to be great discernment of emphasis. Laced throughout the narrative framework are temporal flash-forwards to the Roman Emperor Hadrian, with whose reign Fox’s history terminates, on his grand tour of his dominions, so that we might see one of the classical cast members classicizing what is to him already the distant past at every major point in the journey of our own readership. This device complicates the work beneficially, and buoys the dense catalogue of bygone personae and events with an essential impression of the classical world examining itself and its own ‘classicism.’ While it asks, rightfully, to be read as a tale, intercalary chapters are dispersed throughout, which magnify certain personalities, or generalize sociological trends, the only points at which Fox remotely favors the textbook to the chronicle.
The Classical World is divided into two huge stages (Greece, then Rome) of three parts each, which respectively cover ‘The Archaic Greek World’, from Homer’s Greece through the Persian wars, ‘The Classical Greek World’, Athens’ ascendancy through Philip’s advances, ‘Hellenistic Worlds’, Alexander’s conquests and the decline of Greek freedom through the dawn of Rome; then ‘The Roman Republic’, from its early evolution through its effective dissolution by Julius Caesar, ‘From Republic to Empire’, detailing the struggle of Antony and Octavian and the character of the victorious latter’s subsequent political overhauls, and finally ‘An Imperial World’, charting Rome’s frenetic succession of principes from the Julio-Claudians up to the now-familiar congenial globetrotter himself, Hadrian.
The thematic pillars of this ‘epic’ are the buzz-words ‘freedom’, ‘justice’ and ‘luxury’, to which Fox makes constant recourse as alternating lenses through which to examine the long course of political modulations which are presented as themselves a cyclic recurrence of these ideas and their reactions. As Fox has it, the call for political ‘freedom’ was as frequent an object of rhetorical ‘spin’ as it is today, the very conduit for the violent usurpations and repossessions of the power of dispensing ‘justice’ over against the tide of ‘luxury’, the spectrous heritage of that power. In this connection he makes a good deal of reference to Polybius, a Greek historian of Roman activity, in whom he identifies a similarly systematic view of history. “According to Polybius’ theory, such change [toward the adoption of ‘luxury’] would inevitably occur, linked to changes in the citzens’ ‘customs’ and behavior: oligarchy would change to democracy, democracy to degenerate mob-rule and then back to monarchy, the starting point” (329). The appropriateness of these themes is manifest, so much so that the insistent emphasis placed on them becomes somewhat tiresome—there are junctures where the operation of these rallying cries (for ‘freedom’, for ‘justice’; against ‘luxury’) is sufficiently self-evident that the work is a little burdened by Fox’s effort to make them transparent. In addition to this, the narrative is laden by a certain categorical repetition of the phrase ‘in my view’, apparently the author’s means of emphasizing the separation of his inferences from fact—but this distinction is likewise too self-evident to necessitate this phrase surfacing nearly ten times a chapter, and therefore several hundreds of times altogether. But as Fox’s frankness appears to make no pretensions to stylistic achievement, excepting the structural impressiveness of the whole, let these be dismissed as petty detractions. And in despite of them, Fox’s voice is not without humor and charm, assuring us that the dubious art objects left in the ruins of Pompeii, whatever the unknown nature of their decorative role had been, “are simply sexy.” But of course, “Pompeii did not collapse in a final torrent of orgies” (537-40).
Diverse chapter headings, almost all from ancient texts, whether literary or clerical, situate the narrative very effectively, and at times are juxtaposed to great effect. One such chapter, which treats the inception of the Flavian dynasty, pits some verses of Statius which appear on a bronze statue of the emperor Domitian (“This staute…will stand while earth and sky endure…” (520)), against the younger Pliny’s Panegyric which lauds the destruction of one of the same such statues. Here and elsewhere, The Classical World is at its most affecting when Fox lets his wisely selected material speak powerfully for itself.
He is at his most effective as a story-teller in the dizzying political drama of the fourth and fifth parts at the heart of the book, during which Hadrian’s trans-temporal field trip is abandoned awhile for the companionship of Cicero, the precedent reductions of whose character he amends, whilst following the manifold civil strife of late-Republican Rome from his beleaguered perspective. Fox cuts through what he identifies as the inherent ‘spin’ (he seems to find this contemporary term very helpful) of ancient sources on the subject, and presents as intricate a record as is possible to follow of these intrigues and their participants, who appear by turns, in this bright objective light, brutal and beautiful, and unfailingly ingenious.
In its totality, The Classical World manages to offer a sustained vision of nearly an entire millennium, of which most would otherwise pass their lives with only the vaguest impressions. It will well furnish for the interested reader copious contextual material with which to approach ancient sources themselves, as well as pull together the accumulated miscellany and ambiguity of such studies into an integrated narrative whole.