Introduction
By
Jasper GriffinThe subject of this book is enormous. In time it covers a period of well over a thousand years, from the poems of
Homer to the end of pagan religion and the fall of the Roman Empire in the West. In geographical extension it
begins in Greece with small communities emerging from a dark age of conquest and destruction, and with
Bronze Age villages on the hills of Rome; it ends with an Empire which unified the Mediterranean world and a
great deal besides, from Northumberland to Algeria, from Portugal to Syria, from the Rhine to the Nile. The fall
of Rome was further removed in time from Homer than we are from the Norman Conquest; as for political scale,
the Roman Empire comprised the whole or part of the territory of what are now thirty sovereign states, and it was
not until 1870 that Italy, for instance, achieved again the unity which Rome had imposed before the birth of
Christ.
That world is given the title 'classical'. The word carries the implication that the works of art and literature
produced in Graeco-Roman antiquity possess an absolute value, that they form the standard by which all others
are to be judged. In the Renaissance and even after it that was indeed what many people thought; Swift's Battle of
the Books expresses the idea with wit and brilliance, and in painting such works as Raphael's Parnassus in the
Vatican, showing Apollo and the Muses with the great poets of Greece and Rome, or the ineffably academic
Apotheosis of Homer by Ingres, give it visual form. The time is past when it could make sense to think of the
ancient world as passing judgment on its successors. On the one hand, the technical advances of the last five
generations have transformed life in too many respects for such a comparison to make sense; on the other,
interest in other early cultures outside the classical framework has shown that Greece and Rome were less unique
than our ancestors supposed.
Yet while we can no longer allow to classical antiquity the exclusive dominance which its study once enjoyed in
the schools and universities of Europe, it must retain a special interest for the western world. The art of
Michelangelo and Rubens, the poetry of Milton and Keats, the architecture of our cities, with their domes and
triumphal arches deriving from Rome and their pillared porticoes deriving from Greece, are only a few examples
of the pervasive presence of the ancient world in the modern. No less important has been Greek mythology:
Helen, Oedipus, Narcissus, the Minotaur in the labyrinth. Other myths have been no less haunting: Athenian
democracy, Spartan austerity, the stern virtue of the Roman Republic, the luxury and order of her Empire. And
that world presents, as no other can, the prospect of a society which, though distant, was not merely barbaric, but
which attained high sophistication and produced great works of art, and which is in addition directly linked by
history with that of the modern West, as the societies of ancient China and Peru, for instance, are not. Western
civilization grew out of the classical world, and it never lost the knowledge that a high culture had preceded it,
whose legacy was there to be emulated and exploited. The study of that distant but not completely alien world
can allow us to understand that there are alternatives to our own ways and assumptions, and so it can help to
liberate us from the tyranny of the present.
The story is a long one, the setting is wide and varied. Many varieties of human society are to be found in it:
primitive villages, fiercely independent city-states, great kingdoms, even federal leagues. Democracy was
invented, practised, lost. Tyrants seized power; aristocrats fought to retain it; philosophers argued and speculated
on the origins of society, the nature of justice, the duties of the citizen. In the beginning there was verse and song,
and with time prose literature can be seen coming into being, with philosophy and history and fiction. Rational