The Greek experience

Jennifer T. Roberts has been teaching the ancient world at American universities for fifty years, and at the City College of New York for three decades. In this valuable, capacious study, we reap the ripe fruits of that experience. Her previous books have focused on ancient history and political theory, and their reception, but in Out of One, Many: Ancient Greek ways of thought and culture, she demonstrates compellingly that she is a classicist in the fullest sense of the word, equipped to portray a complex civilization in the round, interweaving its philosophy, literature, art and archaeology in a vibrant and cohesive tapestry.

Her clever title inverts the traditional motto of the US, displayed in 1776 on its Great Seal, E pluribus unum (“Out of Many, One”). The ancient Greeks did not form a unity out of multitudes, but were multitudes who shared a unifying common language and imaginative repertoire. Roberts’s overarching argument is that “Greek civilization” is a misnomer: people who spoke and wrote in ancient Greek lived in countless communities around the Mediterranean and Black Sea, and penetrated Asia almost to the borders of India. There were manifold types of Greek experience. Her subtitle is also allusive, nodding to Edith Hamilton’s bestselling The Greek Way (1930), but substituting the plural ways of thought to explain her distinctive, centrifugal approach.

The Greeks changed our internal, mental and psychological landscapes for ever, and Roberts leads us on a detailed tour of these terrains that is always persuasive and at times enthralling. The historical backdrop is not neglected; her synopses of the Persian Wars and the chaotic evolution of the Hellenistic world after the death of Alexander are exemplary. But she prioritizes explorations of what discrete groups of Greeks thought about life’s pressing private preoccupations – family, sex, foreigners, slaves, rivalry, revenge, divinity and death. Her authorial voice is touchingly humane, and her readings of ancient poets and philosophers are enriched by her intimate revelation, early on, that she has recently suffered serious ill health and acute bereavement.

In some ways, the book’s project may seem old-fashioned, similar not only to Hamilton’s, but also to monumental works such as Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff’s Die Glaube der Hellenen (The Beliefs of the Greeks, 1931–2) and Werner Jaeger’s Paideia (1933–47; translated into English with the subtitle The Ideals of Greek Culture, 1939–44. Roberts is unafraid to deliver paeans on the achievement of Plato, for example (on whose Phaedrus, Symposium and Republic she writes deliciously), or to refer to the “genius” of Sophocles. But the freshness of her approach ensures that even seasoned Hellenists will rarely feel that they have heard most of this before. Her own translations are up-to-date and lucid. Her storytelling is fast-paced and vivid. She writes with flair and wit, referring to the countless Athenian vases that portray women performing indoor tasks as a “thoroughgoing media blitz” directing female users to their appropriate sphere of operation. She points irreverently to the tedium of translations of Homer that attempt to reproduce its clunky dactylic metre, and describes Agamemnon’s usually celebrated excursus in the Iliad on atē (the blinding of one’s judgement) as “mythological gobbledygook” designed “to distract the audience’s attention from his own culpability”.

Modern reassessments of the classical “legacy” in the light of identity politics are integrated seamlessly, especially in the discussions of ancient Greek attitudes to race (her comments on physiognomic theory are fascinating), sex and gender. The final chapter offers an insightful overview of the continuing presences of the ancient Greeks in modernity. She acknowledges frankly the spread of classical culture across the planet by colonialist educators, architects and political theorists, and the mobilization of classical ideas in support of some of the world’s most regrettable ideological programmes, such as Aryanist racial theory. But she stresses that the classical past has also been harnessed to radical and progressive causes. The ground has been prepared for this chapter by pointed parallels or contrasts with recent events: the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the sporting of Greek hoplite helmets by some of the rioters who stormed the Capitol in Washington on January 6, 2021.

The three standout chapters address the most metaphysical and cerebral issues. “Giving the gods their due” recreates the subjective experience of ancient people whose countryside was littered with shrines and sanctuaries, whose religious calendar meant organizing mass festivities, often on a weekly basis, and whose primary medium of trying to control what happened in their lives was the violent and gory ritual of animal slaughter and incineration. We are regaled with the texts of questions put to the oracle at Dodona, where priestesses interpreted the rustling of oak leaves: “Would I make money by keeping sheep?” “What happened to my missing bed linen – did somebody steal it?” Curse tablets include one apparently deposited by an aspiring publican attempting to jinx every other innkeeper in the neighbourhood. Yet, as the chapters on philosophy and science document, some ancient Greeks had no time for superstition or even traditional religion. While Aristotle receives a much briefer discussion than I would have liked, the summary of the different philosophical schools and scientific specialisms that arose after Plato is written with skill and incisiveness. The inclusion of a chapter on thanatology – the remarkably diverse views of death and ways of commemorating the departed – is one of Roberts’ finest achievements, especially the sepulchral epigrams for individuals who had died very young, each one encapsulating in a few delicate verses what must have been a life-changing tragedy for the bereaved who commissioned them.

Jennifer T. Roberts has achieved nothing less than an account of the inner workings of ancient Greek minds. While the book is not for the complete beginner in Greek studies, the copious reading lists, images and careful glossing of arcane terminology reveal her vast experience as a teacher. It is no criticism to say that I wish she had extended her chronological scope to include Greek culture after Cleopatra VII and into the Roman imperial period.

Edith Hall is Professor of Classics at Durham University. Her latest book is an edition of Aeschylus’ Agamemnon, 2024

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