Every nation has its historical narrative, a story that both explains its origins and justifies its mores. These narratives weave the tapestry of the national culture,cohering it around a handful of core beliefs that bind the nation's citizens in common enterprise. For instance, the origin story of the United States, that it was a country founded on the desire to practice faith and commerce unhindered by the leash of the British empire, both catalyzes and sustains the pro-capitalist and pro-democratic America of today. But what about suprenational narratives? Do origin stories exist for continental cultures, for global cultures? Misters Price and Thonemann, classical scholars both, cannot speak to the latter; however, the former, the cultural history of early Europe, is well within their purview. And, here, they speak to it clearly and compellingly.
Beginning with events prior to the TTrojan War of Homeric fame (1100 BCE), The Birth of Classical Europe is a systematic and informative excavation of European culture up to the fall of the Roman Empire in the 5th century AD. Two civilizations dominate this vital, 2,500-year chunk of European history, the Greeks and the Romans. The former, a civilization of warriors and philosophers, thrived for a millennia, agricultural city states slowly consolidating into regional alliances which bound the Greeks in common cause against foreign threats. This profoundly impacted Greek thought and Greek supremacy which persisted until the rise of the Roman Republic. The latter, a civilization of soldiers and farmers guided by populist autocrats, rose rapidly in the third and second centuries BCE, consuming Greek thought and smashing Greek supremacy to reign unchecked,for the next 600 years, as the most powerful European state the continent had ever known. Ostensibly a republic, a sense of destiny and self-belief elevated Rome above the other Italian city states,consolidating the peninsula on its way to conquering territories in Europe, Africa and Asia, founding an empire nearly as impressive as the one Alexander so briefly forged.
Whereas the Greeks connected themselves, historically,to both the Homeric narrative of the Trojan War, as well as their bronzed-aged forefathers who created an identity by defeating and banishing the tribal, animalistic peoples that preceded them, the Romans connected themselves to history through Aeneas, a Trojan hero who survived the fall of his civilization to father Romulus and Remus, the founders of Rome. Not only did both cultures cherish their origin myths as a means of legitimizing their existences, they rose to power in similar ways as well, by forming alliances to conquer an enemy common to their internal tribes. For the Greeks, these enemies emanated from Troy and Persia, the latter of which had the power to annihilate Greek culture. For the Romans, the enemies were Carthaginian and Mithridatic in origin, civilizations and alliances from Africa and Asia that stood in the way of Roman destiny. Together, these two European civilizations endured and, in doing so, succeeded, by dint of their longevity and power, to imprint their cultures and their gods, their ethics and their dreams, upon a continent of disparate peoples, connecting them, in an unbroken line, back into Greco-Roman antiquity.
Though The Birth of Classical Europe is a dry, academic text which, at times, threatens to overwhelm the reader with a flurry of unfamiliar events and archaeological parlance, it sustains its vitality and relevance by connecting the deeds of ancient cultures to the morals of the modern day. Much as we may wish it otherwise, primogeniture is important to us. We place great stock in the first one to discover, claim, own, invent, something. And so it should come as no surprise that the politics of the Social War, or the radicalism of Athenian Democracy impact on our lives. For these are the West's cultural forefathers. The founders of the United States did not pull their Constitution out of the clouds; they looked to the Roman Republic for lessons in the creation of a free state. It is this continuity which the authors captured here so well.
This is excellent and thorough work. It is unquestionably obsessed with the Greco-Roman legacy, relegating to the sidelines the cultural contributions of early, western Europe. I wish the authors had more than merely touched on the Urnfield and Hallstatt cultures which appear to have stretched from Germany to Hungary. But it is unclear to what extent these cultures influence us today. After all, we are not erecting statues to Hallstattian queens before the parliaments of Europe. Those we reserve for the heroes of Greece and Rome. (4/5 Stars)
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