Civilizations: Culture, Ambition, and the Transformation of Nature

Earlier sea peoples of the Mediterranean vanished. The megalith-builders of the eastern islands were unremembered. The sophisticates of the Cycladic Islands and Crete in the Bronze Age disappeared into legend. The Phoenicians were almost expunged from the record. Conquerors destroyed their writings and most of their art and even razed their cities, consigning them to a death—in the words of Lord Byron, a later Hellenophile, in his poem “The Sea”—“unknelled, uncoffined, and unknown.” But the Greeks, who took to the sea at almost the same time, for similar reasons, from a homeland with a similar environment, endured. Their settlements, cities, art, and books survived where the bones of rock poke through the thin skin of the soil. In the fifth century B.C., Plato imagined Greece as a skeleton emerging from desiccated flesh, wasted by sickness.²Hesiod complained about the harshness of his own farmland. The very fragility of the environment made the people who lived there want to change it even as they feared for the consequences. The gods were always inclined to chastise man’s presumption in abusing the gifts of nature. The River Scaramander threatened to drown Achilles for polluting its waters with corpses. Herodotus saw the defeat of Xerxes as punishment for a series of ecologically incorrect excesses: canal-building at Athos, bridging the Hellespont, and lashing the waves.³

It seems incredible that such a background could nourish the achievements of the civilization founded here, in the southern lands and offshore islands of this hot, dry, rocky salient of Eastern Europe. But the deficiencies of the landward environment were made up from the sea. “We live around the sea,” said Socrates, “like frogs around a pond,” and a glance at the map shows how the Greek world was a network of seaboard communities. Plato reckoned seafaring to be one of mankind’s greatest achievements. But even the wood, pitch, and sailcloth to make ships had to be imported, as well as metal for the shipwrights’ tools. So building up the wealth necessary to be able to exploit the sea was a long and laborious business.

The Pursuit of Galatea: Greece Takes to the Sea

At the beginning of the story, around the end of the second millennium B.C., city life had been almost wiped out in Greece by devastating invasions. The only stone or rubble buildings known from the period were at Eretria, in euboea;and only at Athens and in Euboea do cities seem to have survived. Most Greeks lived by goat-farming and in thatched huts. Few iron tools were available for farming, and where it was practiced, it was based on barley: indeed, in the region of Athens, this humble crop, with a gluten-deficient nutritional value, was all the soil could sustain.

In these circumstances, industry was the only means to acquire wealth. At Athens, Corinth, and a few other centers in the tenth century B.C., finely decorated pots were made for export. Olives—the only surplus farm product—were pressed for their oil. These were the beginnings of trade which first lined the Aegean and Ionian Seas with cities, then spread, from the mid-eighth century onwards, all over the Mediterranean and Black Seas.

Neighboring peoples considered the Greeks’ barley unfit to eat. But the olive oil was exportable and came from a crop with distinct competitive advantages. The olive was the economic secret weapon of the Aegean. Its care was seasonal and left plenty of time for seafaring. It would grow in ground which cereals and pulses disdained; it permitted farming at remarkably high altitudes, up to twenty-two hundred feet; the economies of scale made possible by industrialized processing favored concentrations of wealth and the growth of a pallid sort of mercantile capitalism.

Stories of early explorers were collected by the historian Herodotus nearly twenty-five hundred years ago. He told, for example, the story of Coleos of Samos, who crossed the length of the Mediterranean with a freak wind and burst through into the Atlantic, between the Pillars of Hercules, where the racing current stoppers the sea. He was aiming for Egypt but ended up in southwestern Spain. Here he discovered the El Dorado of the Greeks: the real-life fantasyland they called Tartessos, where Hercules tamed the flocks of Geryon and a king could be said to live for 120 years. “This market,” Herodotus reported, “was at that time still unexploited,” despite its rich mines: the copper which has stained the banks of the Río Tinto, the gold, silver, and iron which are concentrated in the pyrite belt.

Therefore when they returned to their own country the men of Samos made more profit from their wares than any Greeks we know of, save Sostratos of Aegina—and there is none to compare with him. They sailed in round freight-ships, but the men of Phocaea, who discovered the Adriatic Sea, made the same journey in fifty-oared vessels.⁴

In the eighth century B.C., increased use of iron tools made agriculture more efficient, but the consequent increase of population made ever greater demands on food and land.⁵As well as a trading people, the Greeks became colonizers, extending the range of their settlements to rich wheat-growing areas in Sicily, southern Italy, and the north shore of the Black Sea, then to cash-richmarkets in what are now France and Spain. During the seventh century, many of these colonies became impressive cities in their own right. The progress of trade, meanwhile, is shown by the introduction of coinage in most Greek cities and the building of new, larger ship types. Although Greek writers tended to idealize their hardy farming past, they realized that commerce was the lifeblood of their society. Many of them included merchants and sea explorers among their heroes—something unthinkable, for example, in the China of the time, where only farmers, warriors, and scholars were valued.

The call of the sea was not universally felt: Spartans often preferred to stay in Greece and build up an empire in contiguous territory. This, however, was one of many Lacedaemonian eccentricities, of which the gods disapproved. A pair of Spartan imperialists who planned a settlement near Corinth in about 706 were directed by the oracle “to Satyrion, the water of Taras, a harbor on the left, and the place where a goat loves salt water, wetting the tip of his grey beard. There build Tarentum.”⁶From other centers, the usual direction of imperialism was outward. Colonies were founded abroad with the blessing of oracles uttered by the gods, especially through the mouths of priestesses at Delphi. In this shrine, the divine pronouncements were relayed from a theatrically effective setting—a tripod throne in the form of writhing serpents rose from a smoking chasm in a cave—and recommended colonization in a baffling array of cases: the founder of Croton went to Delphi in search of a remedy for childlessness, with no prior thought of starting a colony. In about the 720 s, Chalcidians were directed to colonize in order to escape famine. In about 640 , Rhodians were told to found a colony in Sicily and share it with Cretans. The founder of Herakleia, in Sicily, was criticized for omitting the routine preliminaries of oracular consultation. Foundation stories of colonies came to include claims of Delphic authorization almost as a matter of course, because Apollo’s fiat conferred legitimacy and appeared to guarantee antiquity.⁷Colony-founding ever farther afield became so much a part of the Greek way of life that a playwright speculated on the chances of founding one in the sky. “Not that we hate our city,” the wouldbe colonists protest, “for it is a prosperous mighty city, free for all to spend their wealth in, paying fines and fees.” Aristophanes knew not only how to add a phrase—“Cloud-Cuckoo-Land”—to the lexicon, but also how to tweak his audience into laughing at themselves.⁸

Because the Greek world spread seawards, rather than by land, the colonies kept the maritime outlook that characterized the world they came from, and neighbors of the sort they already knew. Colonies were usually sited on heavily indented coasts.⁹Yet they could have ended up looking very unlike home, for colonists were outcasts and exiles, criminals and bastards—breakaway frontiersmen forging a new society, not imperial paladins recreating Greece overseas.¹⁰In some places they began life by sheltering in pits.¹¹But nostalgia, the needs of commerce, and lack of imagination all conspired to keep them clinging tomiliar ties and patterns, reproducing the tastes of Greece, replicating its sentiments, receiving its visitors. Naucratis, the self-designated “polis” on the Nile Delta, had temples to Samian Hera and Milesian Apollo—among other shrines dedicated to Greek cults—and Ionic porticoes.¹²The sixth- and fifth-century dedications of votive cups to Aphrodite show a lively stream of Greek visitors: sex tourists, directed to Naucratis by Herodotus’s praise of the prostitutes; Herodotus himself, perhaps, if he can be identified with a pledge-giver of the same name; sober travelers, including Aristophanes and Solon, bound for Egypt on business or on a sort of grand tour in search of enlightenment by a great civilization.¹³

Meanwhile, growing contacts had enriched the inspiration of Greek artists and thinkers. The sea washed new cultural influences back towards Greece: the most striking example is the creation of a system of writing, loosely based on models picked up in the eastern Mediterranean, in the eighth century. It was rapidly used to record creative literature and to preserve the epics formerly recited by bards at warriors’ drinking parties: the Iliad, which bristles with masts, and the Odyssey, which is aloud with waves, are examples of the genre which have been admired—even revered—ever since. According to individual temperament and judgment, readers accept or reject the tradition that ascribes them to the single blind genius known as Homer: the evidence and the shelvesfull of strenuous, impassioned scholarship cannot sort the problem out. I have talked it over countless times with scholars and my elder son, who has convinced me that these are the best poems in the world. For my part, I cannot have them read without hearing the rattle of Homer’s cane; the conventions of oral transmission which ripple through the lines are, to me, examples of the poet’s mastery of traditional artifice; the occasionally convincing visions of the Bronze Age are not necessarily incorporations from more ancient works, just evidence of an inspired imagination.

For the Greeks always went beyond mere imitation when they received influences, whether from abroad or from an antiquity that was in some sense their own. Sculptures, buildings, and vase-paintings of the seventh and sixth centuries began to anticipate the classical styles. Greeks of later periods remembered the sixth century B.C. as an age of great sages who grappled with the fundamental problems of science and society: men like Solon, who in the 590 s B.C. pronounced laws for Athens in verse; or Thales, who predicted an eclipse in 585
B.C.; or Anaximander, who made the first world map known to the Greeks in about 550 B.C., and who tried to imagine how the universe originated in a vortex whirling in space; or Pythagoras, a superman credited by his followers with miraculous powers and a golden thigh, who still features in every school curriculum for work attributed to him on the mathematics of right-angled triangles. The schools of the sages flourished on the rim of the Greek world—in the west, in Italy, in Pythagoras’s case, but mostly in the east, in islands off what is nowTurkey. Even at the height of the classical age, teachers such as Plato and Aristotle still remembered that their traditions of learning were heavily indebted to what they called “Asia,” which, to them, included Egypt. The extent of their debt to Egypt has got confused in recent and current debate, with the problem of how far Egyptian civilization was “African” and Athena, by extension, “black.” This battle of the books is being fought on a field which the evidence cannot reach. It is true, however—and nothing in Greek civilization can be understood without admitting it—that Greece was a land open to the eastern Mediterranean and Greek culture was fashioned by influences from all around the sea’s rim.¹⁴

Early in the next century, the Greek communities, cooperating in defense, achieved security against their main enemies—the Etruscans in the west and the Persians in the east. But they continued to fight among themselves, as well as to compete, one city against another, in the creation of magnificent civic spaces and art, and in the celebration of public spectacles, especially plays and body-breaking sports.

The Claim of Poseidon: Athens and the Sea

Thanks in part to an incomparable terrestrial asset—the silver mines of nearby Laurion—by the fifth century B.C. the richest and most powerful Greek city on the Ionic Peninsula was Athens, with a fleet big enough to force many other cities to pay tribute. Here, Poseidon was said to have disputed possession with Athena, lashing the nearby cliffs with waves churned by his trident. Though we think of Athens as a state organized for art, its own citizens’ priorities were war and wealth; and their moralists tended to emphasize the priority of the former. Athens would be safe, according to the words Aristophanes put into the mouth of a playwright of revered high seriousness, “when they shall count the enemy’s soil their own, and . . . when they know that ships are their true wealth, their so-called wealth delusion.”¹⁵

War, art, and spectacle absorbed a lot of treasure. But, partly because politicaldecisions were made by a relatively large assembly of citizens,¹⁶Athenians also put a high value on education, especially in the arts of speaking and writing to persuade. These circumstances helped to make classical Athens one of the most fertile nurseries of genius the world has ever seen. Ruins on a hill where some of the most important civic spaces were concentrated help to suggest what it was like. The building on the summit was the temple of the goddess who was supposed to look after the city: like the city she guarded, Athena sprang armed for war but was said, above all, to love wisdom. Her temple was called the Parthenon, or House of the Virgin, because, in the family of gods imagined by the Greeks of the time, she was unmarried. Even in its ruined state it is widelyacclaimed as the most beautiful building ever created; certainly it is the most often imitated.

Below stood the theater where literary competitions attracted the whole citizenry to watch. The surviving work of the dramatists is still regularly performed or imitated, especially the archetypal revenge saga of Aeschylus, the Oresteia, and the seminal tragedy of Sophocles, Oedipus the King. The latter work inspired Aristotle’s abiding definition of tragedy as a tale of downfall caused not by misfortune but by the hero’s flawed character.¹⁷It gave its name to the complex Freud claimed to detect in his own subconscious. Even the tragedies, which take place in the intense, inbred, cramped settings of small courts, city-state elites, and dysfunctional royal families, are linked by offstage sea lanes to the wider world. The Oresteia is a tale of homecomings; Oedipus ends in exile.

In the colonnades around the public spaces, schools were set up. More than any other teachers—more, in fact, than any other Greeks—we remember the names of two: Plato and Aristotle. Like so many great teachers and pupils, they had a love-hate relationship, with Aristotle admiring his master but striving to prove him wrong. Plato fancied himself as a political thinker and made or started various attempts to describe the ideal society; these turned out to be chillingly authoritarian and unpleasant. His metaphysical speculations, however, are sublime. They can hardly be summarized without being traduced. All subsequent Western philosophy, it has been said, consists of “footnotes to Plato,” but perhaps the essence of his teaching was that there are real objects and events beyond what our thoughts and senses tell us. His importance lay less in the contributions he made on his own account than in the comprehensive array of classical thought his dialogues mustered. His language preserves some of the poetic genius and elusiveness in which the sages of earlier generations spoke. Perceptions are like the shadows on the wall that delude the cave-dweller; the soul is like a sea god, deformed by the erosion, barnacled by the accretions of long submersion, but capable of rising from the weeds and rocks to recover beauty and truth.¹⁸

Among Aristotle’s many contributions, the most outstanding was the formulation of the rules of logic, by which, starting from what we think to be true, we can work out trustworthy conclusions. His status in this respect would surely have surprised him. He was a physician’s son from Stagira—a part of Greece, close to the edge of barbarism, that had never produced great thinkers before. His family served at the court of a northern tyrant, as he himself was to do in middle age. His father was the court medic, and Aristotle’s favorite study was biology, dissection his preferred technique. When he came to logic, he analyzed propositions into their parts as an anatomist chops up frogs. He never thought reason could guide him to the truth unaided; it had to start from observations of fact and be subjected to tests of verifiability from the world of the senses. For him, nature was displayed to be explored, not concealed to be excogitated. Hewas what we should now call an empiricist: he demanded evidence, not just thought, in the quest for truth. But he was the best analyst ever of how reason works, as far as it works at all.¹⁹

Many generations of schoolboys in the Western world must have had the same experience of Plato and Aristotle as that described by W.K.C. Guthrie in his great book on Greek philosophy. He admired the former, but understood the latter. At first, he thought this was because Aristotle’s thought was precociously “modern.” Only when he grew up did he realize that it was the other way round: it is not that Aristotle thinks like us but that we, saturated in his influence, think like Aristotle.²⁰He changed everything his thought touched. “The fathers,” according to a character in The Name of the Rose,

had said everything that needed to be known about the power of the Word, but then Boethius had only to gloss the Philosopher and the divine mystery of the Word was transformed into a human parody of categories and syllogism. The book of Genesis says what has to be known about the composition of the cosmos, but it sufficed to rediscover the Physics of the Philosopher to have the universe reconceived in terms of dull and slimy matter. . . .²¹

By the closing years of the fifth century, when Plato was a young man, Athens had lost its political preponderance, defeated by alliances of other cities. From the fourth century B.C., all the Greek communities were overshadowed or controlled by new foreign empires—first Macedonia’s, then Rome’s. But this only meant a wider extension of Greek civilization as both the Macedonians and Romans absorbed Greek culture and carried its fruits to new conquests farther afield.

Still, in spite of the unique contribution made by the ancient Greeks to the rest of the world, we should beware of idealizing them, as so many historians have done in the past. What was most enduring in their heritage was, in its day, the most eccentric: Socrates was condemned to suicide; Aristotle was driven from Athens and died in exile. Pythagoras was probably killed by rioting specimens of common Greek man; Sophocles had to defend himself against a charge of insanity. Plato abandoned politics in disgust. At one point, Aristotle withdrew to a cave, and Diogenes to a barrel. Most Greeks did not share the philosophers’ reasoned vision of the world but saw it as the playground of capricious gods and demons, who had to be appeased by bloody sacrifices. When we think of classical buildings or statues, we should not see them in the pure, gleaming “ classical” taste which intervening centuries have shared, but in the gaudy, strident colors in which they were painted in their day. We ought to base our ideas of the Greeks’ moral code on the coarse street-wisdom of comic playwrights rather than the refined school-wisdom of philosophers. And although it is true thatdemocracy was transmitted to the modern world from ancient Greek examples, we should remember that democracy in those days was a harsh and rigid system, which excluded from power huge classes, including women and slaves.

A Hellenic Cruise: Five Wonders of Antiquity

A society defined by its relationship with the sea is best understood through its sailors rather than its scientists. The Greeks’ own perception of the seaboard nature of their world can be shared by readers of the adventures of Odysseus and the Argonauts; but it may make for a more realistic reconstruction of a historical experience of the Greeks’ seas if we accompany a guided tour of its most recommended sites—a holiday of a kind genuinely available in the second century B.C.

The “Seven Wonders”—the number is approximate, as guide-writers’ selections varied—singled out by the ancients for enduring awe were built over a period of two thousand years. Except for token nominations which could be seen in inland Egypt and Babylon, they were all of Greek workmanship, and clustered on the well-frequented sea routes that bound the Greek world and the eastern Mediterranean together. In the two millennia since their completion, all but one have been lost to earthquake, subsidence, pillage, and neglect. But the minds that conceived them, the techniques that devised them, the societies that made sacrifices for them are all revealed in glimpses by descriptions compiled at the time. We can identify what made them wonderful.

In the 1950 s, when an American engineering magazine polled its readers’ selection of seven modern wonders, Chicago’s sewage disposal system headed the list.²²By ancient standards, this would have been daft as well as depressing. For the compilers of ancient lists, wonders were not distinguished solely or specially by technical prowess or social utility. They were spectacula —visible marvels, to be beheld with awe, “sights” in a modern tourist’s sense of the word. The first quality they all had to display was prominence.

None exemplifies this quality better than the lighthouse of Alexandria at Pharos. It was the last wonder to be built, and its surviving fragments are also the last to be recovered. In recent years, an underwater archaeology project has been scouring Alexandria’s old submerged seafront for stones that toppled into the harbor as the pharos crumbled away with neglect six hundred years ago, under Muslim rulers who disdained the monuments of paganism. The excavations have to be scrutinized with caution: Alexandria had one of the most sumptuous seaside esplanades in antiquity, and most of what the sea claimed belonged to other buildings. But in granite lumps now being hoisted from the harbor bottom it may be possible to identify some of what the Mediterranean left in ruins when it took revenge on the original, exemplary lighthouse of the world.

The name of the pharos provides words for “lamp” and “lighthouse” inmany modern languages. Ancient texts praised its worth as an aid to pilots through the rocky harbor entrance. Yet it was not a lighthouse in the modern sense. It was not there to warn shipping off, but to draw it in. The pharos was a giant advertisement for Alexandria—the showiest of many promotional projects by which a newly founded boomtown turned itself into the cynosure of the Mediterranean, “the greatest trading-place of the inhabited world.” It stood over three hundred feet high. Its gleaming white walls were surmounted by lavish statuary. Its great mirror of burnished bronze, reflecting sunlight by day and fire by night, could be seen—by a reliable report—thirty-five miles away. Yet it was not so much for the ships that its light shone as for the Alexandrians themselves, signaling their self-perception to the world, exalting their kings, proclaiming their civic pride, flaunting the wealth of their elite, and advertising their commercial values. While waiting for more clues from the relocated ruins, we can use ancient descriptions and depictions to reconstruct an image not only of the pharos itself but also of the society it illuminated.

The site of Alexandria was picked out by Alexander the Great in 331 B.C. on his way upriver from his coronation as pharaoh. He was besotted with his divine self-image and obsessed by his plan for uniting Greek and Egyptian traditions. For want of other materials, the plan of the city, with the locations of temples for Greek and Egyptian gods, was traced on the earth in handfuls of ground corn, which the seers interpreted as a sign of future prosperity.

When the visionary conqueror died and his empire was divided among his generals, Egypt fell to the most successful of them: Ptolemy returned to Alexandria to build a capital for himself, and a shrine for his dead master’s body—the most precious relic of the Hellenistic world—away from the haunts of earlier pharaohs, facing Greece. He called for a street three hundred feet across, colonnaded throughout, and a palace complex that came to fill more than a quarter of the city, enclosing not only royal apartments but also an archetypal “science area”—the zoo, the biggest library in the Western world, and the Museion, “the bird-coop of the Muses,” where, according to one critic of the academic life, “cloistered bookworms get fed, endlessly bickering.”²³

The island of Pharos, where the lighthouse stood, was an Alexandria in miniature. Crammed inside its curtain wall were native Egyptians, who liked to be mummified for burial but lapped up Greek language and culture. Here you could listen to Alexandria’s characteristic babble, which grated on the ears of the historian Polybius: “the native Egyptians, sharp-tempered and uncivilized; the crowd of overbearing and unbiddable mercenaries; and the Alexandrian citizens—a mixed lot, who, though not entirely reliable, are of Greek origin and have not forgotten the Greek way of life.”²⁴This settler society needed the pharos: the rootless needed a symbol of identity; the restless needed a magnet for the wealth they craved.

The pharos reflected and attracted that wealth. The ships that passed underits light paid tolls of up to 50 percent of the luxuries they brought from the Aegean and the Black Seas: Rhodian wines, Athenian honey, Pontic nuts, Byzantine dried fruit and fish, Chian cheese. By about 270 B.C., when the lighthouse was completed, the trade already touched Sicily and southern Italy. By the end of the century, it reached Gaul and Spain. Images of overpowering opulence fill a description of the court rites of the reign of Philadelphus, Ptolemy’s successor, when most of the work on the pharos was done: statues of Victory with golden wings, gold crowns, and horns of plenty, altars, tripods, and mixing bowls for sacrificial libations, statues of satyrs and cupbearers, all in gold, with hangings and tapestries from Persia and Phoenicia.²⁵

The pharos was built for commercial Alexandria by courtly Alexandria. By the latest scholarly consensus, the principal patron was Sostratus of Cnidus, who served Ptolemy and Philadelphus as courtier, bureaucrat, and ambassador. His world can be approached through the poetry of Callimachus, the laureate of early Alexandria and one of the most widely imitated poets ever. It was a twofaced world, gazing with abject flattery on the throne, celebrating the apotheosis of one queen or the “rape” of a lock of another’s hair. Deposited in a royal temple in 216 B.C. as an earnest for the safe return of a campaigning king, the lock, in Callimachus’s imagination, was filched by a jealous love-goddess to be hidden among the stars.

The courtier world’s other face was turned towards a demimonde darkened by the disasters of gay love and the frustrations of fastidious taste. One of Callimachus’s most touching poems regrets a rent boy whose grasping mother found a richer client; yet the poet also abhorred “a boy whom any man can have; nor do I drink from a public fountain. All common things disgust me.”²⁶These fussy, fantastical Alexandrians loved Books of Wonders²⁷ and gave the world one of its acknowledged wonders in the pharos. Though it took a long time to establish its place on conventional lists, the lighthouse embodied the features commonly admired in all the conventionally identified seven sights. As well as conspicuousness, it evinced defiance of nature, size, swagger, originality, opulence, and an awesome character that made it more than merely profane. For the site was sacred to Proteus, the ever-coiling sea-god. The guardian statues of its light were of Zeus the Supreme Savior and of Tritons blowing their horns, perhaps by mechanical contrivance, as an additional signal to shipping.

The technical wizardry by which it worked, which baffled medieval visitors,-still defies attempts at reconstruction. Outwardly, it resembled the images preserved on coins. By the latest theory, it was built of granite faced with white limestone, on a tall plinth, with a short, tapering first floor and an upper tower. Reconstructions which show a high fire-chamber, modern-style, must be dismissed as fanciful. No authentic descriptions mention any means of carrying fuel aloft, nor is there likely to have been any permanent flame: fuel in Alexandria was among the rarest of commodities. The bronze mirror, shattered by hamhandedmedieval workmen during an attempted restoration, was the means by which a small fire in the bowels of the building was magnified and diffused.²⁸

Nighttime navigation, however, was shunned in antiquity, and it was by day that the pharos was most effective as a beacon, trapping sunlight in its mirror and throwing a concentrated beam out to sea. Its purpose was not so much to lighten the darkness as to dazzle the day. Like all the wonders of antiquity, it was built more for ostentation than use. Arrogance was a virtue to compilers of ancient wonder-lists.

To qualify as a wonder in a maritime civilization, it helped to be conspicuous-from the sea. In this respect, the pharos was rivaled by a monument which exemplified arrogance to excess and defied good taste in straining for ostentation. The Mausoleum of Halicarnassus dazzles by disproportion. It was built to inter a man of small importance. Mausolus, who died in about 351 B.C., was the kind Greek writers abhorred: a half-barbarian by birth, he ruled his native Caria, on what is now the coast of Turkey, on the Persian emperor’s behalf. He was his sister’s husband—practitioner of a tradition of dynastic incest which revolted the Greeks. In Athens, he had a reputation as a grasping miser, an unreliable ally, and a treacherous foe. Despite selectively Hellenizing tastes, he also favored Oriental arts; indeed, the mausoleum was an original work because of its departures from Greek aesthetics. Though idolized by his sister-wife, who at his death held games in his honor and poured money into the completion of his tomb, he was a ruler of a small principality, whose attainments in diplomacy and war were modest. But for the mausoleum, he would be barely remembered and rarely recalled.

Nor was his tomb calculated to appeal to Greek taste. Caria must have been much richer in antiquity than its parched aspect would suggest today. But the monument was built on the cheap, with marble veneers of varying quality, for a patron anxious to keep money hoarded. Stylistically, it was a glorious mess. It echoed local tombs, Numidian pyres, and the sepulcher of a Persian emperor. Its top story imitated an ancient Egyptian step-pyramid. The main architectural element of Greek origin—a peristyle of columns supporting the pyramid—would have struck a Greek onlooker as a blasphemous imitation of a temple. The closest approximation to what it must have looked like can be seen today in Melbourne, where the national memorial to the dead of the First World War reflects the influence of archaeologists’ attempted reconstructions.

It was gaudy, even by the standards of the time, with a troop of guardian lionspicked out in alternate red and white. It was big— 130 feet on a side at the base and nearly 140 feet to the top of the well-carved chariot-team that crowned the pyramid—but not big enough to impress by size alone. The first clue to what made it admirable is disclosed by the quality of some of the hundreds of sculptures with which it was smothered, especially the surviving portrait-statues of Mausolus himself and his grieving sister-wife. The identifications are speculative;but whom better could the statues represent?²⁹Early observers of the tomb were so impressed by the best of the carvings that they attributed them, plausibly, to the most renowned Greek sculptors of the time. Thus, seen close-up, the mausoleum had some claim to be rated as a wonder. From far off, it had the advantage of a brilliantly calculated setting. Halicarnassus was a town created by Mausolus’s act—forged from a higgledy-piggledy scattering of villages. He designed the layout, around the projected site of his tomb, with consciously theatrical contrivance, for maximum dramatic effect: the eye of any seaborne pilgrim, passing to or from Ephesus, would certainly be caught. Finally, the mausoleum was admirable for the kind of sheer braggadocio evident in other aspects of Mausolus’s behavior: his wriggling to be free of tributary relationships with more powerful neighbors, his reputation for rapacity in taxation, his heavy spending on fortifications and ships. The success which eluded him in his lifetime he achieved in death: a hero’s burial and even, perhaps, the immortality of a god. What was that elegant chariot-team waiting for above his tomb, if not to bear him to heaven?

Halicarnassus was abandoned by its last inhabitants, probably in the seventh-century A.D., but the mausoleum was still standing, crumbling and overgrown, when the Knights Hospitaller reoccupied and fortified the place in the fifteenth century. They demolished what was left of the monument between 1494 and 1522, in order to rebuild their castle, cannibalizing the building blocks and burning the marble for lime.³⁰

Close to other sites at Ephesus and Rhodes, the mausoleum was handily placed on the route of a tourist bent on seeing the wonders of antiquity. Southbound on the same route, any shipboard tourist would strain for the first view of a building that evoked a mystical response in its onlookers, for reasons we can no longer reconstruct with certainty. The earliest compiler of a list of seven wonders claimed to have “gazed on the walls of impregnable Babylon, along which chariots may race, and on the Zeus by the banks of the Alphaeus. I have seen,” he said,

the Hanging Garden and the Colossus of the Sun-god, the great manmade mountains of the lofty Pyramids and the huge tomb of Mausolus. But when I saw the sacred house of Artemis that towers to the clouds, the others all paled by comparison, for the sun himself has never seen its equal outside heaven.³¹

This seems a disproportionate assessment of a building which—to judge from what little is known of its outward appearance—was the least admirable of the acknowledged wonders of antiquity. It was unattractively sited, on low and swampy ground. It was admittedly large, rich, ostentatious, and lavishly decorated. But many other temples of the Greek world were superior in some or allof these respects. The house of Artemis was not produced by any special ingenuity of construction. The cult statue it contained was of Oriental craftsmanship and taste and did not conform to the ideals of Greek aesthetics: instead of the gossamer-clad huntress familiar in classical art, the Artemis of Ephesus was an Asiatic earth-mother, erect and unblinking, dangling swollen dugs from all over her ample torso.

To understand the impact of her dwelling, we have to delve below the surface-of outward appearances to unearth the mysterious evocative power that made so deep an impression on the ancients. Of course, the reputation of the temple owed much to clever commercial image-projection. The lines in which it was praised above rival wonders may have been a promotional jingle of the second century B.C. Antipater of Sidon, the author of the verses, must, one suspects, have been paid by priestesses of Ephesus, anxious to stimulate the pilgrim and tourist trades. Some two hundred years later, the same anxiety drove Ephesian rioters to expel St. Paul. The entrepreneur who controlled the market in silver statuettes of the goddess feared Paul’s claim that “gods made by human hands are not gods at all.” He warned his audience, “It threatens not only to discredit our business, but could end up by taking away the prestige of a goddess venerated all over Asia and indeed all over the world.” The mob kept up the cry of “Great is Artemis of the Ephesians!” for two hours before Paul escaped.

Testimonies like these to the importance and ubiquity of the cult of Artemis of Ephesus are in themselves evidence of the attractions of her temple, which drew so many worshippers and sustained so much trade. The sanctity of the spot was of very long duration. The temple admired by Antipater had been preceded by others. Recent excavations have identified the ruins of a shrine of the eighth century B.C., which was destroyed by flood in the seventh century. A more splendid edifice, endowed by Croesus, the Lydian king of proverbial wealth, had replaced it by about 560 B.C., the date of the latest coins found among the offerings at the foundation level. The new temple was in turn destroyed in the mid-fourth century B.C. —reputedly fired by a mad arsonist who hoped to make his name infamously memorable. The Ephesians refused Alexander the Great’s offer to pay for the next rebuilding on the grounds—so it was said—that “one god should not make offerings to another.”

Nevertheless, during a process of construction and decoration which occupied-more than a hundred years, offerings from far and wide combined to create a monument of considerable magnificence. Much of what we know of its building history is owed to the efforts of John Turtle Wood, who in 1863 abandoned his job as a designer of stations for the Smyrna Railway to launch the first search for a lost building of antiquity. After six years of digging in apparently more likely places, he found the ruins under twenty feet of mud. His successors today have been able to continue the work he began only by draining the waterlogged site.

The temple stood on a platform 430 feet long, approached over a plinth of stepped marble. The goddess’s chamber was surrounded by a grove of 127 Ionic columns, fluted and decorated—in defiance of the usual canons of Greek taste—with friezes at their bases. The entrance and pediment were guarded by statues of Amazons, who, according to legend, had been among the pilgrims who found sanctuary under the protection of Artemis or succor at those prodigious breasts. As time went on, votive offerings accumulated. More statues topped the entablature, and plaques and shields gleamed below it.

Pilgrims’ oblations made this temple rich, but its wealth was not the source of its wonder. Each of the seven wonders evinced in a peculiar way the qualities they all shared. The pyramids were especially noteworthy for their size, the Zeus of Olympia for opulence, the mausoleum for arrogance, the Hanging Garden of Babylon for sheer defiance of nature. The Colossus was the supreme example of technical inventiveness. The pharos was, above all, conspicuous. Although the temple of Artemis possessed a little of all these qualities, it could equal none of the other wonders in any of them. Its special property—in which it exceeded its rivals, and which made it a favorite of the compilers of wonder lists, was the awe inspired by the sacred.

The house of Artemis was hallowed by a peculiarly intense holiness. Here, Heraclitus fled to escape mankind. Here, other fugitives, who thought on a smaller scale, came to find sanctuary from their enemies. Here, the emperor Julian was secretly initiated in paganism. The worship of the goddess was richly ritualistic when clouds of incense obscured the sun, or when the cult statue was carried in procession, with magnificent civic mummery and smoking sacrifices, to attend performances in the theater. The cult became beguilingly magical when Artemis, summoned by rites at the outdoor altar in the temple enclosure, was supposed to appear to her worshippers in a window of the pediment. If we find it hard to understand the attraction of the temple in its day, it is perhaps because we have lost the sense of reverence which the temple of Artemis inspired: the ability to recognize the sacred in our own works and to respond to it with worship.³²

The westernmost of the seven wonders, the huge statue of Zeus at Olympia, was the most lavish artifact of antiquity. On Greece’s eastern island rim, the even bigger Colossus of Rhodes was the most technically daring. The Zeus was a symbol of pan-Hellenic feeling, the Colossus an assertion of local identity in the aggressive arena of competition between Greek states. According to a Renaissance myth, the Colossus “bestrode” the harbor of Rhodes, as ships passed in and out between its legs. This was a silly fantasy. But, between them, the Zeus and the Colossus could be said to bestride the Greek world.

Like the pharos of Alexandria, which was built in the same period, the Colossus was a giant advertisement, designed to be visible from far off and to draw shipping to the Rhodians’ rich emporium. It celebrated the defeat of attackers from Macedon in 304 B.C., when, to win deliverance from the greatestcrisis in the history of the island, slaves were armed by their masters and women gave their hair for bowstrings. The Colossus—“a second sun to shine like the first” in a city already adorned with a hundred great statues—was paid for, in part, by the sale of the seige train abandoned in the Macedonian retreat. The dedication read:

To thy very self, O Sun, did the people of Dorian Rhodes raise high to heaven this colossus . . . when they crowned the country with the spoils of their foes. Not only over the sea but also over the land they spread the lovely light of unfettered freedom. For to those who spring from the race of Heracles dominion is a heritage both on land and sea.

It sounds contradictory today, but for the Rhodians freedom meant superiority over competitors.

More, however, than a thank offering for past achievement, the Colossus was an investment for future profit. Rhodians were renowned for business. “Ten Rhodians, ten ships,” the saying went.³³By signaling their harbor with the world’s most conspicuous statue, they could honor their sun god and advertise their wares.

At seventy cubits—probably about 120 feet—the statue was intended to be nearly twice the size of anything then standing in the Greek world. The sculptor chosen was Chares, a native Rhodian with unrivaled experience in monumental bronze-casting. According to a technical study made before the disappearance of the Colossus, he began with a plinth of white marble “so high as to overtop other statues,” to which he fixed the feet. He then built an inner framework of stone pillars, connected by iron rods “hammered as if by Cyclopean force.”

Over the twelve years the job lasted, each part of the statue’s body was separately modeled, perhaps in plaster, then cast in bronze and added to the outer cladding. As the work advanced, to provide a working surface around the statue, Chares built an ever-rising ramp of earth, broad as Trafalgar Square and high as Nelson’s column. “He expended as much bronze,” said the technical report, “as seemed likely to create a dearth at the foundries, for the casting of this statue was the metal-working wonder of the world.”

For visibility, the Colossus must have stood on high ground, overlooking the harbor—perhaps in the citadel area, where the Church of St. John of the Colossus now stands, or on Mount Smith, in the western corner of the ancient town. It must have represented the sun god in a characteristic pose: with feet together, shielding his eyes—as in a contemporary carving—or holding aloft the “light of liberty,” which was praised in the statue’s dedicatory inscription and copied by Gustave Eiffel when he designed the modern successor of the Colossus for the New York Harbor.

The statue’s knees buckled in an earthquake in 226 or 227 B.C. Most of theadmirers who hailed it as a wonder saw it only in its collapsed condition: an embodiment of the tragic principle, flawed and floored by unmitigated ambition. Rhodians revered all statues; they even respected those of their enemies, preferring to wall them up rather than destroy them. But to the Muslims who raided the island in 654 A.D., a fallen idol was good only for scrap: nine hundred camels were said to have been needed to remove the fragments.³⁴

The Zeus of Olympia has also vanished without a trace. It was looted when Christianity replaced paganism, then destroyed in a fire in the fifth century A.D., when it was about a thousand years old. Its appearance, at least, is documented in pilgrims’ texts and depicted on coins and gems. Wrought entirely in the gold and ivory favored for the finest votive statues of the gods, it dazzled on a scale unrivaled by other works of comparable opulence. Zeus was shown seated, in gold mantle and sandals, holding a scepter and a figure of Victory. His olive-wreath crown almost touched the roof of the temple, over forty feet high, where priests kept the statue constantly anointed. It was a triumph of realism as well as of recklessness. The sculptor was said to have captured the moment when Zeus unleashed a thunderbolt by wrinkling his brow. The temple had a gallery for visitors to climb and examine the god’s lively expression close-up.

The image of the sculptor is almost easier to recover than that of the statue. He was the famous Pheidias, who crafted some of the finest carvings of the Parthenon. His workshop has been excavated alongside the statue’s former site, yielding scraps of ivory, moldings for the god’s mantle, discarded tools, and a jug inscribed “I belong to Pheidias.” He decorated Zeus’s throne not only with the conventional scenes of centaurs, Amazons, and Herculean labors, but also with an allusion to his lover, Pantarkes, shown winning the boys’ wrestling contest at the Olympic games of 436 B.C.

The games—rites sacred to Zeus—happened every four years, during five days of blistering heat at the end of the harvest. Greeks suspended their wars and traveled from their remotest colonies to take part, for Heracles was said to have “founded the Olympics to mark the beginning of amity among the Greeks.”³⁵Characteristically, they expressed their unity in emulous sports, and the prestige of states could be affected by the outcome of contests. In 416 , the reputation of Athens was transformed—“when they thought we had been ruined by war”—by victory in the chariot races. In the 330 s, Philip of Macedon celebrated his charioteers’ success by building a cenotaph for himself in Zeus’s sacred grove. The grove was strewn with temples and statues made to mark individual victories. The very temple of Zeus itself—when first erected in 456 B.C. —had been a thank offering for victory in war. But the statue of the god transcended all rivalries, erected by subscriptions from all over the Greek world: a realization of that “Olympic spirit” idealized since antiquity and regularly honored and dishonored to this day.³⁶

So the wonder lists of antiquity were dominated by sailors’ landmarks—Colossus,pharos, mausoleum—and the seaside shrines of Zeus and Artemis. The Greeks built a world as far removed from savagery as they could make it: as consciously artificial, as resolutely constructed. But they kept close to the sea. Though they despised the wild, they knew, too, that they were inseparable from nature. When they depicted themselves, they used the earth-sprung materials of which, they believed, they were really made. They wrenched their self-sculptures from stones and metals, twisted their shapes out of the entrails of the earth.³⁷

Around the Middle Sea:
Ancient Rome as a Seaboard Civilization

Romans hated and feared the sea. “Whoever first dared to float a ship on the grim sea,” wrote one Roman poet to another in about 30 B.C., “must have had a heart of oak coated with a triple layer of bronze.”³⁸In Ovid’s version of the story of Medea, she hesitates to take Jason as a lover out of fear of the prospective ocean voyage. Yet these reluctant sailors made the Mediterranean their own—“ mare nostrum,” as they called it, lining it with territories they conquered.

In the last two centuries B.C., they extended and strengthened the Mediterranean network created by Greek traders and settlers. It became possible to speak of a “Mediterranean world” bound together more closely—by more continuities of politics, economics, and culture—than ever before or since. The always unsatisfied search for secure frontiers led Romans beyond the Mediterranean Basin to the Rhine and across the English Channel. But Roman civilization remained dependent on the sea as a principal axis of communications and a channel along which traveled taste and trade, ideas and artifacts, people and influences.

How they did it is a mystery—one of the biggest unsolved problems in the history of the world. The Romans started as a small community of peasants, huddling for defense in an unstrategic spot, on poor soil, unendowed with metals, and unprovided with a port. Their own historians created the myth of an essentially peaceful people, who acquired empire by accident and made their conquests in the course of self-defense. In reality, they became warlike by necessity: they had no way of gaining wealth except at their neighbors’ expense. They developed a society organized for war, with victory as its supreme value. Roman citizens owed the state at least sixteen years of military service and were schooled in the belief that “to die for the fatherland is sweet and fitting.” Victories were celebrated in public parades of booty known as “triumphs.” Virtues of patience and forbearance were particularly cultivated, so that Rome was exceptionallywell equipped morally to tough out defeats: like those other great imperialists, the British in the nineteenth century, they could “lose battles but win wars.”

Rome showed no vocation to be other than a land power until nearly the end of the third century B.C., when, having reached the limits of landward expansion in Italy, Romans were tempted towards the wealth of Sicily, Sardinia, and Spain. There they encountered the power of the most formidable naval empire of the western Mediterranean, Carthage. Reluctantly, but with unstinting and ultimately unstoppable commitment, Rome took to the sea to beat the Carthaginians in their own element.

The Germans, however, whose territories lay beyond those of the Celts, seemed, to most Romans, unworthy even of conquest—“wild creatures” incapable of civilized arts. Except for a few relatively brief forays, the Romans left them to their own devices. This was probably a mistake. Had the Roman world absorbed all the people settled on its frontiers, it might, like that of China at the other end of the Eurasian steppe, have survived for millennia as the guardian of a common heritage of sedentary peoples against the nomads outside. Instead, almost all the Germans were left in resentful exclusion and took their revenge when they could.

Once imposed, Roman power survived by winning or forcing the collaboration of local elites: magistrates of conquered communities, chieftains of tribes. Iberian officials, for instance, followed Roman law in making adjudications which they ordered to be carved in bronze. Hebrew kings and German warchiefs retained their authority under license from Rome. At one level the empire was a federation of cities, at another a federation of peoples, with Greeks predominating as Rome’s partners in the east and Celts in the west.

Roman self-consciousness, Latin speech, and Mediterranean ways of life were spread around the empire by colonies and garrisons. Colonists on the Atlantic shore of Portugal, where the salt spray corroded the mosaics, tore down their city center in the first century A.D. to rebuild it in the image of Rome.

Sewers in Spain, pediments in Pannonia, sarcophagi in Syria spread the instantly recognizable “classical” style of Roman art. A veteran in frontier Cologne, on the Rhine, reclined, attended by his wife and son, with food and wine arrayed before him, just like a patrician back in Rome. A tombstone in northern Britain commemorates a sixteen-year-old Syrian boy who died in what his mourners thought of as the dwelling place of the Cimmerians—the rainy, foggy land Homer had imagined on the way to Hades.³⁹Roman culture was so well known on the same remote island that engravers in the third century could recall famous lines of Virgil’s to the minds of members of the public simply by stamping coins with the initial letters.

Trade as well as war shipped elements of a common civilization around this world. The empire worked by enriching its subjects as well as by coercing them. In the first century A.D., for instance, merchants from a clan in the Duero Valley in Spain were buried in Hungary. Greek potters made huge jars in which wine was carried from Andalusia to Provence. Because the Roman empire represented an extension of Mediterranean civilization beyond the basin of that sea, Mediterranean products were among the most widely exported; but as industries became geographically specialized, commercial relationships crisscrossed the entire empire. In southwestern Spain, for instance, huge evaporators survive from the factories where garum—the empire’s favorite fish-sauce—was made from the blood and entrails of tuna and mackerel. Northeastern Gaul was a center of cloth manufacture; the lives of the merchants are engraved on a mausoleum at Igel, on the frontier of Germany and Luxembourg. They conveyed great bales of finished cloth by road and river and sold it in elegant shops, banqueting on the profits they made at feasts designed to highlight their superior status over farming neighbors.

Petronius’s fictional merchant Trimalchio, who gave the most notorious of such banquets, was the archetypal nouveau riche; he employed a trumpeter to sound the hours “to let him know from time to time how much of his span of life has gone by.”⁴⁰Clock-watching was already a bourgeois vice. He had himself painted in the company of gods and kept his first shavings in a golden casket. He ordered ships under full rig to be carved on his monument. His fleets sailed every sea of Roman commerce. He “had bees fetched from Athens, that he might have Attic honey, home-made. . . . It was only the other day he wrote to India for wild mushroom-seed.”⁴¹He lost thirty million sesterces in the shipwreck of a single wine shipment and more than made it up on the next. Theoverladen merchant’s dinner table was already a standing joke when Petronius overdid it. Horace was entertained to “honey-apples picked by the light of a waning moon.”⁴²It was a trick of his poetry to rely on exotica for sonorous effects; his work is therefore a treasure trove of images of imports. Derision for the merchant’s vocation was another favorite device of Horace’s to create an atmosphere of prejudice in favor of the virtuous simplicity of his own Sabine farm. His verses are therefore full of allusions to the range of trade: to the heaps of wheat from Sardinian granaries, the Indian gold and ivory, the Syrian drinking vessels piled by those “dear to the gods, who can visit the Atlantic sea twice or thrice a year and come back unharmed.”⁴³The residual values of a military and agricultural society—the values by which Rome had begun—were never displaced; but values of a seaward-looking society, commercial and far-venturing, gradually joined them.

The empire is often said to have “declined” and “fallen,” but it would be fairer to say that it was gradually transformed out of existence. A critical part of the story can be read in Rome’s most famous ruins, those of the Forum—not in inscriptions but in the configurations of the stones. What we can now see dates overwhelmingly from the late third and early fourth centuries A.D. —a period of an extraordinarily concentrated burst of public projects by emperors who believed in the civic spirit, public rites, and pagan gods associated with Rome’s glorious former achievements. These monuments to pride in the past were destined to be stripped of their decoration and even plundered for their stones in a future of changed priorities. The biggest building of the Forum—the crushingly enormous new basilica of 306–12 A.D., whose huge niches dwarf their surroundings—was almost the last. Henceforth, the emperors were mostly Christians, content to let the old rites wither and the spaces built for them decay. The reign of the first Christian emperor, Constantine, was like a trench across the course of Roman history, diverting it into new channels. By founding a new capital in the east, he doomed the city of Rome to decline and the Forum to stagnation. Symbolically, his triumphal arch seals the view to the east. From a distance, it looks impressive enough, a proud reversion to imperial tradition; but by comparison with earlier arches, it is a shoddy piece of work, with inappropriate friezes recycled from other buildings. After his time, only the column of Phocas was added: a sentimental sentinel, watching over the Forum’s aging wreckage.

Meanwhile, the status of the city of Rome was threatened by the shifting political priorities which kept emperors in the east. The shift can be sensed today in the middle of Istanbul, at the highest point of the city, amid billowing exhaust fumes and flurries of dust. Here, charred, broken, and half buried, spoils of the ancient world still adorn the site chosen to be the new capital of the Roman empire in 323 A.D. The serpent throne of the Delphic oracle, obelisks of pharaonic Egypt, and a column carved with a hippodrome scene are almost all that is left of the ornaments of three continents, hurriedly scooped together togive instant dignity to the city. Under the column which supported Constantine’s statue were buried the Palladium of Troy, Aeneas’s own supposed icon of Athena, the sun rays of Apollo’s crown, the nails of Christ’s passion, and fragments of the True Cross—a “time capsule” of the era of the mutual transformation of paganism and Christianity.

On the long, rickety land frontier, the Roman empire was a victim of its own success. Excluded peoples wanted to get inside—not just as raiders or mercenaries but as permanent settlers and sharers in imperial prosperity. The pressure of their numbers proved irresistible. They were not, in most cases, as destructive of Roman civilization as is traditionally claimed: Germanic and Slavic peoples brought, in some respects, a new and culturally enriching heritage. But their arrival contributed to a long, slow process of change: political and cultural fragmentation which gradually elevated the power of small kingdoms in place of rule from Rome. Latin speech broke up into mutually unintelligible languages, and during the period of intensive colonization of the empire from outside, from the late fourth century A.D. onwards, the whole of the Roman world came to seem more variegated than before—like a kaleidoscope repeatedly shaken into more complex patterns.

Yet the essential unity of the Mediterranean shores —the shared feeling of belonging to a single civilization—survived until a sudden period of traumatic change which can be precisely dated to between 634 and 718 A.D. In those years, the once-secure frontiers on the desert-protected flanks of the Roman empire suddenly collapsed to invaders from Arabia—a region never before suspected of harboring a threat.

In 632, the prophet Muhammad had died, bequeathing a new religion which transformed the Arabs. His followers now had a disciplined and dynamic form of organization, and an ideology of holy war against unbelievers. By the time their conquests ran out of impetus—before the walls of Constantinople and in the mountains of northern Spain, towards the end of the second decade of the eighth century A.D. —they had severed Mediterranean civilization in two. They offered Rome neither the awe nor the allegiance inspired in earlier invaders. From now on, most of the lands they conquered belonged to a rival civilization, Islam.

The Reach of the Classics:
The Global Spread of the Greek and Roman Legacies

“Classic” works are those which never lose their influence or relevance. The civilization of Greece in the fifth and fourth centuries B.C. deserves to be called “classical” because people have gone on imitating it ever since. Thisduring place in memory and imagination is not easily achieved. The art and thought of our own times in what we call the Western world will never match it.

You can judge a civilization’s prospects by the confidence with which it builds for the future. Today, for instance, worthy monuments have not materialized to mark the two thousandth year of our era—investments in hope for a better millennium to come. From the Reichstag or Albertopolis to the Vigo Theme Park or the Cardiff Opera, current projects in Europe failed to inspire public passion. London’s Millennium Dome is a bauble: a vacuous bubble, doomed to deflate; the giant Ferris wheel overlooking Westminster seems a suitably ephemeral fairground joke—an ironic skit on a throwaway society. Appropriately, the Ferris wheel failed in time for New Year’s Eve, 1999, and mismanagement kept the celeb audience raging on the doorstep of the dome. All our dreaming seems directionless, and we have no standard by which to judge the plans.

Our traditional source of standards is classical antiquity—the parent civilization, as we like to think, of the modern “West.” Architects still copy its styles if they want to make a building look important or grand. Its works of art have never ceased to determine standards of beauty in the Western world. Paul Mc-Cartney launched his plan for a Performing Arts College in Liverpool at a party with a cake in the shape of the building he chose to house it: the ultimate model was an ancient Greek temple. The history of Western drama could be written entirely in terms of the influence of a handful of playwrights from fifth-c enturyB.C. Athens. The gods of the ancient Greeks have continued to supply artists with personifications of vice and virtue. And the work of thinkers of the classical period still supplies some of the techniques we use most regularly to try to tell truth from falsehood and right from wrong. No one can begin to understand the art, thought, or literature of the Western world in any intervening period without some knowledge of classical Greece. Nor do the frontiers of “the West” represent the limits of the reach of the classical legacy. It has gone on being projected—passed on to others by almost every people who received it—across the world.

This is a radically different kind of transmission from that which has taken Chinese influence out of its environment of origin, though it may be that in future China’s will be seen to be more lasting and pervasive. Though conquest, trade, and migration all played a part, the influences of Greece and Rome were spread to a remarkable degree by the self-ascription of admirers in other cultures. Moreover, the memory and images of the classical world were also broadcast—thanks to an extraordinary trick of historical accident—by Christian evangelists: people who repudiated the treasured gods of classical antiquity. For, in the last two centuries of the formal survival of the Roman empire in the West, state and church corrupted each other. An Oriental mystery-religion—a Jewish heresy, preached by a poor and eccentric rabbi in whom God was convincingly incarnate—appropriated the state’s channels of communication with cosmic powers. A faith, formerly of slaves, women, and the poor, captured an elite saturated in classical art, literature, and philosophy. Both Christianity and paganism in the fourth century shared a world of common assumptions: ethics which went back to the stoics, metaphysics to Plato, reasoning to Aristotle, models of political authority to Rome. The ascetics of both traditions were indistinguishable, with their fastidious diets and ostentatiously lice-filled beards. St. Jerome vowed to give up reading Virgil, but could not keep his vow. St. Augustine felt revulsion from the lubricious unsuitability of classical literature, but incorporated classical thought into the Christian tradition.

The remoter from Rome, the colder the climate, the harsher the environment, the more present or pressing the threat of barbarism—the more precious seemed the heritage of the ancient Mediterranean world. Almost all invaders of the empire felt its allure and, without necessarily sacrificing their own identities, became self-ascribed to its culture. Seduced by the warm south, Visigoths decorated rood screens with vines. Long-haired kings bore consular insignia and appropriated Roman governors’ oxcarts. A Russian tsar arrogated to himself a title of Constantine’s. A Frankish emperor slept in his boots in supposed imitation of Augustus. Anglo-Saxon poets paid tribute to the works of Roman “giants.” By the time the barbarians arrived, Christianity was an inseparable part of the Roman package. As the Roman empire blended into “Christendom,” the same sort of magnetism continued to pull in surrounding peoples, who coveted the relative wealth of the Christian world or admired its literacy and technology.

The story of how it happened is a very long one, best presented, perhaps, as a series of intermittent, dispersed scenes. The first can be set in the prison cell of the patrician Boethius, awaiting execution by order of the king he served, in Ostrogothic Italy in the mid-sixth century. Boethius was a hero of Western tradition, though his works have disappeared from shelves and syllabuses. Even among educated people, few now know his name and fewer still can put any facts to it. The context of his life can be rebuilt in the imagination among what survives of the churches and mausolea of Ravenna, one of the courtly centers of King Theodoric. Here, in glittering mosaics, the tiny tessellations that display a vanished way of life—of baptism, worship, work, and death—are pieced together. The Romans and Goths had their own baptisteries—almost identical, but adorned with different sets of saints. The division overspilled into conflict: Roman reconquest is recalled in the Church of San Vitale, with its triumphant icons of the entourage and person of Justinian, the emperor whom Boethius’s master flattered to fend. Boethius worked hard to romanize Theodoric. The limits of his success are obvious in the domed structure beneath which the king is buried: an eclectic extravagance of the sort fashionable in declining Rome, but unmistakably evocative of the mounds traditionally piled over dead Germanic war-chiefs.

Boethius was a victim of what would now be called “future shock.” In a world of bewildering change, where traditional values dissolved and traditional institutions collapsed, he clung to the old order, insisting on the continuity of the Roman empire, reveling in his sons’ election to consulships, and banking on the domestication of barbarian invaders. After many years in the king’s confidence, his vigilance for justice and his opposition to oppression (he thought) caused his downfall. He protected farmers from requisitions, fellow senators from persecution, and the entire Roman Senate from a collective charge of treason. Imprisoned in a brick tower in Pavia, he wrote The Consolation of Philosophy.

The “consolation,” in brief, is that his confinement must have been consistent-with the goodness of God. He singled out Plato and Aristotle as the only true philosophers. Plato better suited his mood in prison, but he had already summed up Aristotle’s principles of ratiocination in commentaries that would keep the tradition of formal logic alive through Europe’s “dark ages.” He prepared for death with a sense of aggrieved but resigned self-righteousness reminiscent of Socrates. The Consolation was a beautiful and influential book. It helped to fuse the classical, pagan value-system, which put happiness at the top, with the Christian tradition of self-sacrifice, self-abnegation, and deference to God. Happiness and God, Boethius argued, were identical.⁴⁴

From sixth-century Italy to the dark, dank chill of a Northumbrian monastery in the winter of 685 A.D., a place of gray stones overlooking a gray sea, where the cold seeped into the stones of the buildings and the bones of the inmates. In that season’s plague, the community almost died out. Only the abbot and one small boy were spared. The boy, despite the seniority conferred on him by survival when the monastery began to grow again, never attained any position of responsibility in his order. We can therefore assume that he had no administrative gifts. He was, however, an outstanding scholar. His name was Bede, and his thirty-five works of grammar, theology, history, Biblical commentary, and science made him one of the great ornaments of medieval learning, and the Northumbria of the early eighth century a beacon of light in the “dark ages.”

The most extraordinary thing about this Northumbrian “Renaissance”—the first in Europe to merit the name by historians’ general acclaim—is that it should have happened so far from the Mediterranean heartlands of classical European civilization. Bede’s Northumbria was almost as far from Rome as you could get without leaving the frontiers of the former empire. The nearest Roman monument of any size was Hadrian’s wall. The imperfect penetration of Roman culture is suggested by carvings in whalebone on a casket made in Northumbria probably in the generation before Bede’s birth. Alongside scenes of the birth of Christ and the suckling of Romulus and Remus, Wayland the Smith plots the rape of a princess and plans his escape on magic wings. That is how imaginations worked on dark-age frontiers, juggling Christian, Roman, and German myths, conjuring great art out of them. Here, Bede dreamed of Rome,doodled in Greek, wrote poems in Old English, and helped to rekindle lost learning in a land which had hardly known it before. On his deathbed, he was translating the Gospel of St. John and the works of an etymologist from Seville. With hindsight, it is easy to portray men like Boethius and Bede as builders of intellectual bunkers, frenziedly scraping together all the learning of the world before it should finally disappear under the rubble of shattered classicism. In reality, however, they were optimists, whose works were compiled to last, in conscious provision for a long posterity.⁴⁵

These features remained part of the profile of every subsequent renaissance. The classical heritage was not only revived but also transmitted into regions where it was formerly little known or had never reached. The Carolingian Renaissance of the early ninth century had widespread effects, but its core was at Aachen, in a frontier corner of the former Roman empire. The next great renaissance—the so-called Ottonian Renaissance of the late tenth century—happened in Saxony, which had hardly ever seen a real Roman. Yet here were copied comedies by Roswitha of Gandersheim in praise of chastity in the style of Terence and Plautus. The twelfth-century Renaissance not only extended the frontiers of Latin culture but also brought unfrequented recesses within Europe—peoples of forest, bog, and mountain—into the candle glow of scholarship. From Quattrocento and Seicento Italy, the great Renaissance, which gave all others its name, leapfrogged into new and distant lands. In the 1460 s, the humanist King Matthias Corvinus of Hungary built himself a palace in imitation of one of Pliny’s villas. In 1472, Tsarina Zoe took Italian architects and engineers to Moscow, which her husband proclaimed “the Third Rome.” In 1507, Sigismund I of Poland began to embellish Cracow in Renaissance style, and in 1548, Sigismund II, whose mother was Milanese, founded a Renaissance court in Vilnius.⁴⁶To a limited extent, the beginnings of European overseas expansion carried Renaissance influences even farther afield in the same period, especially in the Spanish empire. The Franciscans founded a trilingual college at Tlatelolco. Scholarship in a humanist tradition made its home in Mexico City, which had a printing press before Madrid. Towns in the shadow of the Andes and churches on the shores of Lake Titicaca were laid out along lines derived from Vitruvius.⁴⁷

The last in this sequence of renaissances, extending ever farther the reach of classical civilization, coincided with Europe’s great age of imperial expansion in the nineteenth century. The pace and pre-eminence of Greek and Latin learning justify the use of the term “renaissance” in a period when it seemed to Hazlitt, for instance, that his contemporaries were “always talking of Greece and Rome,” and when Duke Carl of Rosenmold saw the whole of Northern Europe as a slope ascending towards the Alps, which seemed the gateway to the origins of its culture.⁴⁸Greek and, especially, Latin were the essential ingredients in the education of the imperial master-classes prepared in Europe for positionsof power in imperial territory. And nineteenth-century Europe experienced renaissance in the two possible technical senses of the word: first, an improvement in the range and editorial quality of the available classical texts, by virtue of previously unattained standards of scholarship; and, second, a reception into literary tradition of previously unused classical texts. For, although Greek tragedy had long been influential, its influence had been mediated through Aristotle’s Poetics or the Roman adaptations of Seneca. In the nineteenth century, the originals of Sophocles, Euripides, and Aeschylus exerted a direct enchantment, with a novel impact. This last renaissance was easily transferred to frontiers farther removed than ever: by metropolitan education of colonial elites, by the secular evangelism of imperial officials and teachers, and by the convenience of steam travel.

The transmission of the legacy of Greece and Rome—the transfer of the baton of Western civilization to new hands—was a conscious obligation of nineteenth-century imperialism. “What Greek and Latin were to the contemporaries of More and Ascham,” wrote Macaulay in a famous memorandum in 1835 , “our tongue is to the people of India.”⁴⁹And this from an author whose thoughts “were often for weeks together more in Latium or Attica than Middlesex.”⁵⁰In a sense, India was not far outside the rim of the old Greco-Roman world. Its western ports formed part of the Periplus of the Erythraean Sea. It was within the itinerary of Agatharchides and the ambitions of Alexander.⁵¹Indeed, according to a theory popular in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it was umbilically linked to ancient Greece by the supposed Indo-European migrations, which were thought to explain the similarities between Sanskrit and Greek and to provide the civilizations of Greece and India with a common ancestry. This theory—now largely discredited—was, I believe, important in creating in India a cultural climate propitious for the reception of European influence. Indians could absorb it without shame or self-demeaning, because they could feel they were reclaiming a part of their own ancestral past. Even so severe a critic of European corruptions as Swami Vivekananda regarded the Greek heritage as in some sense Indian and respected the teachings of the “ Yavana gurus” of the fifth and fourth centuries B.C. in Athens.⁵²

It is not surprising, therefore, to find the term “renaissance” more frequently applied in India than in any other part of nineteenth-century Asia. And within India, it is most often applied to Bengal. Indeed, one of the most distinguished Bengali historians of Bengal claimed, in a famous passage, that the Bengali Renaissance excelled its European pattern. It was “a renaissance wider, deeper and more revolutionary than that of Europe after the fall of Constantinople.”⁵³In the tradition which sees renaissances as emanating from Europe, the inception of the Bengali Renaissance is usually associated with Raja Rammohun Roy ( 1772–1833), its herald and first great representative thinker.⁵⁴The “ Renaissance humanism” he communicated to his disciples and admirers had beenmediated via the European Enlightenment of the eighteenth century, with its rationalist epistemology and its secular ethos. Rammohun Roy made an almost divine cult of human nature, prescribed Voltaire for his pupils’ reading, and replied, when the bishop of Calcutta mistakenly congratulated him on his conversion to Christianity, that he had not “laid down one superstition to take up another.”⁵⁵

Of course, the reception of the European classical tradition in India was of limited depth and scope. Roy’s inspiration was not as simple as it appears at first glance. As we now know, he was a Vedantic and Persian scholar before he became a student of Western literature. The roots of his liberalism and rationalism predate in some respects his inception in Western learning. And he seems to have known about Aristotle from reading Islamic writings before encountering Western editions.⁵⁶It is an irony well known, but appropriate to mention here, that the Western Renaissance of the twelfth century learned much of what it knew about Aristotle from Arabic and Syriac as well as European sources. As one of the scholars who know Roy’s work best has written, “his preoccupation with an authentic Hindu golden age” made him an “orientalist moderniser,” not a mere vector of the West.⁵⁷Indeed, the Bengali word nabajagaran may have been coined as an equivalent of “renaissance” but it expresses a peculiar perception. It means a “new awakening” to things that were already there, and a reexamination of them in a fresh light. For what remained of the nineteenth century, Bengalis returned to the Upanishads or the Bhagavadgita or Kalidasa or even medieval Bengali Vaishnavism with perceptions influenced by the West but with a sense of retrieving part of their own past.⁵⁸

Many similar stories could be reconstructed of modified transmissions from Greece and Rome to destinations outside the West: in Malawi and Nagoya, Cape Town and Jakarta, Siberia and Saigon—improbable places where classical Greek and Roman writers are on the curriculum and where banks, libraries, or ministries have pediments and porticoes. A representative case—and a thorough one, because it happened in a culture where Christianity was received as part of the package—happened in the nineteenth-century Philippines. In our last scene, the central character is the hero of Filipino nationalism, Jose Rizal. He can be represented as a product of the last European renaissance. He was an Asian of European education, the best student of Greek in Madrid University in his day. He was a Renaissance man, an uomo universale who triumphed in almost every skill he ever tried: poetry and prose, sculpture and surgery, education and revolution, antiquarianism and anticolonialism. Like a true universal man, he was a bit of a misfit wherever he went: the “Spanish doctor” in Hong Kong, the “ Chinese mestizo” in Manila. He crammed his great novel, Noli me tangere, with classical allusions. Onto the title page he managed to fit references to Homer, Caesar, Greek tragedies, Schiller, and Shakespeare: a parade of highlights from the tradition to which he was self-ascribed. His researches into the grammar ofnative languages of the Philippines were in the Renaissance-humanist tradition—reminiscent, indeed, of the efforts of some of the early Spanish friar-scholars in the islands. He anticipated a “pleiad” of Filipino writers, waiting to succeed him.⁵⁹The apostrophications that spring to mind in efforts to explain him are often drawn from the Renaissance world. He is “the Cervantes of Asia” or “the Tagalog Shakespeare.” When Unamuno called him “the Tagalog Hamlet,” he was thinking not of the medieval Danish prince but the tortured Renaissance protagonist.

That is not, of course, the whole truth of Rizal. He also searched for inspiration in the indigenous tradition to which he felt himself heir. He heard Tagalog poetry before he could read Spanish. His annotations to one of the earliest Spanish chronicles of Filipino history were part of a search for a Filipino golden age, uncorrupted by the colonial experience. In a scholar and writer who exemplified a Renaissance tradition, this is no less than one ought to expect.

Renaissances usually inspire more than one kind of literary revival. At Bede’s monastery, the bard Caedmon sang old native songs. Charlemagne, the great patron of the Carolingian Renaissance, ordered the traditional verses of the Frankish people to be written down before they were forgotten, though, alas, they seem to have been lost. In every subsequent European renaissance, a vernacular revival followed the classical rebirth. It is not surprising that the same effect ensued when further renaissances projected the same heritage to more distant shores. During Rizal’s last months of exile in Mindanao, removed from the metropolitan and cosmopolitan environments in which he had spent most of his life, his roots seem to have deepened in what he came to see as part of his own country’s soil. When he returned to Manila, to face death by firing squad for his involvement in revolutionary nationalism, he queried his designation as a “Chinese mestizo” on his own death warrant, insisting that he was a “pure-bred native.” It was not strictly a true claim, but it truly reflected his state of mind, in revolt against the cultural hybridization represented by his life’s work. As he went out to the place of execution, he spurned the crucifix proffered by a well-meaning priest and, bracing himself for the final volley, turned towards the ocean. The European influences which had made him both a classicist and a nationalist had come from there: the great chaotic deep-sea environment which had only lately been domesticated by man. To understand how the world’s oceans became, if not habitable, at least traversible, and were adopted to serve mankind as a series of highways between civilizations, we have to follow his last gaze.