MixedThe Times Literary SupplementDespite its title, The West: A new history of an old idea has little to say about the history of the idea of \"the West\" ... She is distinctly hazy as to when and why an idea of \"the West\" and \"western civilization\" first emerged, and, more importantly, exactly how it differed from older cultural constructs ... A more serious problem with The West derives from Mac Sweeney’s choice to focus pretty much exclusively on the Greco-Roman strand in the founding mythology of the West. The paradoxical result is that she ends up reinforcing a very old-fashioned problematic of Western Civ ... This is a pity, because when Mac Sweeney gets down to the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries... she has fascinating things to say about alternative ways of mapping the history of cultures.
Paul Cartledge
MixedThe Times Literary Supplement (UK)This is unashamedly a work of advocacy. Cartledge wants to convince us that Thebes should in fact be \'central to our understanding of the ancient Greeks’ multiple achievements—whether viewed politically or culturally—and thus to the wider politico-cultural traditions of western Europe, the Americas, and indeed the world.\' That is over-egging it a bit: Thebes is never going to warrant more than a footnote in the history of Western civilization. But Cartledge does make an impressive case that the Thebans were not (just) the violent lunkheads of ancient Greek stereotype. As he rightly underlines, most of our evidence for Classical Thebes comes from Athenian writers (Thucydides, Xenophon, Demosthenes), and the Athenians had a particular loathing for their northern neighbours: imagine a history of Ireland based only on things the English have said about the Irish. The strongest plank in Cartledge’s argument is constitutional ... Cartledge...whips through the entire history of Thebes in the Hellenistic, Roman, Byzantine, Ottoman and modern periods in a cursory five pages ... The underlying assumptions here about what constitutes \'significance\' do worry me a bit: historians of Classical Greece have a bad habit of assuming that Greek cities stop being of interest the moment they stop butchering or bullying their neighbours. Still, Cartledge deserves full credit for his spirited and readable attempt to put Thebes back on the map, though I doubt many readers will be inspired to put Thebes at the top of their list for a post-lockdown holiday.
Bettany Hughes
MixedThe Wall Street JournalThe trouble is that we have not a scrap of evidence that any ancient Greek or Roman saw their gods in these broad and abstract terms. Aphrodite as goddess of mixis is inescapably a modern rationalization, not how the Greeks really saw her. What’s more, not all of Aphrodite’s actual functions can be made to fit with this idea of \'violent mingling\': It doesn’t explain her patronage of Greek civic magistrates, nor does it really square with her role as the goddess who calms the seas (she makes warriors more violent, but the sea less violent?). Nor does it explain why certain spheres of violent mingling were never brought within her supposed domain (she calms storms at sea, but never storms on land). Finally, it misleadingly smooths out what are in fact genuine contradictions and inconsistencies in Greco-Roman religious thought and practice ... To be honest, if you can track down the documentary online, you’re probably better off watching that instead: Venus and Aphrodite is all too obviously the book-of-the-TV-program ... Nonetheless, once one gets past the dotty New Age twaddle about Cypriot fertility goddesses in the early chapters, Ms. Hughes’s book packs real punch, particularly when she turns to the ways in which this ferocious goddess has been domesticated and (bluntly) pornographized in modern European culture.
Tom Holland
MixedThe Wall Street Journal\"Dominion is an immensely powerful and thought-provoking book. It is hard to think of another that so effectively and readably summarizes the major strands of Christian ethical and political thought across two millennia ... herein lies a crucial problem for Mr. Holland’s case. If Christian ideas about wealth, gender, sexuality and power have been in constant flux over the past two millennia, how can we speak of a single, distinctively Christian moral sensibility to which we are the heirs? Here Mr. Holland is, I fear, somewhat evasive ... The trouble is that Christian ethics, like Walt Whitman, are large; they contain multitudes ... This argument—that everything Nice in our contemporary world derives from Christian values, and everything Nasty in the actual history of Christendom was just a regrettable diversion from the true Christian path—seems to me to run dangerously close to apologetic ... The truth is that throughout its history, Christianity—like Islam and Judaism—has been both censorious and “woke,” egalitarian and repressively hierarchical ... Mr. Holland is right: Something wholly new did come into the world with Jesus of Nazareth. Are we really his moral heirs? Just asking the question makes me weep with shame.
Adrienne Mayor
MixedThe Wall Street JournalAbsorbing ... Ms. Mayor, a research scholar at Stanford, is an accessible and engaging writer, and she has a truly wonderful topic to play with. But her book is not an unqualified success. A handful of Chinese and Indian folk tales and myths are rather halfheartedly shoehorned in; she seems not quite to have decided whether this is a book about the ancient Greeks or wider premodern thought. More seriously, many of the Greek myths she explores really have very little to do with artificial life ... Overall, Gods and Robots feels rather like a punchy magazine article that has been stretched out far beyond its natural length ... does a good line in anecdotes about mechanical snails; but for a serious examination of the ethical and philosophical problems of artificial life, you will need to look elsewhere.
Catherine Nixey
MixedThe TimesLike every good polemic, The Darkening Age is sardonic, well-informed and quite properly lacking in sympathy for its hapless target. But the argument depends on quite a bit of nifty footwork. Nixey vividly evokes the fundamentalist bonfires that \'blazed across the empire as outlawed books went up in flames.\' Inconveniently, we have no evidence for a single poem by Ovid or Catullus having been put to the flames: Christian book-burning was always directed at heretical Christian literature or \'magical\' writings ... The Darkening Age rattles along at a tremendous pace, and Nixey brilliantly evokes all that was lost with the waning of the classical world. Those losses were real enough. But by denying that anything of value or interest took their place, she ends up condemning the entire civilization of the European Middle Ages as a collective fit of inexplicable narrow-minded idiocy.
Bettany Hughes
RaveThe Wall Street JournalSince her 2003 documentary series on the Spartans, Ms. Hughes has been one of Britain’s most successful television historians. She is the author of sparkling biographies of Helen of Troy and Socrates of Athens, but Istanbul is an altogether more ambitious enterprise. In vivid and readable prose, Ms. Hughes tells the story of the three cities that succeeded one another on the Golden Horn ... One of the leitmotifs of Ms. Hughes’s book is the cultural pluralism that has characterized Istanbul since earliest times ... Ms. Hughes doesn’t conceal the fact that Istanbul’s history has often been a bloody one... But Istanbul has also been a place of tolerance and enlightenment, and when one compares its recent history with that of the other great multicultural cities of the Middle East...Ms. Hughes’s wonderful evocation of Istanbul’s glittering past, snakes and all, should remind us of just how much there is to lose.
