2013 read #113: The Classical World by Robin Lane Fox.

The Classical World: An Epic History from Homer to Hadrian by Robin Lane Fox
581 pages
Published 2006
Read from August 1 to August 28
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5

In the back of this book I still keep its receipt. (My whole adult life I've tended to use receipts as handy bookmarks.) Together with The Muslim Discovery of Europe and a typo-riddled history of the Mongols, I bought The Classical World in paperback on January 16, 2010 from the Borders store that used to be by the mall. It was the last of my major book "splurges," the financially reckless buying sprees that had loaded my bookcases and trimmed down my bank balances since my ancient army days. In the glory days, I would spend $150 or more on books any time I stepped into a Borders or a Barnes & Noble, stockpiling titles that, all too often, I never actually got around to reading. The last time we moved, I must have gotten rid of at least a hundred pounds of books, most of them unread. The same impulse operates, albeit rather more frugally, every time I step into a library.

So I've had The Ancient World on my hands for over three and a half years. By my standards that isn't a particularly long waiting period; I still have to read The Mists of Avalon and Dhalgren, which I bought around the same time in early 2002. But I think keeping books around for such a long wait makes them that much more disappointing when they don't blow me away when I finally do read them. (I started reading The Mists of Avalon almost two months ago, and I'm barely a hundred pages in; at this point I doubt I'll bother to finish it this year.) The Ancient World is okay, but for far too much of its length it's a highly compressed "kings and wars" history, focused on a rather limited motif of "freedom," "justice," and "luxury" -- three concepts mostly reserved for the most privileged minorities in society, then and now. The breezy, abbreviated presentation can seem flippantly unconcerned with anyone who doesn't meet each culture's standards of freedom and justice: women and slaves in democratic Athens, pretty much anyone who isn't a rich aristocratic head of household in republican Rome. I'm reasonably certain this is an artifact of brevity rather than sympathy, but even so, I would expect better from such a recent book.

The Roman sections were rather more expansive, indulging in a few slice-of-life chapters. I also learned quite a bit, even in this compressed form, about the days of republican Rome. For one thing, the name of today's Cato Institute is hilariously apt, given the Catos' destruction of even modest legislative gains for the lower classes, and their overriding drive to keep the senatorial class's privileges and freedoms intact at everyone else's expense.