While this is a fine synthesis of the ancient Greek experience, it must be said that there is little ‘new’ in this book by Jennifer Roberts. The target audience is certainly not professional historians. This is much in evidence on the very first page of the Prologue, where the author titillates the reader with the public penis-kissing ritual at an annual festival in Tyrnavos in northern Greece (see lead photo). It is not alluded to again, and can only be thought of as a prurient shocker that has no place in a scholarly book.
Roberts, author of the book under review, is Professor of Classics and History at the City College of New York and the City University of New York Graduate Center. A past president of the Association of Ancient Historians, she specializes in the theory and practice of democracy and in the political, military and intellectual history of Greece during the classical period. She has written several books about Greece, and is now working on a history of Athens.
I have to agree with a review of this book by Peter Jones, who writes that Roberts “has been reading too much of the novelist Margaret Atwood.” In a discussion of Homer’s Iliad, both claim that Penelope, because her son Telemachus hangs 12 maid servants, “suffers a stunning loss that offsets her recovery of her missing husband.” As Jones notes, “There is not a word in Homer on Penelope’s sense of ‘loss,’ stunning or otherwise.” This is not just an example of over-reading between the lines, but interpolating a bereavement so extreme it literally eclipses having missed her husband for years. Hardly likely! What Queen of ancient times was ever so enamoured of her slaves/servants?
The problem is serious. Roberts throughout this book deals with myth, but in the passage on Penelope we see that she is not averse to creating her own myths within the myths. Thus, the reader must be constantly on guard to ask “are the interpretations or emotions being presented here real or fictional, perhaps even meta-fictional?” A lay reader will have no way of assessing that: only an expert steeped in the works of ancient Greece will be able to identify such instances. Jones, for example, has a Cambridge doctorate on Homer. Few readers of this book will be so blessed by the gods. But one does not have to be an expert to be stopped dead in your tracks by a trite sentence, such as “Alexander was a remarkable general.” That, dear reader, is what I would expect in an elementary-level school book on the ancient world.
“The aim of this book,” Roberts writes, is “to explore areas of dramatic divergence, areas of subtle difference, and areas of broad agreement.” She does this by examining several broad areas: politics, religion, performance, competition, literature, and myth. She opens with myth, which included a panoply of gods and heroes. But what is a hero without a monster to subdue? “Were heroes created to dispatch monsters,” she asks, “or were monsters created to give heroes a way to discharge their energies in a socially constructive way? Monstrosity defined humanity.” The existence of the Minotaur, the Cyclops, and Medusa (to name but three) has haunted the Western imagination ever since.
I found Roberts’ description of poetry to be particularly fine. “We lose a tremendous amount by encountering Greek poetry in the form of written texts, for these texts served not so much as scripts as they did as librettos, to be adorned and amplified by song, dance, gesture, and in some cases a good deal of ad libbing. Verbal skill was as highly esteemed in Greece as skill on the battlefield.” Indeed, she tells us that the Olympic Games were not just for sports – there was a competition for declamation.
Translation from ancient Greek to English is fraught with danger, and Roberts is very much alive to this. Take the word Hamartia, “which has usually been translated as ‘tragic flaw,’ and because of Aristotle’s high reputation;” a passage in his Poetics “has done great harm to the understanding of tragedy for centuries, prompting readers to exert untold energies in putting one play after another into an ill-fitting straitjacket as they quest fervidly after tragic flaws to explain the action.” Rather than ‘tragic flaw,’ it actually means “a failing, an inadequacy, a mistake in judgment.” This is perhaps the most important insight of the book, and needs to be seriously regarded by anyone interested in reading about ancient Greek tragedy.
One of her final thoughts is quite insightful. “When we converse with the Greeks, we converse as well with all the generations that separate us from them, each of which has interpreted the Greek world in its own way.”
What concerns me most about the book is the title, which is an inversion of the Latin phrase E Pluribus Unum. It was officially adopted as the motto of the United States in 1956, but appeared on the Great Seal beginning in 1782: Out of Many, One. Her inversion makes for a catchy title, but Rogers avers from printing the most relevant quote from ancient Greece on this topic, which is clearly the whole premise of the book. On page 131 she does offer a quote from the Athenian rhetorician Isocrates (without placing him in time: he lived from 436 to 338 BCE). The quote she offers states “the name Hellenes indicates no longer a race but an intellect, and people are called Hellenes who share our culture rather than those related to us by blood.” All well and good, but even more to the point, Isocrates wrote this: “Because there has been implanted in us the power to persuade each other and to make clear to each other what we desire…we have come together and founded cities and made laws and invented arts.” To me, that sounds a lot more like E Pluribus Unum than its inverse.
Used with caution, as an introductory text this is certainly a fine vehicle for those who have a fascination with ancient times.
PS: If this book incites a burning desire to visit Tyrnavos, you just missed the annual festival, held on the first Sunday in April. There’s always 2026!
The book contains typos on page 53: ‘saw was that’ should be ‘saw that’; and on 76: ‘forget is first’ should read ‘forget is the first’. Speaking of words, Roberts prints the longest word known in any language. At 183 letters, this Greek word consumes nearly 3 lines on page 127.
There is an error on page 359, where Roberts gives the date of a Jean Cocteau cinematic trilogy (The Blood of a Poet) as 1952. The original was 1932, followed by parts 2 and 3 in 1950 and 1960.
Out of One, Many: Ancient Greek Ways of Thought and Culture, is by Princeton University Press. It lists for $35.
Photo credit: The Mirror