"Heresy" by Catherine Nixey

Christians claim theirs is the true faith but “In the beginning there was not ... one single Christian message.” (Introduction). The form of Christianity we have inherited persecuted all other forms out of existence. The word 'heresy' means choice and the pagan philosophers believed that it was good to choose, rationally, who and how one would worship. But "within the first century of the birth of this new religion, ‘choice’ for Christians had become no longer a praiseworthy attribute but a ‘poison’.” (Introduction)

In this scholarly but always entertaining book, Nixey continues what she had started in her best-seller The Darkening Age which chronicled the violent persecution of the pagans unleashed as soon as Christianity became the officially endorsed religion of the Roman Empire. Now she shows how most of the manifold versions of Christianity which existed in those first few centuries were branded heretical and had their exponents criminalised and killed and their books burned. Nevertheless, some vestiges of them survived. The ox and the ass of the nativity scene only appear in a banned gospel. 

On the journey, we learn about alternative sons of god, born of a mortal virgin woman who healed the sick and even raised the dead, such as Apollonius of Tyana.

We learn that the three 'wise men' should properly be translated as magicians and that Jesus could be seen as a magician too: “In Greek and Roman texts, wands had long been associated with magicians: Circe held a wand when she transformed Odysseus’s men into pigs; Mercury held a wand when he led the dead back to life. ... In early Christian art, Jesus holds a wand when he is performing miracles. In one fifth-century wooden panel, he holds one when he is changing water into wine and when he performs the miracle to multiply loaves; in a third-century image from the catacombs, he holds one when he raises Lazarus from the two ... While the sign of the cross is almost entirely absent from early Western Christian art, wands are widely seen.” (Ch 4)

We learn that our image of Jesus is one of many originals: “In the early years and centuries of this religion ... Sometimes he appears as a bearded old man, at others as a beardless young one; in some images he is shown bare-chested and as macho as a Greek god, while at other times he is depicted as far more sexually ambiguous" (Ch 6)

Our images of Hell are not found in the canonical gospels but in pagan authors and non-canonical writings such as the Apocalypse of Peter  and the Apocalypse of Paul (Ch 7)

We are told that all these non-canonical versions (not 'apocryphal' because they were rarely hidden and were often the most popular accounts) should not be regarded as not important because they can be unbelievable: "that is to miss the point. Such texts matter not because they are believable - but because they were believed and read by Christians for centuries. It is understandable that some Christian historians may have wished to ignore them - but it is intellectually indefensible to do so. Do so and you are not writing history, but theology with dates.” (109)

This is an immensely readable and important book. 

Selected quotes:

• “Most people do not require being a flogged with leaden weights to abandon their ideas; for most, the fear that they might lose their job, or that they might merely lose a friend, is enough to make them change their beliefs - or at least stop talking about them." (Introduction)
• “Things first become unwritable, then unsayable and finally unthinkable.” (Introduction)
• “A great deal of all ancient religion was a little more than healthcare with a halo.” (Ch 2)
• “For all the brilliance of Greek and Roman medicine, doctors nonetheless struggled to identify the difference between the seemingly obvious conditions of ‘being dead’ and ‘being alive’.” (Ch 2)
• “There were spells in the Greek magical papyri that offered a far larger menu than Jesus managed ... not only loaves and fishes but side orders too.” (Ch 4)
• “A Roman gladiator had better odds of surviving a fight than an emperor did of enjoying a peaceful conclusion to his reign.” (Ch 12))
• "Bishops had been consolidating their power for centuries ... Bishops started to command that everything in a church must go through them: baptism without a bishop did not, or so bishops argued, count; Eucharist without a bishop did not count either. Prayers, bishops argued, worked better with a bishop present.” (Ch 15)
• “It was perfectly clear to numerous ancient observers that religions were less separate entities, virgin-born and pristine, than variations on a theme ... The names were different perhaps, but the deities were fundamentally the same.” (Ch 16)
• “It was a common complaint that the church persecuted less from a love of righteousness than from a love of real estate.” (Ch 18)
• “Books are not being burned maybe to bring about controlled today: they are being burned for posterity; they are being burned to control the memory of the future.” (Ch 19)
• “The past is not merely today in togas; it is far odder and more eccentric than we often expect.” (Ch 19)

May 2025; 279 pages

Published by Picador in 2004

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Homer and his Iliad" by Robin Lane Fox

This is a book about the Iliad written by an expert in his field. I have previously read RLF's Alexander the Great, which I found slightly heavy going, and Travelling Heroes in which he attempts to show that colonists from the island of Euboea were instrumental in many of the early advances of the classical Greek world. Like Travelling Heroes, Homer and his Iliad is full of ideas and simply stuffed with scholarship but rather incoherently present. I never found it difficult to understand but as an intelligent non-specialist, I rather lost the wood for the trees. He was trying to establish some facts about Homer but often the evidence seemed to amount to little more than his opinion and is distributed about the book is such a way that I found it difficult in my head to assemble all the little snippets to decide whether he had adequately supported his main thesis.

For example, he works hard to establish that Homer was a single author who wrote the entire Iliad, except for the Catalogue of Ships in Book 2 and the 10th Book, which, he claims, were interpolations by later authors. But his supposition that the Iliad was created as a spoken or recited poem (evidenced by features such as repetition and ring composition which he says are typical of oral poetry) militates against the single author theory: other epic poems in the oral tradition are reinterpreted each time a new poet recites them. So RLF maintains that Homer must have dictated the poem, thereby fixing its form (and dating the composition to after the introduction of alphabetic literacy in Greece). But then he cites other passages which suggest a later date for composition than he now maintains and he can only explain these away by assuming that they are interpolations by those subsequent to Homer. Indeed, as I discovered in Hidden Hands, it was common for scribes when copying a manuscript to make additions or amendments. But surely this undermines his argument against the 'patchwork' theory: that the Iliad was created by a number of authors. He states “In general terms it is a fallacy to assume that unity of design entails a single author, but the rest of the Iliad’s plot is so pervasively signposted that a single author is evidently guiding its course.” (Ch 6) which seems to underline the feeling that RLF has started with a theory and isn't prepared to let inconvenient facts spoil it.

Furthermore, the arguments for dating the composition of the Iliad seem to be scattered over several chapters and presented in no particular order. I found this confusing. It would have been clearer if RLF had concentrated on a few key dates. For example, even though his stories are set firmly in the Bronze Age there is a mention of iron-tipped arrows ploughshares and this therefore dates (at least that passage which may, of course, be a later interpolation) to after this technology was introduced which puts an earliest composition date at c1020 BC. On the other hand, Homer never mentions coinage and, since this was introduced into that area of the world in about 650 BC it might be inferred that the Iliad was written after that date. Simple arguments such as this, especially if presented on a timeline would have made the dating of the poem clearer.

One feature that I desperately needed was the addition of a map. RLF repeatedly refers to places such as the Troad and I for one wasn't sure where they were. (He also repeatedly refers to the land-mass known to the Romans as Asia Minor and nowadays as Turkey as 'Asia' which is surely bound to lead to confusion!). He even gives geographical arguments, such as Chryse walking down the shore to a temple. My understanding of these arguments would have been massively enhanced with a few simple maps.

There were times when his obvious partiality for the Iliad (and for a couple of other epic poems that he had studied) seemed to lead him to make instant judgements. For example, after establishing how careful Homer was with his geographical references in the Iliad (saying that “throughout antiquity, Greek poetry and cult shows a strong connection to particular sites and landscapes in the real world.” Ch 3), he then dismisses generations of scholars who have tried to use geographical references in the Odyssey to trace the path of Odysseus (for example Ulysses Found by Ernle Bradford) by calling it "a journey into neverland" (Ch 3) without, so far as I can see, a single shred of evidence to back this statement up. This isn't the only time when RLF appears to want to have his cake and eat it.

Don't get me wrong, there were many interesting things in this book, just as there were with Travelling Heroes. But the incoherence confused me and the apparent cherry-picking of facts left me unconvinced. Map and a timeline too, please.

Selected quotes:
“When Helen and Paris re-meet in his bedroom in book 3, how much of the day has passed? They make love, but are they having prime-time sex, in the afternoon?” (Ch 5)
“Close encounters with Homeric gods or goddesses follow a general pattern. They appear, concealing their identity. They talk and intervene, and usually only when they are departing does their identity become clear. Intimacy provokes awe and fear, but the god reassures. This pattern ... also occurs, independently, in parts of the Bible, in the visits paid by angels.” (Ch 28)
“In societies where social relations are highly unequal and stratified, those relations of power are projected onto gods” (Ch 28)
“There is no cosmic justice. ... Homer’s listeners were aware that gods had anger and spite and [it] might lie behind disease or the destruction of a city. It might cause earthquakes or famine.” (Ch 280)
“The explanation of misfortune is a crucial function of religion.” (Ch 28)
“Sex with a god always makes a girl pregnant. If he has sex with her twice in one encounter, she has twins.” (Ch 29)

December 2023; 398 pages

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"The Luck of Troy" by Roger Lancelyn Green

This is a children's book: it is an adventure story for boys.

A retelling of the last year of the Trojan war, from the 3rd person perspective of Nicostratus, the 12 year old son of Helen and Menelaus.  Extraordinarily true to its sources (the author boasts that he hasn't invented a single character) and brilliantly simplified so that it becomes rather clearer than the originals but nothing is lost. There are some brilliant villains: Paris is endlessly cynical about the honour of the old guard and full of victory schemes that involve a certain amount of dishonorable conduct; Deiphobus is a wonderfully bloodthirsty bully, Palamedes a lisping, sly traitor. 

On the whole the Greeks are goodies and the Trojans rather nasty oriental types; I suppose it is in the nature of a book about war to divide the world into us, the goodies, and them, the enemy baddies, and this will almost always simplify and divide over nationalistic if not racist lines; nevertheless I would love to find a story telling the Trojan war from the point of view of the Trojans - pace Vergil's Aeneid.

I must have read this book when I was about twelve and I dare say I utterly identified with Nico. I loved the Lancelyn Green oeuvre, including his Robin Hood, his King Arthur, and his Tales of the Greek Heroes. Looking back I can see he wrote this tales well, and the lack of character depth and complexity merely makes it suitable for the genre: boys' adventure stories.

From about fifty years ago I can still remember this paragraph: "'Now, Nicostratus!' he cried, exultantly. 'Look! I'll stab you just there, where it'll hurt most; and then there, where it means a slow but certain death; and there, so that you'll not be able to move from the floor. Are you ready? Look, my sword is drawn back for the first and cruellest blow -'" (Ch 8) What are the rules the creative writing classes teach you about dialogue? Use 'said' rather than anything such as ... 'cried'. Don't use an adverb such as 'exultantly'. Avoid exclamation marks! I have remembered this paragraph (and shuddered) for fifty years !!!!!

Another great line: "that old bore Nestor, who would talk the tail off a mermaid and then explain how they grew new ones when he was young." (Ch 4)

It's written for kids and I enjoyed it all over again.  Great writing.

I also enjoyed learning that Palamedes was King of Nauplia, a town I enjoyed visiting a couple of years ago.

The bay at Nauplia, March 2019

This blog was written
by the author of Motherdarling

Roger Lancelyn Green also wrote a biography of C S Lewis.

"Pompeii" by Mary Beard

The archaeological evidence from the city of Pompeii, buried for two thousand years by an eruption of neighbouring volcano Vesuvius, is assessed to provide evidence for daily life in the Roman world. The main message from this book is that the Romans weren't as homogenous as they are normally portrayed and that individuality reigned. How they did things in this city does not necessarily tell you how they did things elsewhere. What happened at the time that Pompeii was buried does not necessarily reflect what happened during the other many centuries of Roman Republic and subsequently Empire. And what one citizen or slave does is not the same as how another lives their life.

The biggest disappointment for me was the lack of narrative about the disaster. I suppose this has been covered elsewhere but it is the tabloid stuff. And I am not that interested in archaeology. So some of this book was rather hard going.

Nevertheless, there are some fascinating moments:

• "The hint of 'officer class' prejudices in many modern archaeologists who have so confidently equated social mobility and the rise of new money with revolution or decline." (Introduction)
• "Pompeii stood at the heart of a region - known, then and now, as Campania - where, long before the Romans came to dominate, indigenous peoples speaking the native Oscan language rubbed shoulders with Greek settlers." (C 1)
• "The town of Baiae, across the Bay from Pompeii, had become by the first century BCE a byword for an upmarket, hedonistic resort." (C 1)
• "It is hard to belive that all those Pompeians whoi lived in a single room above their shop, with not always adequate lavatory facilities, never found it convenient simply to piss in the streets." (C 2)
• "For us, it is the rich who visit restaurants, the poor who cook economically at home. At Pompeii, it was the poor who ate out [because they didn't have kitchens]." (C 2)
• In Pompeii, as in other early modern cities, "the mansions of the rich rubbed shoulders" with shops and workshops. (C 2)
• "If by 'poverty' we mean 'destitution', then there were very few poor in the ancient world: for the simple reason that destitution was the first step on a fast track to death." (C 3)
• "A tombstone from Rome ... includes the following piquant observation: 'wine, sex and baths ruin our bodies, but they are the stuff of life'" (C 7)
• "The conventions of bathing brought everyone down to size. Bathing naked, or nearly naked ... the poor were in principle no different from the wealthy - possibly healthier and of finer physique." (C 7). I related this to Acts of Undressing by Barbara Brownie.
• "The emperor Hadrian ... was visiting the baths one day (for even emperors might bathe in public ...) he noticed a retired soldier rubbing his back against the wall ... the man explained that he could not afford a slave to rub him down. So Hadrian gave him some slaves and the cost of their maintenance. Returning on a later occasion, he found a whole group of men rubbing their backs on the wall. ... He suggested they should rub each other." (C 7)
• "The hot tubs in the bathing suite itself must have been a seething mass of bacteria ... Roman medical writer Celsus offers the sensible advice not to go to the baths with a fresh wound ('it normally leads to gangrene')" (C 7)
• "The repeated slaughter of animals by humans to gods was an emblem of the hierarchy of the cosmos, with humans in the middle between beasts on the one hand and the divine on the other." (C 9)
• "In the 1760s, the Temple of Isis was among the first buildings fully excavated on the site ... Exotic and a little bit sinister, it gave Mozart, who visited Pompeii in 1769, ideas for the Magic Flute." (C 9)

A comprehensive study. October 2019; 316 pages

Books to check out
Satyrica by Petronius

"Homer's The Iliad and The Odyssey: A biography" by Alberto Manguel

I look for two things in a non-fiction book. First, that I should learn something from it. This shouldn't be a high hurdle since I tend to read to expand my knowledge. However, I learn more from some books that others. My second criterion is that it should be readable by which I mean that I should keep wanting to turn the pages,

This book passed both these tests although perhaps not quite as spectacularly on either criterion as The Mighty Dead: Why Homer Matters by Adam Nicolson which I found both addictive and fascinating.

Most of the book is not about Homer's Iliad and Odyssey but about the effect of these works on subsequent centuries. Thus Manguel discusses Virgil, Dante, Alexander Pope (who despite not knowing Greek produced a best-selling translation by reading other translations; Gibbon said his version had ‘every merit except that of likeness to the original'; C12), Joyce, and folklore:

• “Virgil ‘did not understand the fundamental principle in Homer’s world, that poetry belongs to the defeated and the dead.” (C4)
• “The model for Dante’s Commedia is a composite of many sources, from Homer ( via Virtgil) to Arabic accounts of Muhammad's journey to the other world, the Mi’raj; one version of the latter was translated into Castilian by order of Alfonso X, and then into Latin, French and Italian, the last of which Dante probably read.” (C8)
• Icelandic saga “Story of Egill One-Hand” influenced by Ulysses and Polyphemus and later became Jack and the Beanstalk. (C7)

He also recounts how a village in war-torn Colombia wanted to retain their library copy of the Iliad. “They explained that Homer’s story reflected their own: it told of a war-torn country in which mad gods mix with men and women who never know exactly what the fighting is about, or when they will be happy, or why they will be killed.” (Introduction)

But he also spends some time talking about the originals. He supports the idea that Homer may have come from Chios: “The language of the poems is mainly Ionic, spoken by the early Greeks who settled on the west coast of Asia Minor and the adjacent islands, including Chios; although it may have been the conventional language of epic poetry.” (C2) But he also supports the idea that the Odyssey may have had a Semitic origin: “Homer calls Circe’s island both Nesos Kirkes and Aiaia. Aiaia means nothing in Greek but in Hebrew it means ‘Island of the She-Hawk’, which in Greek translates as Nesos Kirkes.” (C19) He also tells us that there were once believed to be six other epic poems written about the Trojan war from which only a few quotations now survive: Cypria: prequel: Judgement of Paris; Aithopis: death of Hector to death of Achilles; Little Iliad: from here to up to the Wooden Horse; Ilion Persis: the sack of Troy; Nostoi: the Returns of Menelaus, Agamemnon, Ajax and Neoptolemos; Telegony: the further adventures of Odysseus (C6). Furthermore there were two (forged) eyewitness accounts, one from the Greek side by Dictys of Crete of which a fragment was “discovered in 1899 on at the back of an income tax return for the year 206 AD.” (C6) and another by the Trojan Dares the Phrygian which, after extensive rewriting by Benoit de Saint-Maure in 1165 led to the tale of Troilus and Cressida covered by Chaucer, Caxton and Shakespeare (C6).

Manguel in particular focuses on the Homeric account of the Underworld. His suggestion that it was a sort of retirement home was shockingly brilliant:

• “Homer had described a place without graded categories, an Underworld in which souls wonder about, incorporeal and listless, like the inmates of a retirement home, some still suffering from regret for what they have done or left undone on earth ... Homer’s dead are never pleased to be where they are. ‘No winning words about death to me, shining Odysseus!’ says the ghost of Achilles when he sees him. ‘By God, I’d rather slave on earth for another man ... than rule down here over all the breathless dead’.”
• “Homer’s ghastly picture of the dead as a confused mingling of sexes and ages, occupations and social classes, extends across many hundreds of future years and will eventually take on its most recognizable shape towards the middle of the fourteenth century in the danse macabre.”

Other insights in this fascinating book:

• “Two of our oldest metaphors tell us that all life is a battle and that all life is a journey” (Introduction)
• “The invention of lower case cursive allowed scribes to produce more copies at a lower cost, since fewer pages were needed to hold a given text.” (C6)
• “Translation of foreign literature into Arabic can be said to have begun in the mid-eighth century during the rule of the celebrated Abbasid caliph al-Mansur.” (C7)
• “Several of Ulysses’ adventures surface in the stories of Sindbad the Sailor.” (C7)
• “Petrarch kept, with devotional care, a Greek manuscript of Homer which he didn't know how to read.” (C8)
• “To the opposition's argument that God had punished humankind with a plurality of tongues after Babel ... Schade answered with the notion that God is a polyglot ... and the angels and saints, being our intercessors, are also polyglots by necessity.” (C10)
• In Spain ignorance of Greek meant that Spaniards had to learn Homer through Latin translations: “When Miguel de Unamuno was given the chair of Greek at the University of Salamanca in 1891, it was pointed out that the celebrated intellectual had no Greek. Juan Valera, chairman of the committee that selected him, explained: ‘’None of the other candidates knows Greek, so we selected the one most like to know it’.” (C10)
• “It was Aristotle, according to Plutarch, prepared the edition of the Iliad that Alexander [the Great] kept ‘with his dagger under his pillow’.” (C12)
• “Many poets work in this way: constructing a poem from prose jottings of ideas and observations.” (C12)
• “Pope is not aiming for verisimilitude; rather a natural artificiality punctuated by cadenced rhymes, composing verses with a repetitive beat not unlike today's rap.” (C12)
• “‘The concept of a definitive text,’ wrote Jorge Luis Borges in 1932, ‘belongs either to religion or weariness’.” (C12)
• “Unlike an ordinary metaphor that catches qualities in one object which it ascribes to another, thereby creating a new literary space in which what is said and what is implied intermingle and increase, the epic simile places side by side two different actions that don't blend but remain visually separate, one colouring or qualifying the other.” (C13)
• “Philosophers in Vico’s age offered two conflicting theories of knowledge: the first was based on evidence and argument ... while the second centred on introspection and thought ... Vico offered a third possibility: the imagination, and independent power of the mind that he called fantasia.” (C 14)
• In Book 2 Iliad Homer “stops his narrative and invokes the Muses. Partly this is a literary device that became codified in the Middle Ages as excusatio propter infirmitatem (‘an apology for one's own shortcomings’); partly, it is a way of lending verisimilitude to the telling by shifting responsibility: ‘It is not I who says this, but something greater than I, and therefore it must be true’.” (C14)
• “In the Iliad, Achilles defines the battle as ‘fighting other soldiers to win their wives as prizes’.” (C15)
• “At the core of ancient Greek culture, is a living tension between, on the one hand, a tendency towards order and individual fulfilment (which Nietzsche called ‘ Apollonian’) and, on the other, violence and destructive rapture (‘Dionysian’).” (C16)
• “In the Underworld, the soothsayer Tiresias announces not what will be but what may be: the possibilities of the foreseeable future are always more than one and the outcome depends on the hero's choice.” (C19)
• “We see ourselves as better than our ancestors, savages of the Bronze Age who, though they wrought fine cups and bangles and sang beautiful songs, massacred each other in horrible wars, possessed slaves and raped women, ate without forks and conceived gods who threw thunderbolts.” (C22)

So Manguel definitely passed the first test: I learned loads. I reasd it in two days flat which means he passed the second test as well.

March 2019; 237 pages

"The History of the Peloponnesian War" by Thucydides

This translation by Sir Richard Livingstone was first published in 1943 and the author makes parallels with events leading up to the Second World War. The translation is selective of parts of the original, and orders those parts on a slightly different order from the original, but this mostly works. The flaw is that it includes very little of the eighth book which Thucydides left incomplete but of which Livingstone leaves merely a stump.

What is remarkable about the book is that it is so modern. The events recorded cover a period in which Athens, mostly from sheer hubris, went from Empire to defeat. As such there are interesting parallels with the present situation in which the oligarchical Brexiteers hark back to the days of the British Empire in order to persuade the citizens of Britain to take risks. Let us hope that the results are not as devastating for the British as they were for the Athenians.

Thucydides has a very modern point of view. He is realpolitikal:

• “Men secure peace by using their power justly but by making it clear that they will not allow others to wrong them.” (1.71)
• “It has always been a law that the weaker should be subject to the stronger” (1.76)
• “Where force can be used, law is not needed.” (1.77)
• “Bad laws which are never changed are better for a city than good ones that have no authority.” (3.37)
• “Ordinary men usually manage public affairs better than their more gifted fellows.” (3.37)
• “Three failings most fatal to empire - pity, sentiment, and indulgence.” (3.40)
• “The question of justice arises only between parties equal in strength ... the strong do what they can, and the weak submit.” (5.89)

But he is also good at the psychology behind democratic politics:

• “Men seem to resent injustice more than violence; the former is regarded as unfair advantage taken by an equal, the latter is compulsion applied by a superior.” (1.77)
• “It is a common mistake in going to war to begin at the wrong end, to act first, and wait for disaster to discuss the matter.” (1.78)
• “Zeal is always at its height at the commencement of an undertaking.” (book 2)
• “Villainy is sooner called clever than simplicity good, and men in general are proud of cleverness and ashamed of simplicity.” (3.82)
• “The secret of this was the general extraordinary success, which made them confuse their strength with their hopes.” (4.65)
• “It is a habit of mankind to entrust to careless hope what they long for, and to use reason arbitrarily to thrust aside what they do not fancy.” (4.108)

The battle tactics include a perceptive observation about:

• How men fight:because the shield was held on the left arm making the right side more vulnerable the hoplite armies tended to swerve towards the right; this, he suggests, was because the man on the extreme right tended to move right leaving his neighbour's right exposed so he moved right, and so on.
• Disinformation: “Fire-signals of an attack were also raised towards Thebes; but the Plataeans in the town at once displayed a number of others, prepared beforehand for this very purpose, in order to render the enemy’s signals unintelligible, and to prevent his friends getting a true idea of what was passing.” (3.22)
• Geophysics: “About the same time that these earthquakes were so common, the sea at Orobiae, in Euboea, retiring from the then line of coast, returned in a huge wave and invaded a great part of the town, and retreated some of it still under water, so that what was once land is now sea; the inhabitants who could not reach the higher ground in time were drowned.” (3.89)

Selected quotes:

• “My history has been composed to be an everlasting possession, not the show-piece of an hour.” (1.22)
• “They [Athenians] were born into the world to take no rest themselves and to give none to others.” (1.70)
• “We are wise because we are educated with too little learning to despise the laws, and with too severe a self-control to disobey them.” (1.84)

OK, it got a bit tedious when there was yet another battle in a place whose name I failed to recognise but this is a problem I have with all war histories. Otherwise it was surprisingly readable.

March 2019; I read it on holiday in Greece travelling from Athens to Delphi, Olympia, and Nafplion; it was a little disappointing to drive past Sparta but at least I was on the Peloponnese.

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

Other books about war reviewed in this blog can be found on this page.

"Heroes" by Stephen Fry

This book was a birthday present from my wonderful step-daughter Alexa. It is a sequel to Mythos, which it often references.

Fry tells the story of the key Ancient Greek heroes: Perseus, the Labours of Heracles, Bellerophon, Orpheus, Jason and the Argonauts not to mention the wicked Medea, Atalanta, Oedipus and Theseus and the Minotaur. Fry writes with a beautifully simple, indeed elegant, narrative style and yet he brings an utterly alien world, in which the gods regularly intervene, to our modern sensibility by casting his heroes as real people with real personalities. Thus:

• “Perseus had never believed his mother's wild story about Zeus coming to her as a shower of golden rain. He had taken it for granted that his real father was some itinerant musician or tinker whose name she had never discovered.”
• Heracles "was, as we might say today, far from the brightest pixel on the screen.”
• “Orpheus was the Mozart of the ancient world. He was more than that. Orpheus was the Cole Porter, the Shakespeare, the Lennon and McCartney, the Adele, Prince, Luciano Pavarotti, Lady Gaga and Kendrick Lamar of the ancient world.”

At the same time Fry brings his customary erudition to bear with knowledgeable and insightful comments:

• “Twins were forming in her womb, two sons - one fathered by Zeus and the other by Amphitryon. This phenomenon of polyspermy is common enough in littering mammals like cats, dogs, and pigs, but is rare in humans. Rare, but not unknown. It rejoices in the name heteropaternal superfecundation.”
• “It is your fate to be Heracles the hero, burdened with labours, yet it is also your choice. You choose to submit to it. Such is the paradox of living. We willingly accept that we have no will.”
• Hymen was the half brother of Orpheus. “A minor deity of song (he gave us the word ‘ hymn’) Hymen served as one of the Erotes (the young men in the love god Eros’s retinue), with a special responsibility for weddings and the marriage bed. Our words ‘hymen’ and ‘hymenal’ also derive from him.”
• “Love came to peasants, kings and even gods. Love made all equal. Love deified, yet love levelled.”
• “Human sacrifice, especially involving the young, was now looked on as barbaric, an unwanted legacy from the days when gods and men were crueller. But gods and men never lose their cruelty.”
• “In a fight, do not do what you want to do, but what you judge your enemy least wants you to.”
• “Their heroism, perhaps, derived from their ability to bring their mix of the human and the divine to bear against the grinding pressures of fate.”
• “He may have been the first cruel, abusive and unfit parent to reclaim a child once they became famous or rich, but he would certainly not be the last.”
• “Oedipus is a detective who employs all the fields of enquiry of which the Athenians were so proud - logic, numbers, rhetoric, order and discovery - only to reveal a truth that is disordered, shameful, transgressive and bestial.”

Heroes, like Mythos, has been a joy to read and I hope that Fry is hard at work preparing a third volume in the series, about the Trojan War and the Voyages of Odysseus. Please.

Brilliant perfection. March 2019; 415 pages

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"The Ancient Olympics" by Nigel Spivey

This is a book about the Olympic games as they were enacted at Olympia in Greece every four years for nearly a thousand years from, according to legend, 776 BC. Spivey compares the legend to written documents and archaeological records. Despite being a scholarly overview, Spivey's narrative is readable. Indeed, there are moments when he offers very contemporary insights, such as when he describes Achilles as "Achilles - whom no warrior at Troy can match in his capacity for multiple homicide” and suggests that the prizes at the funerary games in the Iliad include ”several pretty girls who can sew, and some useful lumps of pig-iron.”

In chapter one he borrows a phrase from George Orwell who said that sport was “war minus the shooting”. He suggests that Nietzsche characterised the classical Greek age as one with a Hegelian zeitgeist involving ‘agon’, contest. Spivey traces this Greek lover of competition to Hesiod in 700 BC, a contemporary of Homer. Hesiod compared good strife (eris agathos) with bad strife (kakochartos): “Good Strife, born of a coupling between Zeus and the Night, encouraged mortals to make the most of their brief time on earth; Bad Strife set up lusts for battle and bloodshed. Good Strife nurtured desires for wealth and fame; Bad Strife was a destroyer of lives and property. Good Strife encouraged creative industry, stirring the energies of emulation.” The word ‘athlete’ seems to come from the Greek aethla or athla meaning ‘contests’ or ‘prizes’.

In chapter two Spivey tackles the idea that the Greeks saw athletics as a way for boys to look beautiful, and that this ideal of beauty was derived from the idea that they should be fit for war. He explores the homoerotic potential of the gym, especially when, as for the Greeks, gymnasium involves nudity: “nuditorium is how it literally translates”. He suggests that gyms were places where older men ogled “tautly toned teenagers, out of puberty but not yet using a razor” and that "it was a normal practice ... for a wrestler to tie a string knot around his foreskin, probably to inhibit the sudden awkwardness of an erect phallus.” Nevertheless, “Beyond war, beyond sex, lay the peculiar but pervasive Classic Greek belief that beauty was invested with morality; that to look good was necessarily also to be good.”

In chapter 3 Spivey explores the events. He suggests that the legend of a Sacred Truce was ... legendary but describes how athletes had to arrive a month beforehand to a place that was so unbearably hot in mid-August that in Roman times bad slaves used to be forced to spectate as a punishment. Before Roman times the facilities were even worse: “Illustrious figures travelling to Olympia from all around the Mediterranean were expected to pitch camp or sleep rough in fields.”

Spivey goes on to describe the events in the order in which they were run:

• Chariot racing (in which it was the team owner who won the wreath, including the famous Alcibiades, Philip II of Macedon, and several ladies) and “bareback riding and riding without stirrups”
• Foot races (the single stade of about 200m, the double stade, and longer races up to about 2400 m) and the pentathlon which included “running, jumping, discus-throw, javelin-throw, and wrestling."
• Wrestling, boxing (“Since no padded gloves were worn for a bout, only tightly wrapped leather thongs, serious damage might be inflicted ... The bronze head of a boxer recovered from Olympia displays the troughs and corrugations of a face repeatedly hit hard.”) and pankration (no-holds-barred fighting)
• Full armour race.

Legend says that naked running started 720 BC when Orsippos from Megara lost his loin cloth but went on to win the stade race at which point Akanthos from Sparta discarded his loin cloth to win the two stade race.

In chapter 4, Spivey considers the rewards of victory. “The victor’s reward was a crown (stephanos)". Some scholars propose “that the primal origins of athletic contest should be located in rites of kingship or succession to a throne.” There were also jars of olive oil to be won; the first prize was worth in today's terms £50k. Finally there was the fame which professional athletes could translate into appearance fees of 30,000 drachmas. Star athletes had poems (especially odes by Pindar) written for them and statues made of them. But others could be envious:
“When Theagenes died, one of these enemies came each night to flog his honorific statue, as if inflicting posthumous revenge. But the statue of Theagenes eventually fell off its pedestal, killing the assailant. The statue was then prosecuted, convicted on a charge of homicide, and ‘drowned’ in the sea as punishment.”

And losers were lampooned. The opponents of Apis, a boxer, “set up a statue to him ‘because he never hurt anyone’” It was said of one Marcus, a contestant in the full armour race, that he was so slow that he “was locked in the stadium because the groundsmen mistakes him for a statue.”

Chapter 5 is about the politics of contest. Spivey suggests that Greekness was a real concept. When a Macedonian king wanted to compete the judges had to decide whether he was Greek (they did). To start with Olympia was dominated by Peloponnesian athletes, later from the rest of Greece and eventually from far-flung Greek colonies such as Alexandria. But Greekness was not an ethnic thing; rather it used the test of language. “Hellenistic strictly implies only that Greek was used as a language of convenience by non-Greek peoples”

The Olympics were sponsored. In the late stages Nero was a munificent benefactor to Olympia and Greek athletics in general and Herod the Great “rescued the sanctuary from financial straits by personally subsidizing the festival.” Furthermore, “the Olympic ‘trademark’ was franchised abroad by the Eleans.”

Then Theodosius I prohibited pagan sanctuaries

Chapter 6 deals with the origins of Olympia. A founding myth of Olympia is that Pelops sought the hand of the daughter of Oinomaos who challenged every such suitor to a chariot race and killed the losers. Pelops persuaded Pelops’ charioteer to replace a bronze axle pin with one made of wax so that when it melted during the race the wheel came off and Oinomaos (and the cheating charioteer?) was killed. Thus the founding myth of Olympia involves cheating! However, “The archaeological record suggests that in its earliest phase as a sanctuary (c1000 - 750 BC), Olympia was no more than an occasional meeting-place frequented by local inhabitants.”

This is a great book packed with fascinating information and written in an accessible way. I loved it.

Some more great quotes:

• “Implausibility, or the begrudged suspension of disbelief, is a modern demon. Once there were pilgrims for whom the loose ends of this story were not troublesome. What mattered to them was the myth’s essential security: it's clinging impingement upon the world.”
• “Myths relate to truth as rainbows relate to the sun ... wondrous as they may seem, myths are the phenomena of history's atmosphere. For the Greeks, myths might be written up, dramatized, recited, and parodied; but ultimately, and originally, myths happened.”
• “Some knowledge of ancient athletics was preserved through the Middle Ages in Europe by medical experts, dependent as they were upon the writings of Galen, one-time emergency surgeon to gladiators at Pergamon in Asia Minor, subsequently doctor to the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius in the second century.”
• “It was not with Homer but a copy of Tom Brown's Schooldays at his elbow that Coubertin conceived his dream of an Olympic renaissance.”

March 2019; 256 pages

This book was loaned to me by my good friend Fred, even before he had finished reading it. Fred's impeccable taste may be seen from the reviews of the other books he has lent to me:

The Fred Collection
A Time of Gifts: a wonderful travel book about a man walking through Europe between the wars; beautifully written
Dynasty: the story of the first Roman emperors by the wonderful historian Tom Holland
The Song of Achilles a wonderful novel by Madeline Miller
Defying Hitler by Sebastian Haffner; a memoir of a man who grew up in Germany during hyper-inflation and the rise of the Nazis

The Feather Thief by Kirk Wallace: a true story of a world obsessed with tying feathers and the crime that this provoked

Amo, Amas, Amat ,,, and all that by Harry Mount: a book that tried but failed to encourage me to learn Latin 

Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders: a Booker Prize winning novel narrated by ghosts


Spivey has also written How Art Made the World and Enduring Creation.

"Ulysses Found" by Ernle Bradford

Based on a lifetime of sailing the Mediterranean in a small boat, this book locates the places in Homer's Odyssey. Homer often gives precise sailing instructions and detailed descriptions of harbours (the exception is the clearly mythical voyage to the land of the dead) and Bradford uses these to trace the voyage. Sometimes Bradford agrees with classical sources (almost everyone locates Scylla and Charybdis in the Messina strait between Sicily and Italy) and sometimes he disagrees but in every case he has excellent reasons for his identification. Of course, this all assumes that Homer was working with a sailor or sailors or at least with their log books, even when, as Bradford admits, citing the lack of any encounters with other voyagers in the Odyssey, the Greeks of Homer's time never adventured into the Western Mediterranean.

This is a brilliant, fascinating, well argued and convincing book and the meat of the argument is perfectly spiced with anecdotes about the author's own adventures.

The route that Bradford suggests makes sense both in terms of directions, times and likely speeds, and the descriptions of land. In short, Bradford suggests Ulysses travelled north from Troy to raid the Thracian coast near Mount Ismaro. He was then driven by a storm to the Island of Djerba off the Libyan coast, the Land of the Lotus Eaters. He then travelled north to the land of the Cyclopes in SE Sicily, north to Ustica (the Island of Aeoleus) and again north to Bonifacio on southern Corsica, the Land of the Laestrygonians. He then travelled east to Circe's island (actually a headland) on the Italian coast north of Naples. After Circe he travelled west through the r (to the Land of the Dead) and then back to Circe. Leaving her again he went via the Isles of the Sirens (just south of the Sorrento peninsula) through the Messian straits (Scylla and Charybdis) to Taormina in Sicily where grazed the Cattle of the Sun. He spent years on Calypsos island (Malta) before finally travelling home via Corfu (the Land of the Phaeacians).

I've created a series of maps for this which can be found here


Fascinating bits:

• Odysseus means ‘son of wrath’. But Ulysses derives from Olysseus which comes from O Lukos, ‘the wolf’
• When young U is wounded in the thigh by a boar in a hunting accident. “This wounding in the thigh seems to equate him with a number of eastern gods, Tammuz, Adonis, and Cretan Zeus, all of whom were wounded and killed by a boar. These stories all stem from a Phoenician source.” 
• “The rudder, as we know it today, was a north European invention, and probably originated in the Baltic. This axled, hinged rudder was still considered something of a modern invention when used in the caravels of Henry the Navigator in the early 15th century. It was unknown in the classical world.”
• Odyssey ca C12 BC: “ the Cretan, or Minoan, seapower had collapsed before invaders from the north ... the Phoenicians had not yet founded their colonies on the North African coast.”
• Polyphemus has ‘eyebrows’ in the Odyssey: “It is not till later times that he becomes monophthalmic.”
• “Garlic itself has long been associated with magical properties ... s late as the 14th century ... we find that garlic was reputed to neutralize the lodestone, thus putting the magnetic compass out of action.”
• “Comparatively few rivers of any size flow into the Mediterranean, and it loses by evaporation two-thirds more than it receives from its rivers. This steady loss is made good by an inflow of water from the Atlantic.” This will allow U to drift back to the Med after visiting the ‘land of the dead’.
• “The two mountains which face each other across the Strait were called ‘The Pillars of Melkarth’ by the Phoenicians. They took their name from the twin pillars of the great temple of Melkarth in the city of Tyre. ... Melkarth was not only a sea god in Phoenician mythology, he was also Lord of the Underworld, and it was between the pillars of the Strait of Gibraltar that he was believed to dwell.” which is why C sent U to Gibraltar to go into the Underworld.
• “Baltic Amber was being imported overland into prehistoric Greece centuries before the Homeric period.”
• “It was the Phoenicians who first gave the island its name, Maleth or Malet - the Shelter, Haven, or Hiding Place ... the word ‘Calypso’ in Greek means ‘hidden’ or ‘hider’, and the Homeric words for Calypso’s isle, Neesos Kalupsous, can best be translated in English as ‘The Island of the Hiding Place’.”
• “The Maltese archipelago was inhabited many centuries before the basin of the Mediterranean was flooded.”

Great quotes

• “I do not think that anything is lost by attempting to find a skeleton - however magnificent the cupboard that hides it.”
• “Ulysses was the shopkeeper with his thumb on the scales, and an eye for the girls, handy with a knife in a dark alley, and at the same time in some strange fashion or other, capable of honesty - or was it of great consistency? - over most of the major issues.” 
• “When men return from war it is their record as fighting men which usually determines their immediate position in society. Inevitably within a short time the standards of judgement change, so that often the war hero turns out to be a peace-time failure.”
• “In Trapani I have felt history as heavy as a plush curtain. ... One's own life is seen as no more than a minute drop of resin oozing from the trunk of some giant tree.”
• “Places are little in themselves, you must earn them by your voyage.”

A wonderful voyage.

November 2018; 221 pages

"Virgil's Aeneid" by David Ross

As Ross notes in his Preface "This is not a book intended for Virgilian scholars, nor on the other hand is it solely for 'the general reader', who, in the area of Latin literature at least, may be as rare as the ivory-billed woodpecker." (p vii) It must therefore be asked whether this book falls between two stools. As a general reader I can asset that the answer is no. This extraordinarily well-written book intrigued and beguiled me. Yes, I have read the Aeneid (in translation) and I think it would be essential to have done so, or at least to be reading the Aeneid in parallel with this. But this book made me realise how much of Virgil's book I had missed; how much richer it was than I had appreciated. It made me want to re-read it with this as my guide. And it made me determined, some day, to tackle Virgil's other poetry, the Eclogues and the Georgics (not to mention rereading the Odyssey and trying Catullus).

This book is full of insights. I had never before appreciated that the Roman 'religion' was in essence a variety of pantheons, including the Olympic, grafted on to primitive animistic shadowy and vague powers such as Mater Matuta, Janus, Concordia, Castor, Fortuna etc; that “The ancestors of the Romans were, as Indo-Europeans. rather odd: they seem to have brought with them into Italy no gods and no mythology.” (p 80)  and one of the traditional invocations began “whether you be god or goddess” (p 63)  Even as late as "Cato's time (the first half of the second century) Mars could still be purely a spirit of the wilderness, though he had also, and for a long time, assumed the armour and the personality of Ares.” (p 65)

Nor had I appreciated that the chronology of Roman history is mainly invented, even regarding the date of the founding of the city. “The date that we view as traditional, 753 BC, was not established and accepted until 47 BC, on the authority of Varro, the greatest antiquarian scholar of his time, but it was entirely his invention.” He calculated that the Republic began in 509 BC and there were seven kings with an average reign of, say, 35 years each. (p 78) This is almost as good as Archbishop Usher's calculation of the date of creation.

Other insights included:

• “Virgil’s poem is a complete inversion of Homer.” (p 1)
• “Poetic meaning cannot be caught in the net of analysis, typified, catalogued, and stored away systemically in its proper drawer of a critical cabinet. The Aeneid does have meaning, but it has no answers.” (p 3)
• “Homeric narrative ... is strikingly different from the sophisticated literary narrative of secondary epic, in this respect: it is realistic, with the realism demanded by children listening to a fairytale. Every detail must be precise and logical.” (p 7) And just the tiny fraction of Homer quoted made me realise the power of the narrative.
• “The mundane experience of ordinary people living their everyday lives can become of literary interest only when given a significance that removes the experience from the everyday, that makes it mean something more.” (p 11)
• “The hero must do great deeds and must excel, but if he is to move us and have meaning, he must also fail, because failure is human, and the most human failing is death.” (p 12)
• “The difference between a Homeric hero at a time of crisis and Aeneas is simply this, that in Homer the hero then acts, decisively and without further hesitation, whereas for Aeneas there is no course of action possible, no way to resolve the conflict.” (p 13)
• “Divine action ... is human action in a pure state, a purity of absolute pettiness, of ambition and greed, of spite and pride; but pure also in that it need have no regard for its consequences” because the gods are immortal.” (p 72)

I even understood (most of) the discussion about the Latin hexameter and the reason for stresses and caesuras. 

Other great moments:

• “What is most obvious often receives the least attention” (p 1)
• “Apollonius’ Jason and Medea are subject to passions and faults all too human. Jason appears often as an incompetent, a bumbler, and a cad, and Medea is both the witch of towering passion and supernatural powers ... and also a naive girl experiencing love for the first time.” (p 6)
• “The traditional hero stands half-way between the gods and men.” (p 11)
• “Ignorance is fundamental to the human condition.” (p 76)
• “Whereas we walk down the road of life looking into the future as we go, the ancients sat in a railroad car facing to the rear, seeing only where they have passed; to see where they were going, they had to look back over their shoulders. This, in fact, is a far more realistic conception of the future than ours.” (p 106)

What a wonderful book. My mate Fred is good at picking books for me. Others he has selected which I recommend are:

• The Feather Thief, a true crime story about a theft from a museum
• A Time of Gifts: a wonderful travel book about a man walking through Europe between the wars; beautifully written
• Dynasty: the story of the first Roman emperors by the wonderful historian Tom Holland
• The Song of Achilles  a wonderful novel by Madeline Miller
• Defying Hitler by Sebastian Haffner; a memoir of a man who grew up in Germany during hyper-inflation and the rise of the Nazis

August 2018; 152 pages

"The Darkening Age" by Catherine Nixey

The prevailing perspective is that the glories of the Roman Empire were destroyed by the Barbarian invasions and that learning during the European Dark Ages was kept alive by monks in their scriptoria. Nixey radically revises this thesis. She shows that fanatical Christians destroyed a largely tolerant Roman culture and that Christianity was, to a large extent, responsible for the darkness.

First, she suggests that Roman persecution of Christians was largely a myth. In three centuries there were thirteen years of persecution:

• “Roman Emperors wanted obedience, not martyrs.” (p 78) 
• Trajan tells Pliny "these people must not be hunted out.” (p 73) 
• “As the early Christian author Origen admitted, the numbers of martyrs were few enough to be easily countable.” (p 61) 
• “It is now thought that fewer than ten martyrdom tales from the early Church can be considered reliable.” (p 62) 
• “The Romans did not seek to wipe Christianity out. If they had, they would almost certainly have succeeded.” (p 62) 
• “In this world today, there are over two billion Christians. there is not one single, true ‘pagan’.” (p 100)

In fact, it was the other way around. After centuries of tolerance, “From almost the very first year that a Christian emperor has ruled in Rome in AD 312, liberties had begun to be eroded.” (p xxvii - xxix) and within fifty years there were laws banning paganism. 

Many authors acknowledge that there were iconoclasts. “Classical statues were knocked from their plinths, defaced, defiled and torn limb from limb. Temples were razed to their foundations and burned to the ground.” (p xxxi) But they seem to excuse them. “In modern Histories those carrying out and encouraging the attacks [against heathen shrines] are really describe as violent, or vicious, or thuggish: they are merely ‘zealous’, ‘pious’, ‘enthusiastic’ or, at worst, ‘overzealous’.” (p 115)

People were also attacked, often by gangs of marauding monks: “Monks - anonymous, rootless, untraceable - were able to commit atrocities with near impunity.” (p 215) People were mutilated. “Eyes of the erring were gouged out because those who couldn't see the true religion were ‘blind’ anyway. Another Bishop was seized, his hands chopped off and his tongue, which had preached falsehoods, cut out.” (p 223) This could be excused. Citing Deuteronomy the learned Doctor of the Church St Jerome suggested that “a Christian might take the defeated prisoner, enjoy them, rape them - so long as they mutilated them first.” (p 164) The parabalani were “de facto militaries of the faithful” who threatened violence and killed the philosopher Hypatia (p 127) Even this was excused. Fanaticism perverts morality. “Murder committed for the sake of God, argued one writer, was not a crime but actually ‘a prayer’.” (p 222) Justice was rare. “Courtrooms in the east of the empire with disrupted by sinister groups of dark-clad, psalm-chanting monks.” (p 225) Judges fled.

Christianity has a reputation for condemning slavery but even this was perverted by the early church.“When one bishop advised slaves to desert their masters and become ascetics, the church was appalled and promptly excommunicated him.” (p 204)

As for sex. “Male homosexuality was outlawed.” (p xxxiii) “It would be well over a thousand years before Western civilisation could come to see homosexuality as anything other than a perversion.” (p 196) It seems to use that we live in a uniquely tolerant time; one wonders and worries that a cultural pendulum will swing back in the future. But this book suggests that it is perhaps the last millenniium and a half that has been the aberration and that what is 'unnatural' is not gay sex but the intolerance that leads to its condemnation.

Culturally perhaps the most damaging consequence of Christian fanaticism was the destruction of ancient writings. “It has been estimated that less than ten per cent of all classical literature has survived into the modern era ... It is estimated that only one hundredth of all Latin literature remains.” (p 166) In an age when manual copying was the only way to preserve ancient texts then simply ignoring an author could consign their work to obliteration. But worse was done. A shortage of parchment led to overwriting: “Palimpsests - manuscripts in which one manuscript has been scraped (psao) again (palin)” repeatedly show Christian texts overwriting classical texts." (p xxxii). And, of course, books were burnt.

Christians distrusted knowledge “To a proto-empiricist like Galen ... intellectual progress depended on the freedom to ask, question, doubt and above all, to experiment. In Galen’s world, only the ill-educated believed things without reason. To show something, one did not merely declare it to be so. One proved it, with demonstration. To do otherwise was for Galen the method of an idiot. It was the method of a Christian.” (p 30) 

There were reasons why Christians hated pagan learning. First of all, it was sexually frank:

• “The famously learned St Jerome, himself an inveterate reader, weighed in advising against ‘adultery of the tongue’.” (p 141)
• “Marcus Aurelius, with queasy precision, described sexual intercourse as ‘the friction of a piece of gut and, following a sort of convulsion, the expulsion of some mucus’.” (p 142) 
• Catullus (Carmen 16) says “I will bugger you and I will fuck your mouths.” (p 141)
• Martial’s Epigram 1.90 describes lesbianism as “rubbing cunts together ... to counterfeit the thrusting of a male.” (p 141)
• “In the Greco-Roman pantheon, not only did brother fight against brother but, worse, brother sometimes did quite unmentionable things with sister. Or with anyone else they could get their hands on.” (p 143)

Perhaps, worse, classical learning challenged Christian ideas. This was made worse because “it was painfully obvious to educated Christians that the intellectual achievements of the ‘insane’ pagans were vastly superior to their own.” (p 150):

• Roman intellectuals had a version of evolution: “The distinct species of animals were explained by a form of proto-Darwinism ... Nature put forth many species. those that had useful characteristics ... survived, thrived and reproduced.” (p 36) 
• “Ovid’s Metamorphoses ... opened with a version of the Creation myth that was so similar to the biblical one that it could hardly fail to make an interested reader question the supposed unique truth of Genesis. ... Where the biblical Creation begins with an earth that is ‘without form’, Ovid’s poem begins with a ‘rough, unordered mass of things’. ... a god appears and ‘rent asunder land from sky, and sea from land’ before instructing the seas to form and the ‘plains to stretch out’.” (p 39)

Philosophy actually dared to challenge religious beliefs, including Christianity:

• “The works of Greek and Roman philosophy were full of punchy one-liners poking fun at religion.” (p 143)
• Celsus points out that the crucifixion was seen by many but the resurrection by very few. (p 35)
• Celsus asked why did Jesus prefer sinners? “What evil is it not to have sinned?” (p 35)
• Why did God wait so long to send Jesus? Porphyry asked: “what has become of the men who lived in the many centuries before Christ came? ... [Why] did He who is called the Saviour withhold Himself for so many centuries of the world?” (p 47)

The non-Christians urged tolerance and freedom of thought. Pliny the Elder wrote that “God ... is one mortal helping another.” (p 44) Symmachus (a pagan) said: “We see the same stars, the sky is shared by all, the same world surrounds us. What does it matter what wisdom a person uses to seek for the truth?” (p 121) But this didn't duit the narrow-minded Christians. “Heretics were intellectual therefore intellectuals were, if not heretical, then certainly suspect.” (p 148)

Other fascinating asides:

• “The feast of the Liberalia was on 17th March ... at which Roman citizens celebrated a boys first ejaculation” (p 177)
• “Young men didn't go to the baths with their fathers for fear of the uexpected erection; even for liberal Romans, it seems that seeing one's son's hard-on was felt to be a bit much.” (p 194)
• “Is it not true that we are dead and only seem to live ... or are we alive and is life dead?” (Palladas; p 169)
• Hypatia was “devoted to the life of the mind rather than of the flesh and remained a virgin. ... it is said that one of her students fell in love with her ... Hypatia responded briskly. She brought some of her sanitary towels and threw them before him.” (p 127)
• Hypatia's father, Theon, wrote commentaries on Euclid that “were so authoritative that they form the foundation of modern editions of his texts.” (p 130)
• “Demons stalk through the pages of Augustine's City of God.” (p 14). 
• “One consequence of the concept of demons was that wicked thoughts were the fault of the demon not the man ... the monkish id is laid bare as monks confessed to being tormented by visions of naked women” (p 17) 
• “Temples to the old gods served as centres of demonic activity. Here they settled in swarms, gorging on the sacrifices made by Romans to their gods. Creep into a temple late at night and you would hear petrifying things: corpses that seemed to speak.” (p 19)
• “Those who criticized Christianity, warned the Christian apologist Tertullian, were not speaking with a free mind ... because they were under the control of Satan and his footsoldiers.” (p 21)
• “Strepitus mundi, the ‘roar of the world’” was “the sound of Christianity pouring, as unstoppable as a tide, across towns, countries and continents” (p 23)

This is a fascinating book which authoritatively challenges a fundamental trope of western history. Coming at a time when western Europe is appalled at the cultural vandalism being wrought by groups such as the Taliban, and ISIS it is a timely reminder that suppression of art and culture and thought and learning is not a trait of one particular religion but seems to be a consequence of people believing that there is only one God.

Also by this author:

• Heresy

A must-read. July 2011; 247 pages

Published by Pan-Macmillan in 2017

I recently came across corroborative evidence for Nixey's thesis when reading the Preface to Giorgio Vasari's Lives of the Great Artists (which was written in 1550) in which he says “Christianity ... strove to cast out and utterly destroy every least possible occasion of sin; and in doing so it ruined or demolished all the marvellous statues, besides the other sculptures, the pictures, mosaics and ornaments representing the false pagan gods.”

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God