Civilization’s beginnings

This short history is “an attempt to communicate to the educated reader and to students of history some basic knowledge about antiquity.” Antiquity here means the civilizations of the ancient Near East and the Mediterranean that have helped determine the course of Western civilization. The focus on “our” antiquity suggests that this history, like all histories, is also about ourselves.

Norman F. Cantor, professor emeritus at New York University, is a historian of medieval civilization. The theocratic civilization of the Middle Ages preserved in outline the pagan civilizations that preceded it, with their aristocracies and institutionalized slaveries. From this starting point, Cantor looks back at the ancient Mediterranean world, although without much enthusiasm or affection. He offers a useful overview of social and political organizations. His approach is pragmatic and efficient; his outlook modern and American. He understands that Athenian democracy, though remarkable for its time, was not democracy in modern terms. The first part of the book is a 53-page description of ancient Near Eastern civilizations, Greece and Rome -- and of Christianity in late antiquity. Once his readers have this outline in mind, they can read more detailed descriptions of the societies and cultures of each civilization. This two-step approach has the advantage of letting readers decide what they want to concentrate on. They won’t be seriously misled by what Cantor chooses to tell them: He mentions names that people ought to know and gives clear summaries of the wars that had a lasting effect on later history.

But approaching ancient history from a distance and with a pragmatic slant has disadvantages. Cantor doesn’t explain that our notions of national character in the ancient world are largely determined by the nature of surviving source materials. It is easy to get the impression that ancient Egyptians spent their lives contemplating eternity, because we have so many Egyptian documents about death and the afterlife. It is natural to assume that the ancient Hebrews were more pious than other ancient people, particularly the ancient Greeks, because the Bible is the principal source for their history. But piety and justice were central to the lives of ancient pagans as well, though their historians concentrate on the origins and consequences of wars and assume their readers already know what their religion has to say about the limitations of their mortality. The ancient world, as Cantor describes it, lacks color and style. He has no interest in the philosophizing that appears to have been the principal pastime of the leisured classes in Athens and Rome. The elites of these cities (so ancient writers tell us) liked to talk about the nature of the good and of justice, about how to govern fairly and live happily. They could never stop thinking about the traditional myths of gods and heroes, even when they did not actually believe in them.

Cantor praises Greek tragedy and Latin lyric poetry for their enduring excellence but fails to offer an accurate account of the great Greek national epics or give a fair estimate of their importance. “The Iliad” was, as he notes, the most popular book in the ancient Greek world and a staple of education. But he describes it as a “work of artful deception, created for the bourgeois market, allowing noisy, coarse, but well-educated Athenians to see themselves in pseudo-aristocratic garb.” “The Odyssey,” he tells us, “reveals clearly that [Homer] was a market-driven professional writer” influenced by Egyptian fiction: “It smells of the languid Nile ambience.” But we know almost nothing about Homer or his audience. Virtually all the action of “The Odyssey” takes place somewhere other than Egypt. The Nile is never mentioned.

Cantor is also curiously dismissive of the characteristically Greek invention, philosophy: “Plato had one Big Idea from which everything else derived.... Laid up in heaven are Forms, or Ideas, for everything we see and sense.” He offers a more respectful summary in the second part of the book. Plato showed later philosophers and scientists that it was possible to discuss cause and effect without reference to gods or to religion. By assigning no important role to the traditional gods in his description of reality, Plato made it easier for later thinkers to accept Christianity, with its notion of a caring divinity and the promise of eternal life.

But Cantor does not try to systematically account for the debt of Christianity to Greek, Roman or Egyptian ideas. Instead of offering a brief survey of Christian thought, he inserts a fictional conversation between St. Augustine and two imaginary interlocutors. The dialogue, for all its ancient trappings, speaks to the concerns of the modern world. Cantor describes Augustine (sitting in his study like a modern academic and discoursing on other theologians and theologies) as dark-skinned, his interlocutor Bishop Vincent (who gets the worst of the argument) as fair-skinned and blond. Anyone familiar with the sex-segregated church in late antiquity will be surprised to find a nun (supposedly Augustine’s sister) joining in the conversation.

Cantor concludes with a corrective to European sentimentalism about “the glory that was Greece and the grandeur that was Rome.” He emphasizes the negative legacies of antiquity -- its elitism, conservatism and the right of the strong to dominate the weak. But is that legacy specific to Mediterranean antiquity? It is fashionable for Europeans to blame their cultural ancestors for the social problems we face today. But is it fair to blame the ancients for characteristics that in the end are simply human and universal? *