From The Guardian January 1 2011
Charlotte Higgins on what the Greeks and Romans did and didn`t do for us
When Natalie Haynes was a teenager, her mind was turned. She take the 2nd volume of Virgil`s Aeneid, the Roman poet`s astonishing story of the declension of Troy. Instead of taking science A-levels and becoming a vet, she studied Latin, Greek and ancient history and took a stage in classics.
Her love for Virgil is still ardent. You should read Aeneid book four (the tale of Queen Dido`s fall) because, she exhorts in The Ancient Guide to New Life, it "is the most brilliant record of verse ever written, and it`s your own time you`re wasting if you determine to read something else instead".
But Haynes has more than enthusiasm to offer. As the claim of her book implies, she wants to prove what the antediluvian world has to bid us as a point to support now. This is tricky territory. The ancient world looks as if it is populated by people "only like us", not least because it is the great minds of the hellenic world - Virgil, Homer, Plato, Cicero and the rest - who have informed so lots of our intellectual inheritance, from the humanists onwards. Read certain love poems by the Roman writer Catullus, and you can almost see him breathing, so near and immediate do the emotions that flood out of those words seem to be. But the worlds of classical Greece and ancient Rome are also irretrievably alien, separated from us by thousands of years, utterly foreign by way of everything from faith and ritual to their general adoption of a slave-based economy (even Spartacus believed in slavery, he simply didn`t need to be one).
Haynes gets this, and writes rather well near the hole of seeing "ancient Rome as a toga party to which our invitation went astray". Recalling the opening time of LP Hartley`s The Go-Between ("The by is a strange country"), she writes: "We run to see Rome as though it were topographically, rather than temporally, separate from our world."
Unfortunately her consciousness of the trap does not end her from light into it from sentence to time. Ancient Athenian democracy, for example, had very small to do with our modern political system in Britain: the job is that we have transmitted the Greek word (the original significance is "grip of the people", so it`s an approximation with an inbuilt critique). Haynes seems to me to be too enthusiastic about Athenian democracy, which - even if it was retrospectively glorified in texts such as Pericles`s Funeral Oration- began as a practical solution to a very real set of political problems that simply happened to go out quite well for the house of its founding father. (The statesman Pericles and the gorgeous Alcibiades were both of the sami family as Cleisthenes, the aristocrat credited with Athens`s democratic reforms.)
Sometimes the conclusions for new spirit that Haynes draws from the antediluvian world can seem rather banal. Does the fact that Greek officials were paying a workman`s wage mean that modern politicians could usefully fill a pay-cut? Will thinking about Plato`s theory of forms actually get us hesitate when considering the leverage of a new electronic gadget? Does the fact that the emperor Caligula died at the pass of the point of the Praetorian Guard really teach us not to tease policemen? (Surely Haynes has her tongue in her face with that net one.)
For all that, as you`d expect from somebody who made a calling in stand-up comedy, Haynes is bright on writers such as Aristophanes and Juvenal. The Greek comic playwright`s most obvious successor, she reckons, is The Simpsons - "anarchic, satirical, parodic and political". The Roman satirist she unpicks with ravenous enthusiasm, loving him though he`s "dyspeptic, bigoted, racist and furious". A compelling passage describes Juvenal`s third satire, in which he dramatises his friend Umbricius`s decision to provide Rome and cover the rural life in Cumae (not far from the ultra-fashionable seaside resort of Baiae, on the bay of Naples). The savage, witty accusations against Rome pile up: it is expensive, dangerous, there`s no work, it`s good of crooks and immigrants. So, will Juvenal move to the state too? No fear. Rome, for all its confusion and discomforts, its pot and chaos, is where Juvenal will stay. The Roma of the mind, as Haynes demonstrates, is yet the order to be.
Charlotte Higgins`s It`s All Greek to Me is promulgated by Short Books.
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