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A review by socraticgadfly
Introducing the Ancient Greeks: From Bronze Age Seafarers to Navigators of the Western Mind by Edith Hall
1.0
This book looked interesting on the shelves; I thought that, if nothing else, I might learn one or two things, at least, about post-Mycenean, pre-classical Greece, and, since the author is a philosophy prof, get her particular take on the ground zero of western philosophy.
Unfortunately, whopper errors at the start and end of the book mar any good content in the middle.
First, near the start, Hall talks about how small Greece is, at 25,000 square miles, smaller than Portugal or Scotland.
Er, WRONG! It's 50,000 square miles and bigger than both. With that error occurring in the first dozen pages, my skeptical antennae were up for the rest of the book.
It's much worse at the end, where a mix of errors and unsupported presuppositions are horrendous.
First, she claims that there were 110,000 Christians in the year 200 CE. First, we don't know the exact number of Xns. Second, to the degree we have guesstimates, we don't know how many of them were inside the Roman empire.
Next, she claims the gospel of Mark was written @ 61 CE. Uhh, most New Testament scholars would date it about 5 years later. I think it could have been written as late as 70-71, depending on the provenance of its origin.
Finally, she repeats the old secularist canard, as did Carl Sagan, that the death of Hypatia at the hands of Christians was what led to the destruction of the Library of Alexandria.
Actually, the library was first sacked, if not necessarily destroyed, during the reign of Emperor Aurelian a century earlier, in battle that had nothing to do with Christians. Its final destruction may not have happened until the Muslim invasion of Egypt nearly two centuries after Hypatia.
Besides the errors of fact, some of Hall's interpretations of classical Greece are spotty. Yes, the Greeks were great seafarers, by and large. But did every city-state focus on the sea that much? No. Sparta didn't, certainly. North of Athens, on the mainland, areas like Thessaly certainly didn't.
Also, on the central conundrum of (some parts of) ancient Greece, that of personal liberty and in (yet smaller) places, that of democracy, vs. the ubiquity of slavery, Hall simply doesn't wrestle with the conundrum that much. Without expecting classical Attica to abhor slavery as much as us, and with Stoics like Epictetus even detaching from their own slavery, nonetheless, it was a conundrum of sorts even back then. The Epicurean brotherhood of man attests to that.
Beyond that, classical-era Greece seems too much filtered through the lens of Athens/Ionia on one hand, and Sparta on the other. I mentioned Thessaly above. What about Corinth? Or the borderlands of the northwest? The lens should have a wider angle.
So, look for some other relatively new book for an introductory overview of ancient Greece.
Unfortunately, whopper errors at the start and end of the book mar any good content in the middle.
First, near the start, Hall talks about how small Greece is, at 25,000 square miles, smaller than Portugal or Scotland.
Er, WRONG! It's 50,000 square miles and bigger than both. With that error occurring in the first dozen pages, my skeptical antennae were up for the rest of the book.
It's much worse at the end, where a mix of errors and unsupported presuppositions are horrendous.
First, she claims that there were 110,000 Christians in the year 200 CE. First, we don't know the exact number of Xns. Second, to the degree we have guesstimates, we don't know how many of them were inside the Roman empire.
Next, she claims the gospel of Mark was written @ 61 CE. Uhh, most New Testament scholars would date it about 5 years later. I think it could have been written as late as 70-71, depending on the provenance of its origin.
Finally, she repeats the old secularist canard, as did Carl Sagan, that the death of Hypatia at the hands of Christians was what led to the destruction of the Library of Alexandria.
Actually, the library was first sacked, if not necessarily destroyed, during the reign of Emperor Aurelian a century earlier, in battle that had nothing to do with Christians. Its final destruction may not have happened until the Muslim invasion of Egypt nearly two centuries after Hypatia.
Besides the errors of fact, some of Hall's interpretations of classical Greece are spotty. Yes, the Greeks were great seafarers, by and large. But did every city-state focus on the sea that much? No. Sparta didn't, certainly. North of Athens, on the mainland, areas like Thessaly certainly didn't.
Also, on the central conundrum of (some parts of) ancient Greece, that of personal liberty and in (yet smaller) places, that of democracy, vs. the ubiquity of slavery, Hall simply doesn't wrestle with the conundrum that much. Without expecting classical Attica to abhor slavery as much as us, and with Stoics like Epictetus even detaching from their own slavery, nonetheless, it was a conundrum of sorts even back then. The Epicurean brotherhood of man attests to that.
Beyond that, classical-era Greece seems too much filtered through the lens of Athens/Ionia on one hand, and Sparta on the other. I mentioned Thessaly above. What about Corinth? Or the borderlands of the northwest? The lens should have a wider angle.
So, look for some other relatively new book for an introductory overview of ancient Greece.