A Classical Education

I've finally finished Robin Lane Fox's "The Classical World", which I'd been wanting to read since the hardback came out. It was well worth the wait; a fantastic way of putting what I can only describe as "all that stuff" into context without having to go through a pre-1940's public school education. His occasional, somewhat bizarre, emphasis on the significance of gardens is only explicable when one reads the author's biog and discovers that he has been the Financial Times' gardening correspondent since 1970.

It's clear that Fox has a great deal of admiration for many of the military exploits and feels sympathetic towards some individuals whose behaviour was at times, well, ruthless, to say the least. This is probably fair; neither the idea that the classical civilisations were hideously cruel and alien, nor that their inhabitants were demigods compared to us can be adequate. We must judge in context. Nevertheless, I was reminded of David Starkey, another historian; during an edition of "Any Questions" he claimed that anyone who actually understood history would be right-wing politically. I'm not at all sure; I think that, inevitably, people like Starkey and Fox view history from the top-down, as it were. It's no wonder that this happens, because that is the stuff that our traditional sources of History talk about, and that is where all the action seems to be - wars are led by kings, not serfs. Life, though, is lived from the bottom up. There have been vastly more serfs than kings, and the history of kings and queens is really only context for the true meat and gristle of human experience.