CONTENTS

The Acts of the Apostles contains one of the most vivid accounts of travel from the ancient world (Chapters 27-8). The apostle Paul had exercised his right as a Roman citizen to appeal directly to the emperor and so needed to travel by sea from Caesarea, on the coast of Palestine, to Rome. Paul, accompanied by a centurion, as he was officially in custody, set out in the autumn, probably of ad 60. The two first made their way north up the coast to the ancient Phoenician port of Sidon. Next, to avoid unfavourable winds, the ship worked its way around the northern coast of Cyprus and then westwards across the open sea, past Cilicia and Pam-phylia, now south-eastern Turkey, to reach the thriving port of Myra. Here Paul and the centurion transferred to a ship that had made its way north from Alexandria. This battled its way along the coast to Cnidus, on the south-western tip of Asia Minor, before giving up in the face of contrary winds and heading south to pass along the southern coast of Crete. It was now well into autumn and Paul hoped they would winter there. However, his guard and captain thought otherwise and the ship continued across the open sea towards Sicily. Paul’s fears were justified. A gale blew up and it was only after a terrifying fourteen days of storms that they managed to beach the ship on the coast of Malta where its stern broke up. They had to wait until the spring when another ship from Alexandria, which had been wintering on the island, set off to take them to Syracuse on the east coast of Sicily and then round the southern heel of Italy and so up the coast to Puteoli (the modern Pozzuoli) where the grain ships from Alexandria docked. Paul continued on to Rome.

So much has changed in the Mediterranean since two thousand years ago but it is still possible to follow the route of Paul’s journey by sail, pass the same landscapes and contours of the shore, and encounter the same frustrations with contrary winds. In 2007 four of us followed part of the same journey in a 38-foot sailing cruiser we had chartered. Our projected passage was from Gocek in the Gulf of Fethiye in southern Turkey, westwards, to Cnidus. It was early spring, the shores had hardly begun to awake to a new season, and the bays where we anchored were still empty of other craft. The winds were fickle, usually light or non-existent, and we had to abandon our hope of not using our motor in order to make progress. The frustration was as great as it would have been two thousand years ago unless one was a grandee with a hundred oarsmen at hand.

As we made our way westwards, it was easy to see the remains of the civilizations of the past. We were not far from Gocek when we anchored in the so-called Tomb

Bay from where we were able to clamber up the hillside to find deserted tombs carved into the face of the rock. This was the wild and mountainous coastline of ancient Lycia. The Lycians were cut off from their neighbours inland by mountain ranges and had their own language and history. They fought ferociously to defend their autonomy within, successively, the Persian, Hellenistic, and Roman empires. The Romans were shrewd enough to give Lycia the status of a province of the empire. Ancient ruins were scattered all along the coastline and it was common to come across isolated sarcophagi with the distinctive Lycian pointed lids. The hillside tombs of Tomb Bay were probably from the Lycian city of Cyra that flourished in the fifth and sixth century bc.

At the western entrance of the Gulf the secure and deep anchorage of Kizilkuyruk sheltered us as it had done shipping for thousands of years. A path led up from the bay and eventually came out on to a small plain where the ruins of the city of Lydae were spread out. Two mausoleums, perhaps from the Hellenistic period (see Chapter 20), survived and the site as a whole was marvellously evocative in its isolation, typical of the vast numbers of classical cities in Turkey that are today virtually inaccessible except on foot and hardly excavated. It was easy to scrape away on the surface and reach an original pavement, possibly of the agora, the market-place. This was probably one of those Greek-speaking cities that flourished under Roman rule (see Chapter 29) and survived into Byzantine times. Yet apart from a mention in the Geography by the second century Ptolemy of Alexandria, it has vanished from the literary sources.

Beyond the modern port of Marmaris, there were reminders of the difficulties of sailing in the ancient world. At Serce Limani, there is what appears to be a perfect enclosed harbour (‘limani’ is Turkish for harbour) but within it there are no ruins. Why had it never been settled? The answer was provided by a shipwreck discovered by George Bass, the doyen of underwater archaeology and excavator of the famous Uluburun shipwreck of 1300 bc (see p. 36). It was of a Byzantine ship loaded with Islamic glass and Byzantine metals that had sunk at the entrance to the harbour in the eleventh century ad. Its position suggested that it had tried to seek refuge in the harbour but had been caught by the shifting winds that are still prevalent at the entrance there today and had been driven on shore. Experienced sailors, especially those manning the more cumbersome merchant ships of earlier times, had learned not to risk it.

A far better entrance was to be found in the next bay to the west, now called Bozuk Buju, and this is where larger Greek and Roman fleets had assembled over the centuries. Perhaps the most famous was that of Demetrius Poliorcetes, ‘the taker of cities’, who had gathered forces and siege engines here in 305 bc before, in the struggle for dominance in the east following the death of Alexander the Great, he had attempted to take the island of Rhodes. Despite a siege lasting a year, the Rhodians held out and celebrated their victory by building the Colossus, a statue of the city’s patron god, Helios, which stood alongside the harbour as one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. The finest survival in this bay is the fort on the headland. Its carefully fitted stone walls had been assembled without mortar and still stand well above ground. Again it is probably a construction from the Hellenistic period. There were breathtaking views from the summit along the coast and across to Rhodes so that any raiders would have been spotted long before they arrived.

Eventually we arrived at the site of Cnidus on the end of a peninsula. We had passed the cliff top base of a monument possibly built to commemorate the victory of the Athenian mercenary admiral Conon over the Spartans in 394 bc. The massive lion that had topped it had been taken off along with many other statues from Cnidus in 1859 by the archaeologist Charles Newton and is now in the British Museum. Cnidus is an especially nostalgic place for me as I worked on the excavations there in 1968 (when I was 20). The Cnidians had created a double harbour by building a causeway between the mainland and an island in the fourth century bc when the site was first occupied. The smaller of the two, ‘the trireme harbour, as the first century ad geographer Strabo called it, was big enough to take twenty warships (in 1968 we used to sit on the beach there watching the sun set each evening). The larger harbour still had its original breakwaters and it is a magnificent experience to sail into it, passing the original theatre on the shoreline with the deserted terraces sloping up towards the city’s acropolis.

Creating the new harbours was a shrewd decision by the Cnidians. They provided ample space for ships to anchor while they were waiting for the prevailing winds from the north, the meltemi of the summer months, to change and so there would be good business to have from the visitors. The most famous, or, to some, notorious, treasure of the city was the life-size nude Aphrodite created by the fourth-century bc sculptor Praxiteles. It shocked the Greek world for its impudence in showing the goddess naked but the Cnidians exulted in the scandal. It soon became a tourist attraction. Its fame soared when an admirer assaulted the goddess leaving his semen on its thigh to be shown off to inquisitive onlookers. The statue has long since vanished. It was probably taken north to Constantinople in the fourth or fifth century ad where it is believed to have been destroyed in a fire. The excavations on the site have, however, revealed a circular pavement on a northern terrace of the city that answers to the ancient descriptions of the shrine.

So Cnidus became wealthy. It is an important site for archaeologists because it was never built on and simply decayed, perhaps as a result of the drying up of its water supply but more likely as the result of the disappearance of trade in the seventh and eighth centuries ad. Its remains are still laid out on its terraces. There was a residential area on the former island and theatres and temples among the houses on the mainland. Much of its original walls survive. Cnidus had famous citizens as well. The fifth-century bc Ctesias, who probably came from an older settlement of the Cnidians along the coast, was a historian of Persia and of India. He provided the earliest account of India known in the west. Eudoxus (C.410-C.350 bc) was one of the great mathematical astronomers of the Greek world and after a distinguished career across the Mediterranean world was said to have built his own observatory in the city. He was the first astronomer to attempt a mathematical model of the planets. Sostratus, claimed by some as the architect of the famous lighthouse of

Alexandria, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, also called Cnidus his native city.

Soaking up the fragmentary remains of the ancient Mediterranean is a fundamental experience for those studying classical civilizations. Anyone travelling to Athens or Rome or any number of other classical sites (see my Sites of Antiquity, Taunton, 2009, for examples) will be following in the footsteps of those pioneers who rediscovered this world from the fifteenth century onwards (see further Chapter 36). However, traditionally, the academic study of the ancient world has been not of its ruins but of its literature. Latin had always survived as the language of the western church but from the fourteenth century the classical style of Cicero was championed, his texts rediscovered, and Ciceronian Latin became the medium of scholarship. The study of Latin, and from the sixteenth century Greek, texts became a symbol of intellectual elitism and at the core of any traditional education. These were ‘the classics’

The word ‘classic’ itself is derived from the Latin classicus, ‘of the highest class’ of the five into which the Roman citizenry were divided when meeting in the assembly known as the comitia centuriata, and the term refers not only to a work picked out for its enduring excellence (as often in ‘classical music’) but for Greek and Roman civilization as a whole, as if it represented a peak of human achievement. (The first recorded use in this sense is, in fact, in the second century ad.) However, linking the mastery of surviving classical texts to social status led to a formalized rite of passage. Homer and Virgil, Demosthenes and Cicero made up the initiation, with young scholars then progressing to the famous Greek tragedians, Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, and, next, to Aristophanes and, in Latin literature, Terence, Lucretius, Horace, and Juvenal. Plato and Aristotle followed. The historians Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophon, Caesar, Livy, and Sallust were also part of the canon of texts. (See Pran9oise Waquet, Latin, or the Empire of a Sign, London, 2001, for this curriculum. All these authors are described in the following chapters—see their Index entries.)

By 1900 the examination system in the public (i. e. private) schools of England had become ossified. I still have the papers sat at Winchester College by my great-uncle Kenneth Freeman in 1901 when he was 18. There were twelve papers dealing with classical subjects and they were mostly concerned with translations to and from texts. So, in the Divinity paper, Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians had to be translated from the Greek. English texts, including one from Shakespeare’s Henry V, had to be translated into Greek verse or Latin elegiacs. It was possible to achieve a 100 per cent as young Freeman managed for his translation of a passage from Thucydides. (Quite how this was marked is unclear but Kenneth was a top scholar going on to win the Senior Chancellor’s Medal in Classics at Cambridge before dying, tragically, at only 24.) Most of the other questions concentrated on the specific use of language and grammar (and even in the 1960s when I was ‘construing’ texts this remained the case). There was virtually nothing on history or the broader understanding of classical civilizations. Nor was there, at this preuniversity level, anything from the works of Plato or Aristotle. One had to wait until

Oxford or Cambridge to read Plato’s Republic or Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, staples of the curriculum.

The core texts known since 1500 (including the authors noted above) have hardly been added to and so have been subject to ever more meticulous study among those classicists seeking to reach the top of their profession. The scrutiny to which they were subjected is astonishing. Sir Kenneth Dover (1920-2010), widely regarded as the finest Greek scholar of his generation (not least for the way he opened up the serious study of Greek homosexuality), describes a commentary he made of Books VI and VII of Thucydides’ The Peloponnesian War. It involved him ‘in some six thousand hours of work altogether, much of it in the minutiae of chronology, grammar and textual criticism’. On one occasion he looked up ‘all six hundred examples of a certain common preposition of Thucydides in order to elucidate the precise sense of one passage’. Another fine Oxford classicist, Jasper Griffin, remembers, in the 1950s, a course of three lectures a week covering three terms on the text of a single play by Euripides which did not even reach the end of the text. One might ask how such a painstaking approach to ancient texts achieved anything of significance. Could one imagine an English scholar applying the same dedication to a Russian or French work of history? Yet as recent work on The Histories of Herodotus shows (in a number of scholarly commentaries published by Cambridge and Oxford University Presses in recent years), there is still much fascination in decoding that great historian’s sophisticated use of language.

As Dover’s work suggests, one result of there being so few surviving texts was to give them a sacred quality. The pioneering Moses Finley, who brought the fresh air of anthropology into classical scholarship in Cambridge in the 1950s and 1960s, complained that ‘sources written in Latin and Greek occupy a privileged status and are immune from the canons of judgement and criticism that are applied to all other documentation’. Another bias was towards believing that the Greeks and Romans themselves privileged the written word. Yet this was primarily an oral culture where rhetoric was considered one of the supreme arts (see Interlude 4). The philosopher Plato noted that one cannot engage in debate with the written word: ‘If you ask them [words] anything about what they say. . . they go on telling you the same thing over and over again forever.’ Plato emphasized his point by presenting his arguments as dialogues in which his participants argue down an issue until they reach philosophical bedrock.

Yet the studied texts are among a tiny coterie of survivors. The amount of ancient writing which has been lost is staggering, and it may be the best of what was written. Geoffrey Lloyd, the leading expert on the history of Greek science, suspects that much of the finest work in Greek science and mathematics was discarded because it was simply too difficult for later generations to grasp. The logician and physician Galen and the astronomer Ptolemy, both working in the second century AD, gained such authority that much work from before their day was considered inferior and not preserved. There are hundreds of recorded commentaries from Late Antiquity on earlier Latin authors but none survives (unlike many Christian commentaries that we still have). Sophocles is considered one of the finest playwrights of western literature and wrote some 130 plays, but only seven, some 5 per cent of the total, survive. How would we assess Shakespeare if we had only Twelfth Night, Hamlet, or any one other of his plays to know him by? The picture we have of the achievements of the ancient world is therefore distorted, and it is tempting to think how it might have been affected if a different pattern of texts had survived—the later books of Tacitus’ Annals instead of the earlier ones, or the earlier books of the fourth century ad historian Ammianus Marcellinus instead of the later ones.

So the voices of the vast majority of the Greek and Roman populations and their subjects have vanished unheard. In his study of Roman slavery, Slavery and Society at Rome (Cambridge, 1994), Keith Bradley records only one freed slave, the philosopher Epictetus, who actually describes the indignities of slavery from the point of view of one who had endured them. Women’s voices have also been lost. There are the few surviving poems of Sappho but then virtually nothing until the Christian era and the diary of the martyred Perpetua (see p. 596). Any assessment of the position of these disenfranchised groups has to be decoded from the texts that

There is now much greater sensitivity towards the wider contexts within which texts are created. This is partly because more are being discovered in settings outside the monasteries where most of the originals were preserved. One can now cite the gradual publication of the vast papyri cache (100,000 fragments) from Oxy-rhynchus in Egypt that dates from the Hellenistic and Roman periods. (Well covered in Peter Parsons, City of the Sharp-Nosed Fish: Greek Papyri beneath the Egyptian Sand Reveal a Long-Lost World, London, 2007.) Its discovery has helped revise the rigid picture of ancient literature that had prevailed since the Renaissance. There are over a thousand fragments from Homer, an indication of his immense popularity as a ‘classic’ throughout the Greek and Roman era. These show how variant readings were gradually reduced in favour of a finalized text by the end of the second century Bc. Homer is not the only author who had achieved such a high status; the tragedian Euripides was second to him and, interestingly, the twenty most popular authors in the cache were all writing before 200 BC. In other words we are dealing with a literate culture at home with a favourite set of earlier ‘classic’ texts. The second-century ad Plutarch may have derided the people of Oxyrhynchus as ‘barbarians’, but they were reading his sophisticated works within a generation.

Books provided solace for many living in remote Egyptian villages. ‘If you have already copied the books, send them, so that we have something to pass the time, because we have no one to talk to’, reads one letter. Quite apart from what the Oxy-rhynchus cache tells us of ‘colonial’ culture, an immense amount of background knowledge has been added. A tragedy by Aeschylus, The Suppliants, had long been considered one of his first and used to make statements about the early nature of tragedy until a text from Oxyrhynchus showed that it was actually relatively late! The finds from Egypt also show the slow adoption of the codex, sheets of papyrus bound in book form, at the expense of the papyrus roll. The codex appears in the first century ad but only 1.5 per cent of texts are presented in this form. By ad 300 the percentage is 50 and by ad 500, 90. The roll gradually becomes obsolete as the book takes its place. (Recent work shows that the codex first developed in Rome but was then adopted by Christian communities in Egypt. See Roger Bagnall, Early Christian Books in Egypt, Princeton and Oxford, 2009.)

As will be seen, the climate of Egypt is ideal for the preservation of papyrus and much else besides but it is not the only source of new texts. A whole library of philosophy found in charred and brittle form in the opulent Villa dei Papyri in Herculaneum, a casualty of the volcanic eruption of ad 79 that also buried nearby Pompeii, may eventually be deciphered. Then there is the remarkable selection of human voices surviving from wooden writing tablets found preserved in waterlogged pits at the Roman fort of Vindolanda, near what was to become Hadrian’s Wall in northern Britain. These letters not only bring the reader face to face with life as it was lived in a frontier garrison at the end of the first century ad but provide details of economic life, the organization of the army, the Latin language at its most vernacular, and the extent of literacy.

The most abundant source of new texts comes from inscriptions on stone, pottery, metal, or, in rare cases such as Vindolanda, wood. Possibly half a million inscriptions from the Greek and Roman world have now been published. Epigraphy, which is concerned not only with the recovery, translation, and editing of ancient inscriptions but with the placing of them, like other texts, in the political and social context in which they were written, is now a major specialism in its own right. Not only is the range of epigraphic texts much wider than those of the traditional canon of literature, but inscriptions are often discovered in their original settings, on the walls of public buildings, for instance. Some have provided a key to a whole civilization. The decree inscribed in three scripts and two languages on the Rosetta Stone, now in the British Museum, led to the decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphics. Many have a direct historical value (the ‘Decree of Themistocles’ discovered in 1959 at Troezen or the Athenian Tribute Lists, for example, discussed in Chapters 13 and 16 respectively). Others give a flavour of city life, the dates of buildings, and the names and status of those who built them. (The city of Aphrodisias in south-western Turkey has been especially abundant in public inscriptions.) Some of the more personal (although the ‘personal’ nature of any ‘public’ inscription needs to be judged with care) reflect marital harmony and commitment as in the famous Laudatio Turiae, a Roman funeral eulogy from the first century Bc for one Turia by her husband who praises her constancy during the upheavals of the civil wars. (Childless, she even offers to divorce him so that he can beget heirs, a proposal he angrily rejects.) (See further John Bodel (ed.), Epigraphic Evidence: Ancient History from Inscriptions, London and New York, 2002. Those in Rome should visit the superb new museum devoted to epigraphy in the former Baths of Diocletian.)

Archaeology is primarily concerned with the recovery of material culture and buildings and their interpretation as evidence of past human behaviour. (Colin Renfrew and Paul Bahn, Archaeology, Theories, Methods and Practice, sixth edition, London, 2012 covers in detail all the points made here.) Traditionally the archaeologist has dealt largely in stone, pottery, and metalwork, as these are the materials most likely to survive in a temperate or tropical climate. In recent years a much wider range of materials, in particular those relating to plant and animal life, have proved recoverable, and so much more can be said about agriculture and diet, for instance. So the archaeologist is preoccupied with the vulnerability of the materials he deals with (archaeological excavation necessarily involves the destruction of the context in which artefacts are found), as the recent looting of sites in the Middle East reminds us. Virtually every bronze statue from the ancient world has been melted down, many for the value of their metals, others because, as ‘pagan idols, they offended Christian sensibilities. It was only in the Renaissance that the urge to preserve an item because of its antiquity or aesthetic quality becomes a powerful force in Europe again with the result that ancient art begins to be idealized (see Chapter 36). Yet human destruction sometimes works in the archaeologist’s favour. The burning down of the palaces of the Ancient Near East hardened the clay tablets that were piled in their archives so that they have survived to be read! Even so the archaeologist is still normally left with only a small and unrepresentative sample of what originally existed.

There are certain features of life that are poorly documented in the texts—houses, the details of everyday living in the streets, the uses of public spaces and developments in technology are just three of them—and here the work of archaeologists has proved indispensable. Excavations and surveys along the borders of the Roman empire have revealed the successive programmes of fortification there as the empire came under the pressure of invasion. It has even proved possible to say something about political developments. Excavations in the Roman Forum have shown an increase in the space reserved for the public assemblies as the tribunes became more influential in the mid-second century Bc, and a corresponding diminution in this space at the expense of that given to the senate house under the dictator Sulla. On the other hand, the impression given in Greek texts that cities were walled and graced with public buildings from early times has been shown to be false. It was often more than a hundred years after its foundation that a city acquired its first set of walls, and the spaces set aside for public buildings were then often still unfilled.

In a typical excavation layers of occupation are uncovered, the older ones below the more recent. If these layers can be dated—from coins, for instance—so can other material, such as pottery, found in the same layer. Similar pottery uncovered in other contexts can then be used for dating a layer of occupation. This has been particularly important in the study of pre-dynastic Egypt and the deep stratified pits of the Ancient Near East. The recent find of a sealed layer of eighth-century BC pottery and other material at Methone in the northern Aegean (see p. 155) is a textbook example of the datable site.

Coins provide some of the most useful archaeological evidence, often confirming or disputing other forms of evidence such as written texts. Coin hoards in Germany correspond almost exactly with details of the composition of such hoards given in Tacitus’ Germania. The distribution of coins helps plot trade routes or the passage of armies, their content is an indication of the resources available to the minter, and hence his patron, their reliefs show buildings that may have vanished. The way that emperors used coins as a means of propaganda is a field of study in itself. Occasionally, as in the discovery of a coin at Chalgrove in Oxfordshire, UK, in 2003, they might provide the only record of an emperor, here ‘Domitian II, a figure who appears to have briefly proclaimed himself an emperor on the northern frontiers of the Roman empire in ad 271. (See Christopher Howgego, Ancient History from Coins, London and New York, 1995, for an excellent introduction to the subject.)

A particularly important development has been underwater archaeology. It is an expensive and sometimes hazardous business, and added to the costs of excavation are those of the preservation of artefacts when on dry land, but the expansion has been spectacular, not only in the number of wrecks that have been plotted but the depths at which they can be identified, now up to 850 metres in the Mediterranean. The pioneering work of George Bass, founder of the Institute of Nautical Archaeology in Texas, has resulted in sophisticated ways of removing sediment, creating 3-D plans of hulls, and lifting heavy artefacts to the surface. The scale and direction of trade, which was mostly carried by water, can then be plotted. Harbours, among them Caesarea Maritima in Palestine and Alexandria in Egypt can also be explored. (See The Oxford Handbook of Maritime Archaeology, Oxford and New York, 2011, for a survey of developments. Seaborne trade in the Roman empire is covered below, pp. 528-31.)

Advances in scientific techniques have made the evaluation of evidence more precise. While radiocarbon dating has become ever more sophisticated and is now the best way of dating perishable materials, other methods have emerged. Trace elements in metals allow their origin to be pinpointed. Lead isotope analysis from lead, copper, and silver ores enables a particular find to be traced back to where it was originally mined. The distinctive ‘oxhide’ shape copper ingots of the Late Bronze Age found in many sites in the Aegean were made of metal mined in Cyprus. The earliest Athenian coins were made of silver from Thrace, not, as might be expected, from the Laurium mines near the city. The analysis of residues found in Roman amphorae has enabled their contents to be identified, while comparison of the stamps on the amphorae themselves has been used to map trade routes. (The wine amphorae of one potter, Sestius, whose name was stamped on the rim, were distributed probably from an estate in Cosa in Italy throughout central and southern France.) Dendrochronology, the analysis of tree rings, is an effective way of exploring climate from one year to the next and it has even been shown that the year 218 Bc was a mild one, which helps explain why Hannibal was able to progress through the Alps into Italy that year!

The sophistication of, but also the difficulties presented by, such methods can be shown in the attempts to provide a date for the eruption on the Aegean island of Thera, which buried the thriving Minoan port of Acrotiri (luckily preserving it as fully as Pompeii). It is not merely a historical question—the eruption has been linked to legends of a vanished Atlantis that has inspired so many fantasies about ‘lost civilizations’. At first a date of around 1500 BC was proposed. This was supported by datings from the pottery sequence and from pumice apparently from the eruption that had been found in a distinct Egyptian archaeological layer of this date at Tell el-Dab’a in the Nile delta. (For the excavations at Tell el-Dab’a see Chapter 4.)

However, radiocarbon dating on samples from Thera and the Aegean tended to suggest an earlier date—to between 1627 and 1600 bc with a 95 per cent probability that these dates were accurate. Then a dendrochronology based on tree rings from Californian bristlecone pines (the effect of the eruption would have been felt even this far afield as the dust in the atmosphere affects solar radiation) was used to fix a date specifically 1628-1626 bc and there is some evidence to support the same dates from tree rings in Anatolia. A major new programme of radiocarbon-14 dating for Tell el-Dab’a was then launched and this has produced some earlier dates that may eventually allow the consensus of scholarly opinion to settle on the last quarter of the seventeenth century bc. (For the wider historical context of the eruption, see p. 118 below.)

Traditionally the focus in classical archaeology has been on the large city sites or, in the Greek world, sanctuaries. In fact much of nineteenth-century European ‘archaeology’ was preoccupied with the rediscovery of the major sites (the German financier Heinrich Schliemann’s assault on the site of Troy, launched in 1871, was one of the best publicized, while the German excavation of Olympia 1875-81 with its 500 workers set the model for the ‘big dig’) and the transport of their treasures to national museums in London, Paris, or Berlin. The Germans were able to carry off 350 tonnes of material from Pergamum, then sited in the decaying Ottoman empire, to Berlin as late as 1880.

Although much of value has been found—how could one write the history of Rome or Athens without extensive excavation on the sites?—the concentration of popular monuments or periods of history left important areas unresearched. There has been a shift of emphasis from the city to the countryside (where, after all, the majority of the population continued to live). The field survey (based on the collection of surface finds) has proved a relatively economical and efficient way of plotting the nature of settlement across a wide area. An important field survey was that carried out by the British School at Rome in southern Etruria. (It was prompted by the widespread destruction of the ancient landscape by modern farming methods and new building.) One result of this and other surveys of Republican Italy was to challenge the view put forward in the literary sources that peasant plots had disappeared in Italy in the second century bc. Field surveys in Greece have shown how small and unpredictable the surpluses of produce were, and how precarious, as a result, was the survival of city life. Evidence of the planting of olives has proved a good indicator of political stability as the trees take several years to mature and therefore are only planted when their maturity can be hoped for.

On urban sites the geophysical survey is particularly useful in plotting the traces of buildings. A good example is the major survey of the Roman city of Wroxeter, the fourth largest city of the province of Britannia. The city has never been reoccupied and it has proved possible to plot its outline, including industrial and market areas, and even to accumulate evidence, through discordant magnetic feedback, of destruction by fires, without any disturbance of the soil. Satellite archaeology is giving more sophisticated analyses of site, with many more being discovered in Egypt and throughout the Roman empire. (See the work of Sarah Parcak at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.)

Field surveys, insofar as they are concerned with collecting and interpreting material, are carried out within the parameters of conventional archaeology. In the past thirty years, however, archaeologists have become much more ambitious in their objectives. The traditional approach was to accumulate evidence, describe it, and then use it to piece together a picture of the past. This inevitably produced a rather static picture of a society and one in which people often seemed less important than the objects they had left behind. The so-called ‘New Archaeology’ (a term originating in the United States in the 1960s) adopted a more proactive approach. The ‘New Archaeologists’ moved into the areas traditionally covered by anthropology. They were concerned to understand how individuals within a society related to each other and to the outside world and, in particular, how cultural change took place. They went to live among hunter-gatherer societies to observe patterns of living that might help explain the evidence left by similar societies of the past. They set up hypotheses and then examined a number of sites specifically to find evidence to support or disprove these hypotheses. They then attempted to put forward ‘laws’ of human behaviour. (‘In such and such circumstances human societies turn from hunter-gathering to farming’, for instance.)

The ‘New Archaeologists’ focused overwhelmingly on the environment, which they believed to be the main instigator of social change. (For example, new patterns of social cooperation might emerge if different food sources had to be exploited.) Their approach earned the name ‘processual’, from the emphasis given to isolating and studying the different ‘processes’ that conditioned social change. More recently, some archaeologists, particularly in Britain (Ian Hodder has been the pioneer), have found the ‘processual’ approach too functional. They claim that the emphasis on the environment underestimates the capacity of societies to make their own values and to sustain them, in particular through the manipulation of the cultural symbols that are important to them. This new approach has been termed ‘post-processual’.

One risks losing sight of the traditional concerns of archaeology under the weight of these conceptualizations (and often they were promulgated in jargon which was incomprehensible to all but the most determined readers), but perhaps a synthesis has emerged which shows a deepened understanding of how societies create their own ideological framework within which cultural change takes place. So one might see how a new Roman emperor ensures his legitimacy by using symbols from great emperors of the past, one reason why Constantine, for instance, incorporated reliefs from monuments in honour of the earlier emperors Trajan, Hadrian, and Marcus Aurelius into his own triumphal arch in Rome.

A fine example of how cultural symbols might be used in the Greek world is provided by Andrew Stewart in his Art, Desire and the Body in Ancient Greece (Cambridge, 1997) which reflects on the way in which the body was presented in sculpture and painting to the onlooker in order to reflect specific political and social ideals. There are ways of showing political heroes, the ‘ideal’ citizen or philosopher, and the warrior hero. Even nudity had its own cultural contexts, being the ‘costume’ in which a hero, whether a victorious athlete or a challenger of tyranny, could be portrayed. A more focused use of art as propaganda is explored by Paul Zanker in his The Power of Images in the Age of Augustus (Ann Arbor, 1998). Zanker shows how certain images of traditional Roman life—the grand public building, for instance— were used by the emperor Augustus to sell himself as the restorer, not the destroyer, of the Roman republic. Every statue of himself was composed so that even the scenes on the breastplates (see the Prima Porta statue, below, p. 455) had a cultural significance which tied him to the past, while in the Ara Pacis, the Altar of Peace, Augustus is shown as a simple family man, offering sacrifices to the gods as his republican ancestors might have done. Political change could be achieved through the manipulation of cultural symbols, many of which held enormous emotive power. The term ‘cognitive archaeology’ has been coined to describe the attempt to create the mentality of the past from its surviving cultural objects.

This recovery of ‘mentality’ is one of the most difficult, if most fascinating, challenges for the ancient historian. What were the parameters within which thinking took place? It is a particularly difficult area in that it is virtually impossible to discard our own prejudices and cultural preconceptions enough to enter fully into the world of another. What did it mean for an Athenian to sit and listen to a tragedy and how far would he, or she, use the experience for emotional release or to more fully understand the ethical challenges that faced the city? To what extent did a citizen feel he was genuinely part of his city community—or was his public behaviour adopted for show, a series of learned experiences so that he would appear a perfect citizen to his fellows (see the example of Lucian in Chapter 29)? Why did the classical world have to wait so long before a writer felt able to explore his innermost thoughts as Augustine did in his Confessions in the ad 390s? How far, in general, could personal feelings be shown and if one felt emotionally disturbed how should this be dealt with? In his fine study Emotion and Peace of Mind: From Stoic Agitation to Christian Temptation (Oxford, 2000), Richard Sorabji shows how the Stoic philosophers were all too aware of the threat of stress in public life and how they evolved means of dealing with it. The study goes further to show how the impact of the outside world was transformed by Christians into specific temptations. Yet in what ways did Christians think differently from their pagan contemporaries? Are the Confessions of Augustine evidence that they did so or are they unique to their author?

There have been attempts to understand the mentalities of the ancient world through its surviving Greek and Roman mythologies. As every child knows, these are rich and varied. There remains, however, immense controversy over what myth can tell us about the society that produced it. There is some hesitation in using the myths of any culture to provide universal meaning—the search for understanding of a myth must start with the specific context in which it grew. (In other words Freud’s universalization of the Oedipus myth, taken from his play Oedipus Rex, must be treated with suspicion as there is no evidence that it shows a typical pattern of family behaviour in Greece, let alone any other culture.) The French anthropologist Claude

Levi-Strauss, and his fellow ‘structuralists’, proposed that the world picture of any studied society could be mapped (‘structured’) in terms of defined objects and categories whose meanings and significance are expressed and defined through myth. A ‘Paris school’ led by J.-P. Vernant and P. Vidal Naquet has made elaborate interpretations of Greek myths, teasing any possible nuance of meaning from the surviving versions. A ‘British school’ has tended to be more pragmatic and less willing to assume that a story must have a purpose and every detail of a story a significance.

Yet myths do say something about the culture that produces them, and myths shared across scattered communities sustain cultural cohesion. In some cases myths are used to rationalize behaviour. The myth of Prometheus’ trick on Zeus provides a reason for preserving the meat from sacrifices for the participants to eat rather than dedicating it to the gods. Other myths, particularly those relating to the foundation of a city, may contain historical information. Others again portray the dilemmas of everyday life (whether loyalty to a family should come before loyalty to a city, for instance), presenting them in a ‘distanced’ form that might be easier for an audience to assimilate and assess. It is impossible to say, however, how far myths had the power to condition the way individuals behaved in their everyday lives.

One of the finest scholars of ‘mentalities’, here in the period known as Late Antiquity (c. AD 284-650), is Peter Brown, who transformed the study of the period with his The World of Late Antiquity, which first appeared in 1971. Brown’s extraordinary work in uncovering the liveliness of late Roman society (though perhaps at the cost of downplaying the wider political contexts) has continued to this day. His studies, in particular of the religious personalities of the age, not least among them Augustine where Brown’s biography (second edition, Berkeley and London, 2000) is probably the most intuitive of this brilliant but complex Christian intellectual to have been written, have extended to an exploration of the relationship between ‘the body’ and ‘society’ and the rise of ‘the holy man’ in this period.

Brown’s achievement has recently culminated in Through the Eye of the Needle: Wealth, the Fall of Rome, and the Making of Christianity in the West, 350-550 ad (Princeton and London, 2012). In this magisterial study, Brown turns an acute eye on the relationship between wealth, immense at the elite end of society, and Christian attitudes to it. He is particularly expert at placing each of his key figures, Ambrose of Milan, Paulinus of Nola, and Augustine among them, in their social context, always alert to the minute gradations of late Roman society and how traditional pagan attitudes of wealth overlapped with Christian approaches. He sifts through the surviving voices to highlight every nuance of feeling. No one has probed the interactions of the intellectual and social elite of this period with more insight into their relationships with each other and with their own selves.

In conclusion, there is one book that can be recommended as a preliminary to approaching the ancient world. Its subject is Bactria, one of the least known of the Greek kingdoms that emerged in the east after the conquests of Alexander. The kingdom was in what is now Afghanistan. Frank Holt, in Lost World of the Golden King: In Search of Ancient Afghanistan (Berkeley and London, 2012), explores what

Is known of Bactria from the surviving sources. The earliest material evidence, of what was always a shadowy kingdom, came from a few coins, notably those of a king Eucratides the Great, who appears to have ruled the kingdom between the early and mid-second century bc. As a band of nineteenth-century enthusiasts explored the sites and accumulated ever more coins from Afghanistan (including a single example of the largest gold coin ever minted in the ancient world, the so-called Eucra-tidion, now in the Bibliotheque Imperiale in Paris), there were attempts to create not just a sequence of kings (some forty names were eventually found recorded) but the relationships between them and even their personalities from the way they presented themselves on these coins. Imagination ruled supreme. A particularly speculative history, complete with devastating battles for which no evidence existed, was created by the Scottish classicist, WW Tarn (1869-1957), well known for his idealization of Alexander the Great. Tarn filled gaps in the record with complete, if unjustified, confidence.

The first lesson Holt tells us, therefore, is how easy it is to invent history from limited sources, breathing life into fragments of evidence that may themselves have been poorly interpreted. It is a telling point. At any stage in the study of the ancient world, interpretations depend on limited evidence and even when new discoveries are made, they are often made to fit existing frameworks rather than providing the possibility of rethinking the whole issue. Gradually more evidence of ancient Bac-tria has been accumulated. There have been excavations in Afghanistan, of course, notably of the modern site Ai Khanoum, carried out by the French archaeologist Paul Bernard between 1965 and 1978. Ai Khanoum (its ancient name is still unknown) occupied a strong defensive position on the border of Bactria but also became prosperous from the fertility of the surrounding land and mineral wealth. There is no doubt that this was an important city and had a core of fine Greek buildings and inscriptions but, Holt would argue, there has been a tendency, in the tradition of Tarn, to play up its ‘Greekness’ and to present it somehow as a beacon of civilization. This approach was put into reverse in 1979 when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan and, in their own excavations, refused to follow the imperialist model, preferring to reconstruct the history of the region in terms of its ethnic peoples rather than highlighting the ‘civilization’ brought by the Greeks. So does politics frame the presentation of the past and even the way resources are directed towards its rediscovery. The past is always defined by the present.

Ai Khanoum succumbed to invaders, possibly nomads, at what appears to be the final years of king Eucratides, about 145 bc. Stories that there had been a great defeat of Eucratides in battle are not upheld by any evidence of destruction on the site, which appears, rather, to have been abandoned. Since the excavations the city has again fared badly through extensive looting. Holt charts with dismay the destruction of Afghanistan’s heritage since the 1980s and the continual rumours of newly found hoards of ancient coins which, stripped from the context in which they were unearthed, appear coin by coin on the open market.

One of the most interesting initiatives that Holt takes with the ancient coins that survive for inspection is to analyse them through what he calls ‘cognitive numismatics, the study of who made the coins and how they were used. He shows, for instance, that the planning of the designs of coins was often rudimentary. Even the lettering on the great Eucratidion was poorly placed. Then there were numerous mistakes in the Greek that continued uncorrected. The conclusion was that the whole process of making coins was badly supervised and in some reigns supervision seemed to lapse completely. Did this suggest a kingdom losing its vigour or does it highlight the high number of non-Greek speakers who were responsible for minting the coins? This cognitive approach allows a whole range of new questions to be explored which may provide a deeper understanding of a kingdom that still lurks in obscurity. There is much to learn from Frank Holt’s book about how the past is, at any one moment, a provisional construction owing as much to ideology and speculation as to the detached assembly and interpretation of the different types of evidence.