A notable recent trend in popular history is the revival of interest in the ancient world. Mary Beard, Tom Holland, Bettany Hughes and Peter Stothard are just some of the historians whose books and television series have cashed in on our thirst for knowledge of distant forebears and their civilisations. Now Owen Rees joins the merry band with a strikingly original take on the subject.
He argues that our interest in classical history focuses almost entirely on the Graeco-Roman world, specifically on the capital centres of those cultures. We therefore miss much of what was going on at the periphery of empires, with their vibrant cities and peoples.
Rees attributes our indifference to these outposts to our ‘obsession’ with the most commonly translated historians and poets of Greece and Rome – Herodotus, Thucydides, Juvenal, Suetonius, Virgil and Horace. But the particular target of his venom is Ovid, exiled, for unclear reasons, to Tomis (now Constanta, on Romania’s Black Sea coast) by the Emperor Augustus for the last decade of the poet’s life.
We have, Rees contends, too easily absorbed Ovid’s dim view of his new surroundings. He saw Tomis as a barbarous backwater, populated by an aggressive tribe dressed in animal skins and barking and grunting in a foreign tongue he did not understand. All this offended his sensibilities and isolated him from the community to which he had been banished. In what Rees calls Ovid’s ‘bigoted imagination’, Tomis was a bleak place, where wine froze in jars and the ice-bound Black Sea prevented ships from sailing and dolphins from jumping. In fact archaeological evidence reveals Tomis to have been a bustling, thriving city and an important trading hub between East and West. Added to which, it had ‘all the hallmarks of an urbanised, orderly political landscape’. In short, Ovid couldn’t see what he was missing.
Making his case for a reimagining of the distant past, Rees relies significantly on archaeological evidence that has emerged only recently. His exploration of the outer fringes of empire, beneath the notice of what he calls ‘spoilt aristocrats’ like Ovid, is nothing if not wide-ranging. In his uncovering of forgotten stories of life on the periphery, he roams from the empty northern uplands of Hadrian’s Wall, the chilly mileposts where Roman African legionaries shivered and grumbled, to the ruins of Volubilis in the burning Moroccan desert. From there we travel to the buried city of Naukratis in Egypt (already excavated by Flinders Petrie in the 1880s) and on to the ancient temples of Hanoi in Vietnam. We also glimpse the wonderful wooden city of Bilsk, in present-day Ukraine, known to the Scythians as Gelonus –a semi-mythical metropolis with a footprint four times larger than that of Babylon.
The fragile thread connecting, for example, sub-Saharan Africa with Caledonia, or the Sudanese culture of Kush with Rome, was trade – that age-old human need to get and spend. Trade routes were the information highways of the ancient world, and the peoples who travelled them are just as worthy of study as the better known Etruscans and Assyrians, let alone the denizens of Athens and Rome.
The problem with the pre-textual evidence of archaeology that Rees relies on so heavily is that much of it is speculation. We still need literature to breathe life into these stones and dried bones and shards of ancient pottery. And that can mean falling back on the bitter words of Ovid.
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