Full Circle

Full Circle: How the Classical World Came Back to Us, by Ferdinand Mount, Simon & Schuster RRP£20, 438 pages

I f the hypothesis of this engaging book is correct, our appetite for sex-and-sandals movies set in imperial Rome is more than a passing fad: it is self-recognition. British writer Ferdinand Mount maintains that western society does not merely bear some resemblance to the ancient world; it has become, after a 1,600-year interruption by Christianity, the same.

The argument gets off to a damp start at the Swindon public baths (“Turkish” baths being, of course, Roman in origin), but comes alive when we get to the gym. Here the narcissistic cult of the body beautiful shows that we have made a complete recovery from the restraints of Christian modesty.

From the gym it’s but a hop to the bedroom, and easy access to sin-free sex. The bedroom, of course, is next door to the kitchen. Here a line of “gastro-snobs” can be traced from the first-century Marcus Gaius Apicius – famous for a stuffed dormouse recipe – via the neo-pagan writer Norman Douglas (born 1868), to our domestic goddesses with their food-as-porn cookery books.

Mount argues that modern science is closest in spirit to the earliest seekers after truth, the pre-Socratic philosophers of Ionia. More persuasively, he observes that today, as in imperial Rome, religious imports from the east have created a free market in faith. Then, it was Christianity and Mithraism, now it is Buddhism and Islam. Or there are home-grown deities to choose from, such as pantheist Gaia, the goddess of climate change.

Mount also argues that atheists have never been so militant; and the “anti-God-botherers”, as he calls them, come in for a sound drubbing. Yet outside the metro-intellectual academic zone, a residual Christianity lives on. The popularity of church schools tells us that parents, even if they do not go to church themselves, want their children to be brought up with something rather than nothing. Our society, however, does lack something the ancients had: “the underlying moral grandeur of life in Greek and Roman cities.”

The Mount hypothesis makes for amusing couplings. The late Jade Goody of Bermondsey shares a chariot with Pompey in a dissection of celebrity culture and its manifestation in the Roman victory parade. The art critic John Berger is quoted alongside Petronius, author of The Satyricon, deploring the commercialisation of contemporary art. The Athenian agora finds its virtual counterpart in the internet.

Yet isn’t it stretching things to equate the techniques of Newsnight interviewers with Socratic dialogue? Or to characterise the one-line exchanges between characters in Greek tragedy as early examples of the sound bite? And, even if the Romans loved collecting kitsch, they never produced a Duchamp or a Warhol.

Seen through the lens of the classical age, our society appears neither as new nor as cool as we like to suppose. Human nature does not change, and Full Circle reminds us that the ancients were just as sophisticated as we are. But technology makes a big difference, and (as the late Rev Donald Soper used to say) it strains our ethical grasp to breaking point.

If the book does not manage quite to close the circle, no matter: we are taken on a delightful excursion along the cultural loop line, a journey of sudden views, jokes and surprises, conducted by a witty and knowledgeable guide. As you would expect of a prominent newspaper columnist and novelist, our cicerone is a crafty phrasemaker; but he shows passion in the prose and moral seriousness behind the irony.

Here we have the triumph of the generalist, whose intellectual vigour trumps academic rigour. Take him with you on holiday: you won’t regret it.

Christian Tyler is author of ‘Making Music: Neville Marriner and the Academy of St Martin-in-the-Fields’ (Unicorn Press)