SOME TALK OF ALEXANDER: A Journey Through Space and Time in the Greek World
by Frederic Raphael
Thames and Hudson £24.95, 336 pages
Frederic Raphael is wily enough to make two separate attempts to render his new book critic-proof. With reference to Athenian drama competitions, he comments that “in creative eras, the best criticism of art is better art”. Duly noted. He humbly describes himself as an “importunate amateur” and his own book as a “rambling catalogue, only somewhat raisonne, of my version of Andre Malraux’s “musee imaginaire”.
Rambling is not, indeed, even the half of it. Some Talk of Alexander is a quixotic meander through Greek civilisation from the Bronze Age to the colonels, albeit with gaping lacunae, told in no particular order except for the author’s fancy. Raphael will digress whenever an idea catches his attention. A description of Alexander’s mass wedding of Macedonians to Persian women at Susa (”a cross between the showboating affairs mounted by the Reverend Moon and the baby factories set up by the SS in Hitler’s Germany”) swerves into a disquisition on Jewish resistance to alien domination, as in the Maccabean rebellion two centuries later, and then to the Syrian patriarch John Philoponus’s difficulties with the doctrine of the Trinity in the seventh century.
At its core, Some Talk of Alexander is an argument for the continuing relevance of classical Greece. “In principle, we are all moderns now,” Raphael writes. And yet, “ancient ideas remain tenaciously relevant to modern life. Fanatics and fundamentalists echo antique polytheism and philosophies; Eros and Aphrodite rule; the Great God Pan has come to life again and lives not only in Arcadia but un peu partout.”
The idea that fundamentalists represent a throwback to polytheism is perverse, and to his credit Raphael backtracks away from it. Polytheism is more likely to be the enemy of absolutism, the author concedes. He damns the autocratic Roman emperor Constantine by comparison with his predecessor Julian the Apostate, the last official pagan ruler, and asks the reader to imagine a world that was Julian’s legacy rather than Constantine’s.
The contemporary relevance of the ancient world is argued in an explosion of cross references. The Athenian cleruchs of Mytilene are compared to Ulster Unionists; George Bush suffers in the light of Alexander, whose Iraqi adventure had “better luck, and fewer scruples”; Shakespeare, George Bernard Shaw, Shostakovich and Peter Sellers are all pressed into service. The appearance of Theseus’s ghost, rallying the Athenians at Marathon, prompts thoughts of the Angel of Mons.
The absence of overarching structure means that the same material returns in different guises. Eras and mythologies are jumbled together: a discussion of metis (wisdom) in the character of Odysseus segues seamlessly into the Grand Guignol of Herakles and Theseus; the rise and fall of Athens; the shock and awe of Alexander the Great; Raphael’s own experiences of living on Kos in the 1960s. There are brief meditations on some lesser-known characters: the strategic dilettante Alcibiades, hero and villain of the Peloponnesian War; the “parody of a monarch” Mausolus; the vituperative poet and mercenary Archilochos. And his examinations of the Oracles and the Olympics are well worth the detour.
The story of how Athens stood in the forefront of the defence of an admittedly limited freedom, and its subsequent decline into the worst kind of empire, bears endless retelling and offers ready contemporary parallels. Here, it is hidden. Readers who are familiar with the history and literature of Greece will disentangle enough to amuse, divert and provoke them; anyone else may find it all a bit Delphic.
