Jennifer Roberts has created a rich Hellenic tapestry in Out of One, Many. Her title reflects the diversity of thought and experience represented by the record of Greek culture as it has come down to us. Roberts’ achievement might better be characterized by the metaphor of a quilt, a pleasing composite made from the many thought pieces that antiquity has left for us. Fitting together her appraisals of these, the whole or fragmentary works of ancient authors, Roberts has created a work of contemporary style designed to make the ancients feel familiar, highlighting in an artful way the distinctive elements that compose the work. Roberts may have intended for the image of piece work to play in the reader’s mind this way by her use of Ruby Sky Stiler’s silkscreen, Shards, for the dust jacket cover art (if this was the decision of the PUP art department, it was perceptive).
In the border that frames this quilt, the prologue and epilogue, Roberts affirms the living relevance of ancient Greek culture, its aspirations and contradictions, and the ways in which echoes of its language and imagery have been appropriated, or misappropriated, in modern thought. The Greeks, as Roberts presents them to us, provoke self-reflection on our own history and current predilections. “Given to waxing lyrical about the joys of freedom,” Roberts observes, “[the Greeks] also kept huge numbers of hapless slaves in subjection” (p. 2). And have silenced, for the most part, the voices of women. If there is a guiding theme to Roberts’ work it is this last, a search for the largely missing perspective of women on their own lives.
The nine chapters contained by this frame present Greek civilization thematically, partly according to literary genre but more sensibly arranged by the windows of inquiry that draw us and our students into the world of the Greeks. We begin with myth, the realm of the gods and their lives in a chapter entitled “A World of the Imagination”. Here Hesiod, the Homeric Hymns, Attic tragedians, Apollonius Rhodius and Apollodorus among others make their appearances, not seriatim but interwoven to represent how the gods were thought of, and by whom. Roberts asks us to consider which of these stories might have been conceived by women. She also shows how Plato thought of these stories in his Phaedrus, as well as introducing the modern approaches of the ritualists, Freudians, and structuralists
The Homeric epics get their due in their own chapter. Were the Iliad and Odyssey composed orally or in writing? Story elements out of an oral tradition are certainly woven into these epics, but the poems are “too finely wrought … by the genius to whom history has given the name Homer”, Roberts observes, to be seen as the patchwork compilation of an oral tradition. But they certainly were composed to be performed orally, and Roberts breaks down the elements of dactylic hexameter to give readers a sense of how these epics were heard. Through her retellings of key episodes we gain a vivid understanding of how the heroes, heroines, and gods of these epics embodied the humanistic values of the Greeks in complex and sometimes contradictory ways.
Social and cultural themes from the Iliad and Odyssey, particularly as they relate to the exercise of power and to the relationships between men and women, resonate throughout this book, so that themes from these chapters on early Greek poetry build as the reader proceeds, forming an ever richer picture of the harmonies and disjunctions that informed life in the classical Greek world. Herodotus is the lead author introduced in the third chapter, taking us into the world of historical individuals. We are also guided through a summary of Greek prehistory and how the Bronze and early Iron Ages may have set the stage for the emergence of Archaic Greek culture in its Mediterranean context. Voices of the lyric poets are heard, through selected fragments that Roberts translates, and we glimpse some of the sculpted images through which the Greeks visualized their ideals. Protagonists of the Greek and Persian wars and of the Greek-on-Greek Peloponnesian war are introduced, as is the concept of democracy and its value for male Athenian citizens, restricted value for resident aliens, and its restrictions for women (the status of foreigners, slaves, and again women is treated in more detail in a fifth chapter). Historical and cultural developments take us quickly through the transformations of the Greek and wider Mediterranean world in the time of Alexander and his successor, down to the time of Cleopatra VII and the arrival on Egyptian shores of Gaius Octavianus, fresh from his victory at Actium.
Greek city-states and their diverse governments, from the experiences of oligarchy, tyranny and democracy, are examined in the fourth chapter. Here Thucydides appears again for his political insights, and we also hear from Aristophanes, Plato, Xenophon, and Aristotle in his Politics. Roberts devotes appropriate space to a depiction of the singular institutions that the Spartans attributed to Lycurgus, a subject that has fascinated non-Spartan Greeks as much as it does students today. Reaching beyond Athens and Sparta for our image of the Greek world, Roberts presents snapshots of civic life in the cities of Magna Graecia.
Greek views of the Other bring vignettes from Herodotus back into focus in the fifth chapter, “Foreigners, Slaves, and Sex[ism]”. Here we see the various ways in which our sources valorize the normative ideal of the free male citizen by contrasting this image with all that is not it. Aristotle’s definition of the female as deformed male typifies this perspective. Nature has configured the world to demonstrate the favored place of free Greek men, as we see in the ethno-centric geographic determinism that pops up in Herodotus, Aristotle, and most distinctively in the Hippocratic Airs, Waters, Places. These are not the only perspectives that Roberts draws from our sources, however, as she gives Plato his due for envisioning a society in which women have more recognized standing and authority than was typical at Athens in his day, and Herodotus, while marveling at the ways in which foreign values differ from Greek, is by no means contemptuous of them. Social-sexual norms, including male and female homosexuality, are illuminated from various viewpoints. Amidst the mostly male voices we hear, Roberts extracts some trenchant female viewpoints in letters recovered from Ptolemaic Egypt.
While earlier we were shown the gods as they appeared in the Greek imagination, in the sixth chapter Roberts presents the gods as they were dealt with in the customs of Greek ritual. From the Iliad and the Homeric Hymns through sacrificial calendars and a variety of poetic and prose sources we are guided through the nature and meaning of sacrifice, the rigmaroles of divination and the authority of seers, and the beliefs—or disbeliefs—that accompanied these practices. Privileged access to the favor of the gods is found in mystery cults, the Eleusinian in particular, and through the practices of magic. The influence of foreign gods is treated as a feature of “a powerful spiritual thirst” arising in the classical period but especially characteristic of interpenetration of cultures in the Hellenistic period.
Some themes from Greek musings about the metaphysical world of the gods are taken up again in the eighth chapter, “The Search for Meaning,” which traces philosophical thought from the Presocratics through Plato and Aristotle to the Epicureans and Stoics. Before we get there, however, in the seventh chapter Roberts turns to the world of contest and competition—the agonistic spirit of the Greeks—in a survey of both athletic and especially dramatic competitions. Here we revisit the works of the great poets and playwrights, where Roberts examines the meaning of tragedy and comedy in the Greek social context.
The ninth and culminating piece of this quilt is on death, or more properly, “Life after Life”. Here we reach back to the Homeric epics, to funerary scenes figured on geometric vases, and to the various views of the fate of heroes and the souls of mere mortals once they have been delivered to Hermes the Psychopomp. As in all other parts of this work, Roberts highlights themes that have been latent in other chapters, giving the whole a sense of unity that comes from the inseparable intersections of beliefs, ideals, and realities (explicit and implicit) that come through to us from the sources that posterity has handed down to us, or in select cases, allowed us to discover in the sands of Egypt.
The sense of unity is especially the product of Roberts’ voice in presenting this panorama. She speaks to a contemporary audience in a familiar tone. One can hear her speaking to students around the seminar table, it often seems. Sometimes illustrations are offered by references to contemporary events that are very immediate, a record of classics as it is taught in the 2020s. Occasionally—but only rarely—these are so specific as to be obscure (Hellenistic introspection is characterized by a reference to Ray Bolger’s Churkendoose, which I have to admit escapes my ken—but then I could Google it).
Roberts is an informative, insightful, and reliable guide to the topics she presents. Sources are richly contextualized, you know when she is offering an opinion, she refers to the ideas of other scholars, and any reader whose curiosity is piqued can follow up by investigating the works that she lists as Suggested Readings at the end of each chapter. Her book could be the backbone for an introductory course in Greek civilization. Or, if it might be a bit dense for the average undergraduate, it could be very useful for instructors working out a lesson plan. For that inquisitive relative who wonders what it is that fascinates you about the Greeks, this could be the answer. In terms of her treatment of historical developments, at the high-altitude overview that Roberts provides the picture is generally quite sound. Only occasion quibbles might be felt when certain key moments are summarized, as when the sacrifice made by Leonidas and his 298 fellow Spartans in defense of Thermopylae is honored, with no mention of the seven hundred men of Thespiae who also stood and fell with Leonidas, not to mention the countless number of helots, or when the Roman destruction of Corinth in 146 BCE is ascribed to Roman jealousy of Corinth as a commercial rival. But no one will be misled by this book, and many will find well-lit windows into the past opened by it.