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Plutarch, in his Life of Alcibiades, captures the fascination of the Greek warrior, politician and glamour boy by quoting a line from a contemporary comedy: ‘They long for him, they hate him, they cannot do without him.’ The same words sum up our ambivalent relationship with the cultural world inhabited by the Boeotian biographer and his illustrious subject. We yearn for ancient Greece as a utopian construct, rich in the purest incarnations of poetry, drama, philosophy, architecture and the elemental outlines of democracy. Yet at the same time we shrink from its fatalism, its brutality and the generally low value it placed on the quality of life for anybody who was neither male nor free.
How much we have been unable to do without the ancient Greeks over the last 2,000 years is neatly underlined for us in the opening pages of Frederic Raphael’s latest book. Devout believers, Catholic or Protestant, may be irked by his rhetorical, ‘Who can deny that much of Christian morality is transposed, cannibalised and quarried, as early churches were, from the society and institutions to which it put paid?’ They can scarcely quarrel, however, with a tour d’horizon of the modern age’s indebtedness to Hellenic culture which includes Winckel- mann, Heidegger, Dr Arnold and T. E. Lawrence.
Raphael’s own exuberant surrender to the classical world, beginning at prep school and encouraged by Charterhouse and Cambridge, is celebrated in Some Talk of Alexander. Actually he has little sympathy with the Macedonian conqueror, described here as ‘a gross parody’ of Homer’s Achilles, obsessed with sacking cities and less often magnanimous than vindictive and sadistic. The various Alexandrias founded across an empire stretching from the Nile delta to the Hindu Kush are seen as little better than those ideal towns and palaces projected by Adolf Hitler with help from Albert Speer.
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