Peter Thonemann

Are you a Ptolemy or an Antigonos?

When Alexander the Great died in 323 B.C.E. with no competent heir, his generals fought over the corpse -- both of Alexander and of Alexander's empire. A few -- Ptolemy song of Lagos being the most noteworthy -- took an office and settled for that and quietly went about their business. In Ptolemy's case, the office he took was, in effect, Viceroy of Egypt. He managed that well enough that his dynasty would rule Egypt for almost three hundred years.

Most of Alexander's other generals, including Antigonos One-Eyed, gambled on taking over the whole thing. The story of the twenty years after Alexander's death was everyone's struggle to hold off Antigonos; after he was killed, they spent another twenty years fighting each other. And their attempts to capture the whole Empire didn't work; in the end, there were three major Successor monarchies: the Ptolemies in Egypt; the Antigonids (descendents of Antigonos's grandson Antigonos Gonatas) in Macedonia and Greece, and the Seleucids in Asia and Syria and Babylon. There were a lot of smaller nations -- indeed, pieces kept declaring independence from the Big Three -- but those three empires were the Successor States, and it was they, far more than Alexander, who distributed Greek culture around the world. It was they who created the Hellenistic Age, and it was their politics that decided what did and did not happen in this era.

It was a chaotic period -- take, for example, the reign of Ptolemy VI, in the mid-second century B.C.E. He, like many of the Ptolemies, married his sister, Cleopatra II; they had a daughter, Cleopatra III. But Ptolemy VI's brother Ptolemy VIII (all male Ptolemies were named Ptolemy; you told them apart by their nicknames, such as Ptolemy Fatso, Ptolemy Chick-Pea, Ptolemy the Flute-Player -- and, yes, those are all real nicknames!) also wanted the throne, and got involved in a struggle with Ptolemy VI. That didn't work well for Ptolemy VIII -- until Ptolemy VI was killed in an unrelated fight with the Seleucids and Jews. Ptolemy VIII and Cleopatra II both tried to take over; Ptolemy VIII won, took Cleopatra II as his wife -- and then murdered her so that he could marry her daughter Cleopatra III instead.

Fun folks, those later Ptolemies. Believe me, Cleopatra VII -- Julius Caesar's and Mark Antony's Cleopatra -- was a real improvement.

But you'd never know it from this book. It's intended to be short, so it couldn't cover everything -- but I can't help but wish the balance were otherwise. In a book that has just 134 pages of narrative (in the edition I have), did we really need to devote two dozen of them to life in the city of Priene, a place that has no historical significance at all? It's a chance to look at life in the Hellenistic era, but it's pretty definitely not representative. Or did we need to spend twenty pages on various travels around the boundaries of the Hellenistic states? Or another twenty mostly on Eratosthenes and Hellenistic philosophy and science?

Don't get me wrong. If this book were about six times as long, the section on Priene and all the rest would have been wonderful, and could have been made longer. Eratosthenes, too, was well worth the time spent on him, and could easily have been granted many more pages. But not at the expense of the history! Author Thonemann has been an Antigonos, and tried to cover everything, and so didn't really cover anything (except Priene). I was left wanting more -- but if I had come to this topic without knowing about Seleucids and Ptolemies and Antigonids, I'm quite sure this book would not have piqued my interest. If I can't have more, I'd rather have less -- I'd rather be a Ptolemy and have 134 pages of history rather than half that.

Others, of course, might prefer more archaeology or whatever. That's fair. But you won't find the depth in those areas, either. This is a decently-written, easy-to-understand book. But it just doesn't have enough content for the size of the topic it's taking on. Only an Antigonos could love it -- and only an Antigonos with a really short attention span.… (més)

The Birth of Classical Europe: A History from Troy to Augustine is a fantastic overview of Mediterranean and broader European history. One advantage of reading modern books on history is you have the latest thoughts coming from recent archaeology, technological development, discoveries about languages and migrations, etc.

I have read Freeman's Egypt, Greece, and Rome (my review) so this book was a good refresher for events but did a better job helping me understand the overall historical contexts of the Mediterranean and Asia Minor (Anatolia) during the time period covered. Whereas Freeman tended to categorize his chapters by looking at art, war, technology, and religion separately, Price and Thonemann weave them together as a whole. You can't understand what we know about, say, the Punic Wars without looking at who recorded the stories and the context they were writing in. Price and Thonemann also look more at what modern archaeology tells us about the lives and development. There are also several inset boxes that explain the significance of an event or writing in modern history-- whether it be what influenced Machiavelli or Dante's writings, Shakespeare, the U.S.'s Founding Fathers, or Nazi Germany's inspirations.


We start in the areas of Mycenae, whose inhabitants also settled in Crete, blending with a native culture that was growing and continue with the development of Classical Greece, then through the later Greek periods. Not too much time is spent on Philip and Alexander's Macedonian conquests. We then look at the rise of Rome while also looking at the civilizations that existed in mainland Europe (Gaul) and Britain, Carthage (North Africa), Persia, and Syria. The book concludes by looking at Christianity in the early Roman empire, and the increasing divide between East and West (Greek-speakers vs. Latin speakers). It concludes with a look at St. Augustine, which having just read Confessions I found helpful to put him in a greater context. Augustine is truly a post-Roman, a Latin speaker living in a Roman colony, highly educated in the classics and trying to reconcile those classics and Roman history with biblical history. If you want a general history of Europe and the Mediterranean with plenty of peeks at details without going too deep, then this is your book.

I greatly enjoyed it and give it 5 stars.… (més)