Author: stanprager

For every Southern boy fourteen years old, not once but whenever he wants it, there is the instant when it’s still not yet two o’clock on that July afternoon in 1863, the brigades are in position behind the rail fence, the guns are laid and ready in the woods and the furled flags are already loosened to break out and Pickett himself with his long oiled ringlets and his hat in one hand probably and his sword in the other looking up the hill waiting for Longstreet to give the word and it’s all in the balance …

No, that is not a snippet plucked from a Shelby Foote anecdote delivered with mellifluous voice in his signature cadence on the Ken Burns docuseries, The Civil War, but a passage from William Faulkner’s 1948 novel, Intruder in the Dust. Foote, writer and raconteur, who masqueraded as historian, is celebrated as much in some circles for his three volume narrative history of the Civil War as he is by a much wider audience for his extensive on-camera commentary on the docuseries that articulates the southern perspective in thinly disguised “Lost Cause” soundbites that deftly excised slavery from any conversation about the war. Faulkner also was no historian, nor did he pretend to be, but he certainly understood that slavery was the central cause of the war as well as its tragic aftermath for the denizens of the south, for blacks as well as for whites, even if he had difficulty saying that out loud, although we do hear it quite loud and clear through his carefully crafted characters in the drama and poetry that decorated the prose of his magnificent fiction. Slavery and its Jim Crow offspring poisoned the south, and the toxin was no less potent in Faulkner’s day than it was on that July afternoon in 1863.

The excerpt above references the moment just prior to the doomed Confederate assault known as Pickett’s Charge on the third and final day of the Battle of Gettysburg, seen by many then and now as the turning point of the Civil War, although careful students of the conflict would tell you that another far more consequential Union victory, the fall of Vicksburg, which cut the Confederacy in half, took place just one day later, more than a thousand miles distant in Faulkner’s native Mississippi. Faulkner aficionados glean that too, not least because its significance is subtly underlined in the short story “Ambuscade” (1934) that later serves as the opening installment of The Unvanquished (1938), when Colonel Sartoris’ young son Bayard and his enslaved companion Ringo eavesdrop on the colonel’s revelation that Vicksburg is gone just as the family’s silver, packed in a trunk, is shuttled out to be buried in the orchard.

But the point here, for the purposes of Faulkner’s fiction—as well as the real-life tragedy of the south that still prevails today, well beyond the sesquicentennial of the Civil War—is that the “what-if” of the war’s outcome persistently echoes across far too much of the southern landscape in 2024: if not as loudly as it did in 1865 or in 1962, the year of Faulkner’s death, it yet remains all too perceptible socio-economically and politically. Nothing ever spoke to that  phenomenon better than a more famous Faulkner quotation found in another novel, Requiem for a Nun (1951): “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” And possibly nothing proves its endurance better than the fact that this election year has seen at once bans against teaching about slavery and race in some southern states and, more remarkably, pro-secession candidates vying for office in Texas, perhaps grown men still fantasizing about that instant when it’s still not yet two o’clock on that July afternoon in 1863.

The past and present together underscore the relevance of The Saddest Words: William Faulkner’s Civil War, a brilliant and extremely well-written blend of history, biography, literary criticism, and travel writing by Michael Gorra, professor of literature at Smith College. After years of reading, studying, and teaching Faulkner, Gorra decided to take it to the next level, and he set out to visit the various geographies where Faulkner walked the earth, battlefields where southern blood was shed, and the likely environs of the fictional characters—Compsons, Sutpens, Snopes, and a host of memorable African Americans—that inhabited the author’s imaginary Yoknapatawpha County. Had he stopped there, the end result might have been another academic biography peppered with literary analysis. But instead, Gorra—who correctly identifies the Civil War and its repercussions as existential to Faulkner’s literary themes—assigned himself a rigorous self-study of the war and its wider implications. In the process, the author discovered what today’s historians have long recognized, that there was and remains more than one war: the actual war as it occurred, with all of its ramifications, and the way the war is remembered, especially in the south. There are multiple versions of the latter, both conflicting and overlapping, informed at once by truth and by imagination.

The most twisted and most stubborn of these is known as the “Myth of the Lost Cause,” that has the south waging a righteous if hopeless quest for liberty against a rapacious north intent on domination. Eventually, the heroic south is overwhelmed by sheers numbers of men and materiel, and goes down to an honorable defeat, only to fall victim to northern plunderers in the Reconstruction days that follow. Here it is solely a white man’s war, brother against brother, forged by incompatible forces arrayed in opposition: states’ rights vs. federalism, agriculture vs. industry, rural vs. urban, free trade vs. tariffs. In this version, slavery is almost beside the point, and blacks are essentially expunged from history.  African Americans appear in cameo roles when they show up at all, as harmless servants in the south’s peculiar institution, which is presented as something benign, even benevolent, that would have simply faded away on its own had Lincoln not launched what is still known in some circles as the “War of Northern Aggression.” More recently, blacks make an awkward reappearance in some odd strands of Lost Cause, now recast as comprising legions of imaginary uniformed “Black Confederates” who eagerly stand guard with their masters to defend southern sovereignty. Otherwise, blacks disappear almost without a trace. Gone are the millions held in chattel slavery, the half million  that self-emancipated by fleeing to the Union lines, the nearly two hundred thousand that fought for Union in the United States Colored Troops (USCT)—and most thoroughly erased are the many, many thousands of camp slaves that accompanied Confederate armies throughout the war, including Lee’s infantry at Gettysburg, a fact likely unknown to that fourteen year old dreaming of southern victory.

The Lost Cause is a vile lie, but like all effective lies it is infused with elements of truth. Of course, slavery was not the only cause of the Civil War—just ninety-five percent of it! The key is to focus on the other five percent, and that effort was so successful that this fictitious story became America’s story. So successful that the United States became the only nation in the world to host hundreds of monuments to traitors and rebels across its landscape, many that still preside over public squares today. So successful that it was integrated into the historiography that dominated American education for a century to follow. And ingredients of that distorted curriculum even touched me, growing up in New England in the 1960s, dramatically reinforced on our family’s console TV as the networks commonly replayed Gone with the Wind, the histrionic paean to Lost Cause: an endless loop of the hapless enslaved Prissy incongruously shrieking the “De Yankees is comin!” in terror rather than celebration. I was a Connecticut boy, a state that saw thousands of lives sacrificed in the cause of Union, but I pretended to be a Confederate soldier when I played war, so deeply sympathetic was I to the southern cause. There was only one black child in my elementary school, so I did not find it odd that blacks made few appearances in my textbooks.

But I was a voracious reader, even as a young teen, and books shaped me. I read deeply in American history, fell in love with the Civil War era, and began to discover that what I had learned in school was not only superficial but woefully incomplete and conspicuously misleading. I also read a good deal of fiction in those days, across multiple genres. I think I was fifteen when I discovered Faulkner, and the first novel I read is one of his most challenging to follow or comprehend, The Sound and the Fury (1929). The first section consists of nearly sixty pages propelled solely by a vehicle manufactured from disjointed bits of the stream of consciousness of Benjy Compson, a severely intellectually disabled adult—tagged as an “idiot” in Faulkner’s day—who experiences time as directionless in an interior monologue that speeds along a twisting road of sharp turns from 1928 to 1912 to 1902 and swerves back again repeatedly, with no signs or guard rails to assist the reader, a marvelous journey motif in nonlinear time instead of distance. I found myself reading and re-reading paragraphs and pages, again and again, often lost but relishing the long, strange trip, a dictionary habitually at my elbow as I struggled against an onslaught of vocabulary both unfamiliar and intimidating. I loved every minute of it! And, in that early 1970s acid-infused era, Faulkner’s style here, verging on the phantasmagoric, seemed the perfect companion to the likes of Jefferson Airplane and Pink Floyd.

In my teens, I did not connect Faulkner to the Civil War, but literature and history were then, and today remain, my two great passions. I would read many more Faulkner novels and short stories in the years to come, and my fascination with the Civil War was a part of my motivation, decades later, to return to school to obtain a master’s degree in history. By then the connection between Faulknerian themes and the tortured legacy of the war was apparent.

But it was not until I read The Saddest Words that I came to understand how inextricable that link truly was. Faulkner (and Foote for that matter) grew up indoctrinated in a version of Lost Cause more virulent than that which touched my northern classroom, a memory of the war and Reconstruction so far removed from reality that it amounted to a greater fiction than any of Faulkner’s novels—a fairy tale mandatory to explain to later generations why the weird world they inhabited existed as it did, lest they be crushed by cognitive dissonance. But, as Gorra detects in his superb analysis, it is Faulkner’s characters who speak to truth, even if the living, breathing William Faulkner could not articulate those contradictions. The violence, the rape, the incest, the guilt, the despair that are part and parcel of the body of Faulkner’s works are a kind of subliminal confession that the author is well aware of the actual horror that disfigures southern life that real life pretends away. His white protagonists voice this. His black characters—who speak in dialect now judged offensive—bear authentic witness in what is left unsaid.

In The Sound and the Fury and its cousin, the even more daunting Absalom, Absalom! (1936), Faulkner dwells upon “miscegenation,” a term anachronistic today that once served in the white south as an epithet for race-mixing. Gorra notes that the neologism itself only dates to 1863 (and I recall it still wielded as a cudgel in Dixiecrat rhetoric in the 1960s), although it certainly reflected a fear deeply rooted in the antebellum. But what could never be uttered aloud in the south was that the kind of race-mixing deemed revolting was strictly limited to that which might occur consensually between a white woman and a black man. Because the reality was that the institution of slavery sponsored a vast mixing of the races, but that was primarily the product of the white men of the planter aristocracy coupling with black girls and black women held as chattel property, and it was almost always nonconsensual.

They preached against a dread of a “racial amalgamation” while essentially engineering it; the enslaved population on any given plantation frequently included those who were children of those who owned and worked them. There were contemporary observations at Monticello that among the enslaved were light-skinned blacks with red hair and freckles who bore more than a passing resemblance to Jefferson. Gorra cites the familiar observation from southern diarist Mary Chestnut that: “The mulattos one sees in every family … resemble the white children. Any lady is ready to tell you who is the father of all the mulatto children in everybody’s household but her own. Those, she seems to think, drop from the clouds.” Of course, we now know that none of this is strictly hypothetical: genome-wide analysis reveals that the DNA of African Americans contains on average about twenty-five percent European ancestry. We can make an educated guess that there are few traces of consent in those numbers.

Blacks and whites were always together in those days, although in clearly defined roles. Gorra refers to an episode in The Sound and the Fury when Harvard-bound Quentin Compson has cause to reflect on race when he sits next to a black man on a bus in 1910, something that was common to the north then but taboo in Jim Crow Mississippi. But that was not always the case; segregation was invented in the north. At one time, free Boston blacks, subject to discrimination on rail travel, while hardly envying their enslaved brethren marveled that southern railroads did not separate the races. (Massachusetts finally desegregated railcars in the 1840s.) It was not until the 1880s that segregation was characteristic to southern life, and that was only obtained by the failure of Reconstruction and the rise of “Redemption.” No longer enslaved, blacks were terrorized and murdered as former Confederate officers and officials returned to power and cowed the southern black population into second class status, stripped of rights granted by the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, while the rest of the nation collectively averted its eyes. This is, by the way, not ancient history; I was seven years old when Congress passed the Civil Rights Act in 1964: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”

Of course, “separate but equal” always translated into separate and unequal, but southern whites and blacks could not ever really be separate—and that’s the rub! Faulkner saw that through the eyes of his white characters who lived in terror of incest and race-mixing only to turn around and see a world outlined inescapably by these implications. It is likely that the enslaved Sally Hemings, who bore Jefferson several children, was the half-sister of his late wife, Martha.

It is said Foote and Faulkner met, and even developed a sort of friendship. Foote was a stubborn defender of southern culture. Deep down, many of Faulkner’s characters seem to hate the south. I can’t help but wonder if the two ever talked about that. The Sound and the Fury’s Quentin Compson was certainly consumed by it, by the purity of southern women, by the conundrum of race, by a devotion to honor, so much so that he discovers that he cannot leave the ill-fated south behind him even at Harvard, more than a thousand miles from Mississippi, and in his anguish he takes his own life. But first he conjures a memory of something his father once said to him:

every man is the arbiter of his own virtues but let no man prescribe for another mans well-being and i temporary and he was the saddest word of all there is nothing else in the world its not despair until time its not even time until it was

Gorra’s synthesis of Faulkner’s fiction, Civil War memory, and the echo of systematic racism that yet stains America is nothing short of superlative. That he achieves this while probing sometime arcane avenues of literature, history, and historiography—while ever maintaining the reader’s interest—is especially impressive. If I was to find fault, it is only that towards the end of the volume, the author seems to drift away from the connective tissue in his thesis and wander off into what is clearly his first love, a detailed literary analysis of Faulkner’s prose. But that is a quibble. And truth be told, I now feel inspired to turn to my own shelves and once more dig deeply into my Faulkner collection. In this arena, I must confess that Gorra has truly humbled me: I have read The Sound and the Fury no less than three times, but his commentary on it makes it clear that I still did not entirely understand what Faulkner was trying to say, after all. I suppose I must go back and get to know Benjy again, one more time!

In 1904, the notorious Apache warrior Geronimo, now in his mid-seventies, was a federal prisoner of war on loan to the St. Louis World’s Fair, which belongs to our nation’s uncomfortable collective memory for its numerous ethnographic exhibits of so-called “primitive” humans which included, in addition to Native Americans, the Tlingit, indigenous to Alaska, and the Igorot, an aboriginal population from the Philippines who were billed as “headhunters,” as well as Congolese pygmies. Geronimo developed rapport with one of latter, an amiable nineteen year old Mbuti tribesman named Ota Benga, imaginatively advertised as a “cannibal,” who stood four foot eleven inches and whose smile showcased teeth ceremonially sharpened to fine points. The old medicine man presented him with an arrowhead as a gift; they were, of course, all in this kind of zoo together.

But only two years later that very metaphor materialized for Ota, whom after a brief stay at New York’s American Museum of Natural History found himself on display in the Monkey House at the Bronx Zoo, where he hung his hammock, wearing a loincloth and carrying a bow and arrow, or wandering the zoo grounds accompanied by an orangutan he had grown attached to—a captivating if unpaid attraction for amused onlookers. Just after the turn of century, fresh from the imperialist adventure that was the Spanish-American War, which had compelled Filipinos to trade one colonial power for another, “civilized” Americans delighted in the spectacle of gawking at “savages” in various contrived natural habitats—especially, it turned out, in of all places, New York City!

The hapless Ota’s surprising story, from his birth in central Africa through his unlikely travels across the United States, is the subject of Ota Benga: The Pygmy in the Zoo [1992], an entertaining if occasionally uneven account by dual authors Phillips Verner Bradford and Harvey Blume. It is also, actually, a dual biography, as Ota shares much space in the narrative with Samual Phillips Verner—the grandfather of one of the authors—an eccentric missionary who visited the Congo on a “specimen-gathering mission” for the Fair, and “collected” Ota Benga as one of those “specimens.” There are grander themes to parse, as well, that this set of authors may not have been up to. These run the gamut from the oppression that reigned in the Jim Crow south to the cruelty that characterized the Congo, and—especially—to this particular moment in time when an America now equipped with automobiles and electricity and even manned flight could yet shamelessly put human beings on display to at once juxtapose with and champion their alleged superiors shouldering their “white man’s burden.”

Bradford, an engineer who was inspired to write a biography of his colorful grandfather, recognized that Ota Benga was the hook that would attract readers, and set out to do the research. Blume was brought in to polish the manuscript. Neither were trained historians, which perhaps makes the finished product more readable, if less reliable; more on that later.

This storied grandfather, the aforementioned Samual Phillips Verner, was born in post-Civil War South Carolina to a former slaveholding family and grew up furnished with the deep-seated racism typical to his class and his time. Verner emerges here as an intense, academic prodigy who lingers upon troubling moral quandaries of right and wrong, while suffering from alternating episodes of mental illness—he once insisted he was the Hapsburg Emperor—and religious fervor. Throughout, he takes comfort in the Daniel Defoe novel Robinson Crusoe, as well as the real life adventures of Henry Morton Stanley and David Livingstone in distant, exotic Africa. The sum total of all this was to coalesce in Verner’s calling as a missionary to what was then commonly referred to as the “Dark Continent.” It is in Africa that he demonstrates his intelligence, his charm, his many capabilities, and his propensity for both earning enemies and cementing friendships. He also wrestles with the inherent prejudices he carries from the deep south that come to be challenged by the realities of the human experience. And, as in his boyhood, there are disturbing moral dilemmas to resolve. But what becomes increasingly clear as the pages are turned is that Verner is first and foremost a narcissist, and resolutions for any paradox of morality are always obtained by what suits Verner’s own circumstances most comfortably and most conveniently.

By his own account, Verner’s time in the Congo consisted of remarkable exploits that saw him establish rapport with various native peoples, including pygmies, as well as form an unlikely kind of alliance with a dangerous, otherwise unapproachable tribal king, and a near-fatal episode when he impaled his leg on a poisoned stake set for an animal trap. Along the way, he distinguishes himself by his courage, quick-thinking, and ingenuity—like a character out of Defoe, perhaps. Did it all really happen? Bradford reports Verner’s saga as history, although it is based almost entirely on his grandfather’s own recollections. As such, the reader cannot help but question the reliability of a fellow who once believed himself to be the Hapsburg Emperor!

African pygmies, much like the Khoisan peoples, have an ancient indigenous lineage that are genetically divergent from all other human populations. They may or may not be descendants of paleolithic hunter-gatherers of the central African rainforest. In Ota Benga’s time, the Mbuti, nomadic hunters, ranged within the artificially drawn borders of the Congo Free State, a vast territory that was for a time the personal fiefdom of Belgium’s King Leopold II, a land infamous for the widespread atrocities committed by Leopold’s private army, the dreaded Force Publique, that enforced strict rubber collection quotas through extreme methods of murder and mutilation. A human hand had to be turned in for every bullet issued to prove these were not wasted, so baskets of hands—including children’s hands—became symbolic of Leopold’s “Free State,” a realm of horrors that inspired Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. For those who have read Adam Hochschild’s magnificent work, King Leopold’s Ghost, there is nothing new here, but two of its protagonists, black missionary William Sheppard and Irish activist Roger Casement, who campaigned against Leopold’s reign of terror, turn up in this book, as well. Verner, it seems, was surprisingly unmoved by the carnage about him.

Verner contracted malaria. That illness, his leg injury, and the overall dissatisfaction of mission officials with his performance conspired to send him back to America, where he became famous for his reported feats and, based upon his background, won the assignment of procuring pygmies for The Louisiana Purchase Exposition (also known as the St. Louis World’s Fair). So, eight years later he returned on expedition, with the blessings of King Leopold himself, and in an accidental encounter with the Baschilele tribe stumbled upon Ota Benga at a slave market. Apparently Ota, away from his camp on a solo elephant hunt, as pygmies were wont to do, had returned to find piles of corpses, including his wife and children—victims of the Force Publique. He and other survivors were sold into slavery. Verner could not believe his good fortune: he purchased Ota for “a pound of salt and a bolt of cloth.” [p103] He later recruited other more willing volunteers, and set sail for home. The Thirteenth Amendment forbidding chattel slavery was ratified nearly four decades prior, but that proved not to be a barrier to Verner’s transport of Ota to the United States.

That is just the beginning of this fascinating story! There is much more to come, which makes this book, although flawed on some levels, well worth the read. Those who have studied the American Civil War and the antebellum south are familiar with the nuanced relationships that can develop between the enslaved and those who hold them as property. A bond developed between Verner and Ota that was even more complicated than that. Verner may have purchased Ota and dutifully turned him over to the World’s Fair, but he later freely returned him to Africa. Yet, after a time, Ota, widowed once more after losing a second wife to snakebite, found himself with little to hold him there and a taste for the excitement he had found in America. Thus, he made an enthusiastic return to the US with Verner. But things were not destined to go well for either of them.

Verner had visions of grandeur that did not translate into either the wealth or recognition he sought. He seemed to genuinely care about Ota’s welfare, but that fell to neglect as his own fortunes dwindled, and Ota wound up in that degrading display at the Bronx Zoo. He was not there very long. His rescue came from unlikely quarters: African American clergymen, chafing at their own second-class status, were rightly appalled at the humiliating spectacle of Ota at the zoo, which they likewise perceived as advancing Darwinism, an abomination for their Christian faith. Ota went first to an orphanage in the Bronx, and later to Lynchburg, Virginia, where a kindly patron arranged to have his sharpened teeth capped, fitted him out in suitable clothing, sent him to school, and found him work at a tobacco factory, where he was known as Otto Bingo. But Ota, who in his heyday with Verner had been a celebrity of sorts on travels that had once even taken him to Mardi Gras in New Orleans, found himself lonely and alienated. One day in 1916, he pried the caps off his teeth and shot himself. He was about thirty-three years old.

In the end, I longed for more information about Ota and less about Verner. This volume, while enhanced by both wonderful photographs and a thick appendix of press clippings from the day, is conspicuously absent of endnotes—which would be useful for the reader anxious to separate fact from fiction in Verner’s likely embellishments. Still, despite its limitations, I enjoyed this book and would recommend it.

My Review of: King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terrorism and Heroism in Colonial Africa, by Adam Hochschild

Ota Benga is referenced, with much relevance, in Angela Saini’s fine work, reviewed here:  Superior: The Return of Race Science

In 399 BCE, Socrates was condemned to death, a tragic punctuation mark to the celebrated fifth century that had Athens and Sparta and the multitude of other poleis witness first the repulse of the mighty Persian Empire, the flourish that was the Age of Pericles, and then the carnage of the Peloponnesian War that for nearly three decades battered Greek civilization and culminated in Athenian defeat. In that same era, hardly anyone had heard of Rome, humiliated just shortly thereafter when sacked by Gauls in 390 BCE. A mere century and a half later, the Greeks were themselves subjects of a Rome that had become master of the Mediterranean. But in victory or defeat, sovereign or not, the pulse never failed to beat in the poleis—or beyond it. The life of Socrates, likely embellished, was told most famously by Plato, who founded his Academy in Athens in 387 BCE. Plato’s pupil Aristotle later established his own school, the Lyceum, and served as tutor to Alexander the Great, who in his vast conquest spread Hellenism across the east. By the time that Egypt, the last parcel of territory once claimed by Alexander, fell to Roman rule in 31 BCE, Greek thought prevailed more than a thousand miles from Attica and the Peloponnesus, and it was to dominate Roman intellectual life for centuries to come. As Roman poet Horace once observed: “Captive Greece took captive her savage conqueror and brought the arts to rustic Latium.”

That story is subject to a superlative treatment in The Children of Athena: Greek Intellectuals in the Age of Rome:150 BC-400 AD [2023], a fascinating and engaging work that is the latest to spring from the extremely talented pen of acclaimed classicist Charles Freeman. In a departure from the thick tomes and deep dives into intellectual history that have made his reputation, such as The Closing of the Western Mind¹ [2003], and its sequel of sorts, The Reopening of the Western Mind² [2020], this delightful survey sacrifices none of the scholarship Freeman is known for while expanding his appeal to both an academic and a popular audience. Even better, the volume is structured such that it can just as suitably be approached as a random perusal of out of sequence episodes as a cover-to-cover read.

Books of history often have a slow build, but not this one. The reader is instantly hooked by the “Prologue,” which features an adaptation of The Banquet, a hilarious satirical work by Lucian of Samosata, a second-century CE Hellenized Syrian who wrote in Greek, that has representatives of virtually every school of philosophy attending a wedding feast that degenerates from debate and dispute to debauchery—and even a full scale brawl! Attendees include Stoics, Platonists, Peripatetics, Epicureans, Cynics, and various hangers-on. The point, of courses, for the purpose of Freeman’s work, is both the considerable diversity that was manifested in Greek thought, as well as how prevalent that proved to be in the immensity of an empire that stretched from Mauretania to Armenia.

To animate this compelling cultural history, Freeman has chosen a select group of representative figures. Those grounded in the classics will recognize most if perhaps not all of them, which only serves as underscore to the sheer numbers of Greeks who took leading roles in Roman life over the many hundreds of years that spanned the time when Greece succumbed to Roman conquest in the second century BCE to the fall of Rome in the west in the fifth century CE. There are philosophers, of course, such as Epictetus and Plotinus, but there is also the historian Polybius, the biographer Plutarch, the geographer Strabo, the traveler Pausanias, the astronomer Ptolemy, the surgeon Galen, and a dozen others. Chapters for each are comprised of biographical sketches with an exploration of their significance, as well as the imprint their legacies left upon later Western Civilization. Included too are a number of interludes that explore wider themes to better place these individuals in context to their times.

Rome’s was a martial society not known for organic cultural achievements, at least not until much later in the course of its history. Greek art and epic, already deeply influential on the Etruscans that Rome supplanted in their geography, came to fill that vacuum. The syncretism that gradually integrated Greek mythology into equivalent Roman gods and goddesses, with appropriate name changes, similarly saw Greek culture increasingly borrowed and incorporated over time, even as this latter process met with a sometimes fierce resistance by conservative Roman elites. Philosophy proved especially unwelcome at first, as perhaps best highlighted in a report by Plutarch of an Athenian delegation to Rome in 155 BCE that saw a certain Carneades, a philosopher associated with antidogmatic skepticism, argue convincingly to an audience in favor of one proposition the first day, only to return the next and masterfully rebut his own position—to the horror of Cato the Elder! But such attitudes were not to prevail; Greek philosophy was to dominate Roman intellectual life, even as Christianity gained traction—and some of Freeman’s Greeks are in fact Christian—until repressed by the Church in the last decades prior to the fall of Rome. This was especially facilitated by the Pax Romana that characterized the first two centuries of empire, a period of relative peace and stability that allowed ideas, including spirited philosophical debate, to spread freely across long distances. The Emperor Marcus Aurelius (reigned 161 to 180 CE) was himself a Stoic philosopher!

Freeman’s book demonstrates the vitality of Greek thought in Roman life not merely through the various schools of philosophy, but even more importantly in the realms of science, medicine, and scholarship. Long ago, in my own studies of ancient Greece, I read both Polybius (c.200–c.118 BCE) and Plutarch (46-119 CE) while carelessly overlooking the implications in that these were Greeks who resided in Rome. Plutarch himself even became a Roman citizen. It is a telling reminder that Greeks remained a critical influence upon Western Civilization—long after their city-states ceased to be anything other than place names on Roman maps.

I once ran across a claim of Christian triumphalism in the literature that argued that the rise of Christianity was enabled by a paganism that had so run its course that it had doomed itself to obsolescence, leaving a gaping spiritual hole that begged for a new, more fulfilling religious experience for the masses. It’s a nice fairy tale for the faithful, but lacks support in the scholarship. Even as the “catastrophic” notion of the demise of polytheism (associated with Gibbon) has given way to the more realistic “long and slow” view by historians, it is often surprising to discover how vibrant paganism remained, well into late antiquity. And the best evidence for that is the flourishing of Greek philosophy, and the paganism associated with it, in the Roman world—both which finally fell victim to the totalitarianism of the early Christian Church that at first discouraged and later prohibited anything that strayed from established doctrine. With that in mind, The Children of Athena serves as a kind of prequel to Freeman’s magnificent The Closing of the Western Mind, which chronicled the course of events that came to crush independent inquiry for a millennium to follow in the Western world.

There is possibly no more chilling metaphor for this than in one of the final chapters of The Children of Athena that is given to Hypatia (c.350-415 CE), a Neoplatonist philosopher and mathematician who lived in Alexandria, Egypt in the twilight of the empire. Hypatia, the rare female of her times who was a philosophical and scientific thinker, fell afoul of a local bishop and was murdered by a Christian mob that stripped her naked and scraped her to death with shards of roof tiles. And so the Western mind indeed did close.

For the record, I have come to know Charles Freeman over the years, and we correspond via email from time to time. I read portions of drafts of The Children of Athena as it was coming together, and offered my ideas, for whatever those might be worth, to help polish the narrative. As such, I was honored to see my name appear in the book’s “Acknowledgements.” But I am not a paid reviewer, and I would never praise a title that did not warrant it, regardless of my connection to the author. I genuinely enjoyed it, and would highly recommend it.

This is, in fact, one of those works that is difficult to fault, despite my glaring critical eye. Freeman’s depth in the field is on display and impressive, as is his ability to articulate a wide range of sometimes arcane concepts in a comprehensible fashion. I suppose if I were to find a flaw, it would be for the lack of much needed back matter. Readers may bemoan the absence of a “cast of characters” to catalog the names of the major and minor individuals that occur in the text, a key to philosophical schools and unfamiliar terminology, as well as maps of ancient cities and towns. Still, that is a minor quibble that should best be taken up with the publisher rather than the author, and hardly diminishes the overall achievement of this book, which does include copious notes and a fine concluding chapter that for my part found me motivated to go back to my own shelves and read more about the men and women that people The Children of Athena.

¹ A link to my review of: Review of: The Closing of the Western Mind: The Rise of Faith and the Fall of Reason by Charles Freeman

² A link to my review of: The Reopening of the Western Mind: The Resurgence of Intellectual Life from the End of Antiquity to the Dawn of the Enlightenment, by Charles Freeman