The Ancient Guide to Modern Life by Natalie Haynes

Author:Natalie Haynes
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Profile Books
Published: 2010-12-08T16:00:00+00:00

6

There’s No Place Like Rome

It’s time to put the people and politics of the ancient world into their proper context. We’ve looked at different societies in different periods: from the golden age of Athens to the final days of Rome, from the exotic east to the frozen north. But ancient peoples didn’t live on the pages of an atlas, any more than we do. They lived in real towns, real houses, real farms. They lived in the city and longed to escape to the country. They had seaside boltholes that they could go to when the weather became too hot or the politics too oppressive. They had strong views on the most respectable ways to live, in a city-state, a provincial town or a rural idyll.

There was a far stronger connection between these different parts of their worlds, too. As they had to ride through countryside for days at a time to get from Rome to Naples, we can assume they picked up more than a glancing awareness of their surroundings on the way. It’s a very different process from speeding through the countryside as most of us do now: driving along a motorway, or sitting on a high-speed train. The scenery moves past so quickly that it’s hard to tell which part of a country you are in at any one time. The banks of trees by the train tracks and the fields near the arterial roads look much the same on one side of a country as they do on another. And we live on a small island: in larger countries people simply fly over the chunks they need to travel through. Even the flight information, which we used to see on television screens as we flew over the Rocky Mountains or the Great Lakes – reminding us of where we really were – is in jeopardy: terrorists can’t blow up a plane over Detroit if they don’t know when they’re over Detroit, goes the theory.

For better or worse, we have become disconnected from those who live in the other parts of our world, our country and even our county. Many of us are suburban, by choice or necessity. We’re persuaded by our newspapers to fear the inner cities, with their young, violent under-class. And we’re encouraged by the newspapers’ lifestyle supplements to aspire to the life of the country squire, or gentleman farmer. We’re embarrassed by the ordinariness of where we live. Yet the country life that so many people wish to achieve is a chimera, an oasis of green, pleasant land that disappears when we look at it hard: no rural schools, impossible house prices, closing pubs and post offices. Does the rural idyll even exist? And did it ever, outside of costume dramas?

The first author to really attempt to document the countryside is Hesiod, a Greek poet who lived in Boeotia, in central Greece, in the late eighth century BCE. Hesiod wrote two poems that have survived to the present day: Theogony, an origin story of the gods, and Works and Days, which is rather more difficult to define.

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