Peter Jones (1) (1942–)

Highly recommend this book to anyone interested in Roman history. Easy readability with short chapters that focus on a particular theme/event; such as, social life, law, literature, kings, emperors and imperialism. Each chapter begins with a chronology of the events described in that chapter. The book covers a broad amount of Roman history starting with the origin myth/story of Romulus and the founding/establishment of Rome in 753 BCE and finishing around the 5th century. moreover the end of the book describes the rise of Christianity in the 4th century CE and Theodosius' outlawing of Paganism and convening of the council of Constantinople (381) determining the Christian orthodoxy and establishing Christianity as the official sole Roman religion - The books final page comments on roman native tongue of Latin and the continuation of the language through the roman catholic church and also eventually education (mostly starting in Europe in the 11th and 12th centuries in cathedral and monastic schools (monasteries) ).… (meer)

The first thing to realize about this book is that Peter Jones is discussing British life and politics, and in some detail, so the non-Brit probably won't always know what he is talking about, although the gist is generally clear enough. It really cannot be recommended as a survey of ancient life--but may interest some.

I give the book three stars not because it is uniformly mediocre, but because it varies so much in quality. Sometimes Jones' comparison are very apt, as when he contrasts the attitude of the ancients towards art with that of the modern day. I happened to agree with him, but more than that, it was a comparison of like to like. At these times, he can be quite witty:

"But at least Greeks were spared one ghastly feature of modern sport: athletes were not plastered all over with logos and advertisements. How could they be? They competed stark naked. Well, one hopes they could not have been, but no doubt a modern advertising guru would leap at the chance to advertise--well, one shudders to think what, let alone where."

In the other cases, the comparisons are poorly done. He compares the average Brit's notions of the good life and happiness to that of Seneca and Juvenal. Neither of the latter two were typical of their society, as they themselves were well aware. Moreover, this is cherry-picking, since they don't represent the whole of ancient philosophical thought,

This latter problem occurs too often. Jones times and again compares the realities, or at least of jaundiced view of the realities of modern life with an idealized, and sometimes downright sanitized view of the ancient world. He goes off on tedious rants about how how society is going to hell in a handbasket, just the sort of thing that I dreaded from my grandparents, and my parents, and now that I am getting older, my contemporaries. Society is always going to hell in a handbasket, and people have very selective memories. I often had to put the book down, and thought of giving it up altogether at these times.

He also argued, but didn't elucidate, that Rome had settled the problem of cultural conflict by allowing groups to follow their own customs, except for unexplained situations where Roman law took precedence. Isn't that pretty much allowed in the US, if not in the UK. My understanding is that the Amish settle civil matters, and some criminal matters, basically anything that require an individual to make a complaint, among themselves. They turn to the legal system only in the most serious cases. One point that Jones doesn't address is whether or not this is voluntary. Are people allowed to leave their subgroup? To take the Amish again, they can leave before baptism; if they leave after, they may be shunned, but I have never heard of the Amish using physical force to subdue the rebellious, unlike the honor killings of certain Muslim women who break away.

His defense of Athenian democracy is rather a crock. He argues that obviously, the slaves couldn't vote, since they would have voted to abolish slavery, so it doesn't count that they were excluded. And excluding women doesn't count because they were excluded in other systems. I would think that someone who read so much about philosophy would see the glaring logical error in that argument. If one is asking how good a democracy Athens was, it doesn't really matter what others were doing. Why not argue that modern Britain is a democracy because it is closer to one that medieval England?

In the end, I did finish the book, and it was interesting, but there are plenty of other books to give the reader a selective overview of the ancient world.… (meer)