VULGARISING THE ANCIENT GREEKS by Paul Cartledge

What is public history, as E. H. Can very nearly said? This is not a new question in Classics: as Esther Eidinow reminded us in The Times on the eve of the CA conference (18 April), it had been raised explicitly by E. R. Dodds in his controversial 1936 Inaugural Lecture as Regius Professor of Greek at Oxford (see his own account in Missing Persons, O.U.P. 1977 and repr. 2000). Over the past decade or so, I've tried to follow where Dodds so ably led and been more or less continuously involved with attempts to bring the ancient Greeks -my versions of the ancient Greeks, rather -to a variety of different audiences (readers, viewers or listeners) other than my fellow-scholars.

That is perhaps one sort of answer to my opening question. But it raises all sorts of other questions: what should public history be? how should it differ from academic history? to what end or ends should such popularizing efforts be directed? What prompts this particular essay is my latest effort in this direction, for which I acted as academic consultant: the three-part TV series The Greeks: Crucible of Civilization, shown on BBC 2 over successive Saturdays on prime time in January 2001.

This series was first aired in the United States in early 2000 on PBS (Public Broadcasting Service, the nearest equivalent to the BBC), for which it was made, by a British, London- based production company with American money. Later that year it was shown also in Canada, Australia and Greece, as well as on the BBC's "Knowledge" cable channel. In the States, for its debut airing all three parts were rolled together one February evening, and over three hours some 3 million people allegedly tuned in, maybe even watched. Numberless thousands have since hit the associated website www.pbs.org/empires/thregreeks/, which offers the added attraction of a live "webcam" link to the Acropolis (allegedly -I've never actually managed to get it to work myself ...).

Here, then, is what the French call "vulgarisation", with a vengeance. But how vulgar is vulgar? We could begin by distinguishing the more from the less academic, and I hope you'll forgive me if I use my own oeuvre for purposes of illustration. My four Sparta books (one co-authored with Tony Spawforth) are clearly pretty heavy-duty academic productions aimed at colleagues and their pupils. Some non- specialists and general readers could perhaps get something out of some of them, but overall and as a whole they're supposed to be cutting-edge research works aiming to push back the frontiers of knowledge and understanding, etc etc.

On the other hand, five of the books that I've published since 1990- as author or as editor -have clearly been less academic, and sometimes indeed less than academic, that is, aimed at a wider audience and carrying less of the scholarly apparatus, such as footnotes, that is the mark or stigma of conventional scholarship but apparently so off putting to nonspecialist or general readerships (and especially potential buyers). The most recent of these is the book written to accompany the TV series, The Greeks: Crucible of Civilization (TV Books, N.Y.; corrected repr. BBC Books, 2001). And it's this -both the book and the TV series -that I'm going to concentrate on here.

For two, connected reasons. First, the TV series on both sides of the Atlantic reached astonishingly -to me -large audiences: 3 million viewers saw some or all of the original PBS airing, as I've mentioned, and between 1.4 and 1.9 million, again allegedly, watched some or all of the BBC 2 showings. The book in its original American incarnation has sold about 15,000 copies in hardback, and a paperback is about to appear as I write; the BBC Books version, on the back of the TV series, hit the Saturday Times's bestseller list. Second, partly because of the enormous, and generally favourable, reception by the public towards whom it was aimed, the TV series generated considerable comment and controversy among my academic colleagues, not just in the form of a string of private e-mails to me personally, but also in the shape of a vituperative "review" -really a flagellation -by Peter Green in the American periodical Arion.

Contrary to what Peter Green seemingly believes, academic consultants don't actually have a very powerful role in determining the final look or "cut" of any visual history produced for the small or the big screen. (The locus classicus of this impotence, surely, is Kathy Coleman's experience with the Gladiator movie. Despite all her best efforts, the producer and director simply were not going to allow themselves to be confused by the facts of second-century imperial Roman politics or by the realities of contemporary gladiatorial combat.) Which was one major reason why I wrote a book to accompany the TV series of The Greeks. And why I stress "to accompany", since this is not the book "of' the series.

Although it shares the TV series' biographical approach, and title, the book ranges far more widely in time and space, presenting mini-biographies of fifteen subjects, seven women, eight men, from Homer to Alexander the Great by way of (among others) Sappho and Aspasia. In the TV series, on the other hand, the rise, climax and crisis of Classical Greek civilization are presented through and around the lives and careers of four major figures, all Athenians: Cleisthenes, Themistocles, Pericles, and Socrates. The quartet's lives between them spanned merely the century and a half from about 565 BC to 399 BC.

Of course, by focusing on a more limited number of prominent male individuals from a single, massively influential and broadly to our way of thinking sympathetic city, the writer/director was able to deliver a strong and readily comprehensible storyline. And through the magic of the latest computer and television technology, the glories of ancient Greece were to some extent re-created. Cutting-edge digital animation techniques were combined with matte glass paintings to re-present some of the most dramatic moments and monuments of Greek history. These include the battles of Marathon and Salamis, in which a relative handful of Greeks defeated the mighty hordes of Persian invaders and so helped crucially to make possible the Classical Greek legacy to western (and not only western) civilization, and the Parthenon, which still casts its giant shadow.

On the other hand, as academic colleagues and critics were quick to point out, the rather less glorious position of women and slaves in Greek society, and their role in creating classical Greek civilisation, were not exactly highlighted, the black/white contrast between the Greeks (all Goodies) and the Persians (all Baddies) made even some Hollywood Westerns look sophisticated, and the TV films were unable to present a suitably nuanced picture of the complex and subtle events and processes that went into the development of democracy and empire in Classical Greece.

All history is present history, in the sense that the concerns of the present are bound somehow to affect the way history is studied and written. All history is also personal, since it is impossible to avoid the influence of one's own opinions and prejudices on the selection and emphasis of one's historical material. Consider, for example, in light of those generalisations, the episode of The Greeks that highlights Socrates. It takes a broadly favourable view, portraying him as a hero of free thought rather than -as the majority of the jury thought at his trial in 399 -an anti-democratic villain. But, if you'll forgive the pun, the jury is in a sense still out on that. Socrates remains today a hugely controversial figure, as we can see from such contradictory representations of him as those of the late American journalist I. F. Stone and the distinguished Greek-American ancient philosopher Alexander Nehamas (a major contributor to the TV series). My own vote, then as now, would probably go in the negative direction -for the reasons I gave in an article in the BBC History Magazine (January 2001) -even if on principle I would have opposed the death penalty.

Yet -and here I would want to return to the favourable view presented in the TV programme -there is after all something heroic about Socrates's unwillingness to compromise his ideal of the unremitting search for intellectual truth, even at the cost of his own life. At any rate, history has surely paid Socrates ample compensation in the almost exactly twenty-four centuries since his demise. The Athenian Empire may have died in 404, but Socrates, not least through the manner of his death, lives on. He crucially helped to create an "empire of thought", as Alexander Nehamas brilliantly puts it in the TV version of The Greeks, one that is still a living presence -a vital part of our Classical Greek heritage.

And that, after (or rather before) all, is what I think any attempt to represent the ancient Greeks for a wide, largely non-specialist audience today ought chiefly to bear in mind. We may not all actually "be" Greeks, as Shelley once hyperbolically claimed. But it is the case that ancient Greek ideas and Greek language, Greek culture more generally, have infiltrated and informed a great deal of what we still today consider most important. Issues of democratic control, personal accountability and public civil disobedience are all prominently involved in the story of the life and fate of Socrates, for example. So, here's my parting thought: Whatever opinion we may happen to hold of the ancient Greeks collectively or of individuals like Socrates, they certainly do still give us furiously to think. And, to quote the man himself, as reported by Plato, "the unexamined life is not worth living for a human being".

From CA News No. 24, June 2001.