Book review: The Greeks: Lost Civilizations by Philip Matyszak

The Greeks: Lost Civilizations was a letdown. 

I wanted to read more on, like, the interactions between Greeks and non-Greeks in all those new cities. There was that intriguing tidbit about the Seleucids giving tax breaks to cities with large Greek populations because the Greeks were great tradesmen, traders and mercenaries. Instead what we get is a lot of narrative about the succession
of rulers. Though sometimes you have to accept that that's all you're going to get with ancient history, fair enough. What really bugged me was all the stuff about "all these thing are actually Greek or have a Greek name or have a tenuous connection to Greece." It gets really tedious. 

Really would've liked to read more on Bactria, the most interesting of the lot if only because of how alien it is to what we normally think of as 'Greek'. 

What did it mean to be Greek in the ancient world? Matyszak suggests:

The Greeks (after Alexander) very sensibly chose not to go for genetic hairsplitting of the type that has people in the present-day USA deciding who is ‘white’ or ‘black’. The Greeks opted instead for what in today’s parlance we might call ‘self-identification’. That is, if a person spoke Greek, was intimate with Greek culture, practised Greek religion and called himself Greek, then that person was to all intents and purposes a Greek.

This represented a changed approach from the Classical era, when Greek cities were very reluctant to give citizenship to – and thus bestow ‘Greekness’ on – outsiders. By this argument one could no more become an Athenian than a dog could become a cat. However, this approach was impossibly parochial in that not only foreigners but Greeks of impeccable Greekness could not change citizenship from that of their native city. With the Hellenistic kings founding new cities wholesale across their new conquests (Alexander alone founded well over a dozen cities), this definition collapsed rapidly. It was informally replaced by the more open and flexible definition given above, to the point where – for example – the Maccabees of Judaea were at war with ‘Hellenes’ who were every bit as Semitic as themselves. 

...

Though the top jobs in the (Ptolemaic) government were reserved for Greeks, the government was refreshingly non-racist in its definition of what made a Greek. Basically if someone spoke like a Greek, worshipped the gods of the Greeks and displayed sufficient familiarity with Greek culture, he was counted as a Greek even if his ancestors had never left the banks of the Nile.

I don't mean to be down on Matyszak. There are a number of interesting ideas about what it meant to be Greek. Like how a lot of the people we think of as Greek were Greek culturally but came from outside of the area we know as Greece (Herodotus, Euclid, Archimedes). Or how most forms of what we think of as the heights of Greek civilization–with the strange exception of playwriting–really flourished outside of Greece. 

Matyszak's War Nerd episodes are great and his book on the Athenian expedition to Sicily was fantastic. I think I'll stick to Matyszak for books on specific events for now on. Looking forward to reading his book on Sertorius later this summer, maybe. I wonder if he has what I call narrative brain. I know I do. When I'm reading history I need it to be a story of people doing things, then other people reacting a great long chain. My brain starts to shutdown when you get talking about big ideas. So I can fault him for that. Even if the book had a different title, I'd have liked it more. Like if it was about post-Alexandrian kingdoms instead of Greek Civilization as a whole. 

Details

Title: The Greeks: Lost Civilizations

Author: Philip Matyszak

Format: ebook

Length: 208 pages

Date: published on June 15, 2018

Publisher: Reaktion Books