Review : Ancient Worlds

I have to say that the blurb for for Michael Scott's Ancient Worlds gave me very "meh" feelings and I only picked it up because I was in a budget bookshop. I tend to gravitate towards highly focused, narrative histories, so this epic world(ish) history of connections between different civilisations seemed like something that wouldn't normally be my thing.

Much to my delight, the only thing Scott writes badly is the description of his own writing. Yes, there's some commentary on hitherto under-appreciated connections between East and West, but that's not really what the book is about. Mainly it's about how different ancient civilizations responded to different external and internal pressures, and the resulting changes this produced in their systems of government and societies. This is firmly in the realm of my other favourite sort of history : interpretative history, where the author attempts to extract general trends from specific cases. And since understanding how society works could hardly be more important at the present time, I give this a very solid 8/10 overall.

(I would note, though, that as a standard history this is pretty rubbish. The focus is on how and why things happened with only a bare minimum of the more fundamental what. Start with (e.g.) Tom Holland before going for this one.)

The book is organised in three parts. The first looks largely at the different internal political systems in ancient societies (mainly Greece, Rome, and China), essentially man's relation to man. The second looks more at the relations between those different societies. The third looks at man's relation to the divine and the role religion played in social organisation. All three are well done, but I found the first much the most interesting as it had the most refreshing perspective, stripped of modern ideologies of the inestimable virtues of democracy without denigrating it in the slightest. The second section is more of a standard narrative history, well-told but not very original (though I learned a lot about the Seleucids, who are too often overlooked), while the third is somewhat in between the two. 

I'll limit myself here to how Scott views the different forms of government, which I found to be much the most engaging aspect. It's often said that democracy is the worst form of government apart from all the others, but is that really true ?

The origin of ancient democracy is sometimes mythologised as a single revolutionary event. Scott argues that it wasn't like this at all, but a gradual development. Athens did eventually have its famous direct democracy, but only after the Persian Wars, not during the invasion themselves*. Its route to democracy had arguably begun much earlier, as the lawmaker Solon sought to give each sector of society a "fair" distribution of power - fair only meaning more equal than previously, not actually equal. Rome began down a similar path, even sending delegations to Athens to learn about its system of government. Both such societies emerged from the shackles of tyranny, but neither immediately went for direct people power.

* Indeed, the word "democracy" wasn't even in use at the time. Ancient interpretations of what it actually meant varied from the extreme of Athenian mob rule to simply electing an outright despot. Modern interpretations are similarly complex.

Why did the two later diverge ? Circumstance. Scott is very, very good at stressing how both wider, underlying systematic context and the role of specific events and individual actions can be influential. In this case, the naval battle of Salamis. Infantry battles were limited to the rich elites, but naval battles required the common man. Having played such a vital stake in the survival of the city, ordinary Athenian citizens weren't about to be put back in their place. But neither did the elites particular want to even try : by elevating everyone to a quasi-equal status, the proto-democracy had already enabled the city to field far larger armies than it possibly could under a monarchy or tyranny. That the next step of total equality led to a powerful navy as well was a major advantage to everyone, not a hindrance. Democracy, then, in Scott's view was born more by happenstance and accident than any grand ideological plan, born more from warfare than of welfare.

And especially war ! This is wonderfully counter-intuitive to the modern era, but in the ancient system, Scott stresses quite heavily how much more advantageous a more equal system was to the army. Always careful to keep his interpretations separate from the raw facts, he takes an evolutionary perspective : similar pressures only give rise to similar outcomes in similar situations. Rome, in contrast to Athens, didn't have such a pivotal naval moment as Salamis. It had no key event where sheer people power would result in a full democratic process - its major battles were all infantry-based. Consequently it continued with its middling road of a Republic, neither excessisively tyrannical to the masses but not giving them all that much clout either. Its system, in some ways, was much closer to the modern system of representative government than the direct democracy of Athens.

(It would have been nice to have some comments on the modern perception that war leads to authoritarianism rather than greater freedom. Obviously the particular societies are markedly different, but it's so counter-intutitive to invoke war as leading to freedom that some effort to explain this would have been very welcome.)

China, on the other hand, didn't face the same external threat as Greece but it did have internal warfare on an epic scale. It had similarities and differences to both Greece and Rome. The continual need for infantry-based defence kept power in the hands of the elites, while the enormous logistical demands encouraged the development of an efficient administrative state. Indeed, who the ruler was ultimately didn't matter very much, with most of the decisions taken by the civil service. This produced not a true monarchy or dictatorship, but a hereditary oligarchy, a cast system that ensured a smooth transfer of power. This was very different to the somewhat socially mobile society of Rome and in stark contrast to the totally socially mobile world of Athens, in which every citizen was expected to do a wide variety of jobs and participate in the government at some point in their lives. 

The Athenian system was far more pleasant for the commoners than Rome's - even Plato conceded that democracies are nice places to live while they last. His concern was more that they didn't last, and Scott vindicates this. Of all the dozens of different democracies of time, none lasted more than a few generations. Rome, by contrast, went on to rule the world, albeit becoming an autocratic empire in the processes. Even given the powerful role of chance, this seems like more than a coincidence.

Having this broad trend highlighted is very informative. If you focus more on the minutiae, the overwhelming feeling I get from reading pretty much any part of Roman history was just how perpetually unstable it was. But even its Republican phase endured substantially longer than any ancient democratic system, as though its very instability was a source of strength, perhaps more a measure of flexibility and adaptability than genuine chaos. Not that it was perfect. Scott notes the weakness of the short-term, dual consularship system in which military glory was seen as the pinnacle of achievement, citing the miserable failures against Hannibal as evidence of this (Carthage itself seems to have a similar system to Rome but suffered from much greater corruption). Then as now, short-termism was a problem.

Ironically the solution was sometimes to double down. Yet while the Republic could and did invoke dictators to rule in emergencies, it did so only rarely. Of course we all know how this eventually ended, but what's more remarkable is just how long this lasted - it was very rarely used, and when it was, there was little enough threat (until the end, by which point the Republic was on its last legs anyway) of the dictator failing to relinquish power. Scott describes the Roman's idealised example of Cincinnatus, who was summoned from his farm to lead the army against some invading tribes, and then two weeks later returned to his farm without a fuss. The powers of a dictator were clearly limited to addressing a specific task, not used for constitutional reform. I suppose this was partly necessary in a society where the Commander In Chief was personally taking to the battlefield and waving a sword around, rather than consulting with generals and pushing little model troops around with a big stick over a nice cup of tea.

It's not just all about warfare though - far from it. Scott lucidly sets out just how strange the highly individualistic philosophy of Socrates, now widely held as a paragon of virtue, would have seemed to societies in which selfless duty to the state was seen as the highest goal. Ironically, self-improvement requires selfishness. There was no need for Cincinnatus to have the slightest bit of concern for his own moral well-being so long as he did his duty, and in the even more egalitarian society of Athens, the "unexamined life is not worth living" philosophy of Socrates would have been genuinely difficult for most to comprehend. Athens was all about the group; for someone to focus on the individual so much would have been weird indeed. 

This goes some way to explaining why Socrates (and similarly Confucius) was so unpopular - he went fully against the ideals of the state. Socrates, in a sense, really did corrupt the youth against Athenian ideals. Likewise Plato's fixation in his Republic with a single individual doing a single job is revealed as a direct counter to the democratic system in which individuals were expected and required to do many jobs. And whereas Republican Rome viewed different social strata as having different but always important functions (analogising the state to a human body), such a perspective made no sense in fully democratic Athens. In the Roman views, this free-for-all system was like having a ship without a captain : ultimately doomed.

Democracy at the time was not something other societies particularly yearned after even by their intellectual elites - it just didn't work all that well. The Roman Republic was viewed by its supporters as having the ideal mix of elements : monarchy, oligarchy, and democracy could all be found within it (similarly Plato speculated that an ideal system would be a blend of methods rather than one or another). Of course this didn't last forever, and it's a shame Scott doesn't have more to say about the stresses that transformed the Republic to the Empire (Tom Holland's Rubicon has a great narrative, but Scott is more skilled at drawing out the general trends and reasons; Gibbon viewed the empire's system of appointing rulers as being meritocratic, on the occasions when it functioned properly).

You'll forgive me for skipping over the rest of the book. Scott has equally insightful commentary on the development of ancient religions, again citing similar pressures that led to similar ideas going virial. I found his view of Constantine, much the most difficult of the major Roman emperors to understand, as a ruthless but genuinely tolerant ruler to be very refreshing. Likewise he notes the impact of religion on how societies were governed : how diversity of beliefs was sometimes a strength but sometimes a polarising weakness, how different rulers sought to use religion to their own secular purposes, and how innately peaceful religions were sometimes (but not always) corrupted to warfare. And I've skipped entirely his narrative of the Seleucid Empire and India, all of which is well worth reading.

But it's the system of government that most interested me. The overall impression I had is that we've no right at all to treat our modern systems as stable. When we take the long view of history, most modern democracies haven't even lasted as long as the ancient experiments. Yet the systems themselves and the pressures they face are also different, and exactly how it will play out is anyone's guess. Democracy may indeed be the least awful form of government, but whether or not they're stable, or innately doomed to regress to authoritarianism... that remains to be seen.

Ancient Worlds: An Epic History of East and West

My book, "Ancient Worlds: An Epic History of East and West" was published by Hutchinson (UK and Commonwealth) on 1st July 2016 in hardback and in January 2017 in paperback - order your copy here!