Owen Rees (2)

You can learn a lot about life and civilizations in the places they deem either the “middle of nowhere” or “the faraway lands.”

Such is the premise of Owen Rees’ The Far Edges of the Known World: Life Beyond the Borders of Ancient Civilization (galley received as part of early review program).

By “ancient civilization” he means the Greeks and the Romans; not that everyone else was “uncivilized,” but these two groups in particular have captured the Western imagination and show more also deemed themselves as something akin to “civilized” while everyone else proved to be “barbarians.”

But what would it be like among these “barbarians,” and how really “barbarian” would they prove to be? The author considers various places which were at the edge of, or even quite beyond, the world of the Greeks and Romans: a Greek trading post in Ukraine; a village in Morocco; a post along the Ganges River in India; a major cosmopolitan city in Vietnam.

But it was not just about the truly exotic places; he also considers places like a village in the Fayum of Egypt or along Hadrian’s Wall, places which the Romans exerted authority but were definitely considered part of the periphery of their world.

In all of these places we can find aspects of Greek and Roman influence, often profoundly so, while also plenty of aspects of local culture which would continue to thrive and flourish.

It all definitely leads one to re-consider the conceit of the Greeks and Romans regarding how central they were to the world, and good for those of us who might live in their modern descendants to think about likewise. show less