Robin Lane Fox

66. Travelling Heroes : In the Epic Age of Homer by Robin Lane Fox
published: 2008
format: 419 page paperback (plus 80 page bibliography/index)
acquired: July from Half Price Books
read: Oct 20 - Nov 5
rating: 2½

The cover blurb says, "Multilayered and beautifully written..." Don't be fooled by that nonsense, Fox's text is so dense that it's barely readable. As he sees it, he's really trying to do something new and dynamic with this book, combining as much archeological evidence as he can find show more and with all the obscure Greek mythologies and their variations and influences and histories, and constructing a history and timing of Greek storytelling itself. The book is the building of the argument he constructs, starting with raw archeological evidence. It presents a huge amount of information and in sometimes exhausting detail, mixed with various iffy but interesting inferences. A kind of survey of the archeological and mythological record comes out of this. The bibliography is enormous and there is a lot good stuff collected within - although keep in mind most of the information is not original. Also, and unfortunately, in my opinion the argument he makes is nothing more than interesting but imaginative hand waving.

The odd aspect of the archeological record is that Greeks enter the larger Mediterranean world through the island of Euboea. In the 700's bce, when Homer and Hesiod were supposed writing, Euboeans were sailing from the Levant to Spain and leaving their pottery everywhere - along with their graves and many other bits and pieces. They were clearly deeply involved in the trade runs, filling in gaps in the Phoenician routes, or competing with them, creating their own colonies in many different places, some long lasting and influential. In places they were competing among themselves. This appears to be a dominant source of Greek wealth for a long period time in a fruitful creative period - when east was influencing west and vice versa. And yet, there isn't a lot of Euboea in the Greek mythologies. Hesiod, interestingly enough, claims to have won an award on Euboea, presenting his Theogony in Chalcis. But he doesn't mention any special connection of the gods with Euboea. Homer mentions three locations in this catalogue of ships, and that's it. So, where does this leave us and Fox - apparently with a curious mystery of missing Euboeans.

Fox's story is essentially that the Euboea is in Hesiod. For example he claims that Hesiod pulled mythologies that he learned specifically in Euboea and added them to his story in a decipherable way. But to get to that somewhat anticlimactic contribution he must create a history of mythologies. So, he culls the record (readily available in many surveys, I might add) pulling stories and locating them with landscapes and geology and trade routes. Typhon and the Giants become a big deal, as do Aphrodite and Adonis, who tie in so well with Astart/Ishtar/Inanna and Dumuzi/Tummuz (a well known but really cool tie-in that also has nice links to Hittite mythologies ). He's really proud of what he creates. I'm more skeptical.

Early on I made a note to myself that when Fox says "no doubt", or "surely" it really means "it's possible". He presents what tend to be good ideas, but they don't exactly follow from the data. Often they are really unlikely and no better than numerous other possibilities. He also has an odd characteristic of stating his belief in the sources he cites - stating "I don't believe" or "I think" or "I doubt" or whatnot. I find that all very odd phrasing for a supposedly empirical approach. I'm not an archeologist, but it seems to me he could be cherry picking the evidence that fits his story, and it certainly feels like he's constantly hand waving, and then presenting this as a conclusion(!). All this stuff is possible, but the accumulation of unlikely idea on top of unlikely idea, mixed in with some solid facts, all presented together as a coherent story... I mean maybe there is some truth to this. But the world is a complicated place and the Mediterranean was crazy complex in this era. There are no clean stories and histories, it's all a mixed bag. That's really what the mythology tells us, and what the archeology confirms.

In sum, Fox has a lot of good info, but this is difficult and unpleasant to read and constructs a terribly weak argument - hence a mildly annoyed 2.5 stars.

2016
https://www.librarything.com/topic/226898#5790353 show less

Very compelling set of lectures, effectively a version of Robin Lane Fox' biographical book on Alexander - Alexander the Great. Fox takes a mostly great man view of Alexander, which is refreshing in the face of a lot of revisionism, though he outlines a number of controversies given both Alexander as a person, and granular details like battles, army sizes, death tolls and conspiracies, before giving his personal view on what's probable.

I was first introduced to Oxford historian Robin Lane Fox when I read his book, Pagans and Christians. In addition to authoring many scholarly works, Lane Fox has written on a variety of topics for the general public. What I enjoy most about his writing style is that he occasionally breaks the fourth wall and writes directly to you, the reader. He shares his intentions so that you can follow his train of thought throughout the work. This puts the reader on the lookout and because you show more understand what he is trying to achieve, you have the luxury of deciding if you agree with his approach while you read rather than react to it after the fact.

I’ve read other reviews of Lane Fox’s book and several of them refer to his dry style and the sloggish nature of the book. I wholeheartedly disagree. I found The Oxford History of the Biblical World to be more dry because of its more formal style. No breaking of the fourth wall there. Lane Fox not only speaks directly to his dear reader, he throws in little bits of dry English humor that bring you up from the slog to laugh a bit. My favorite is this: “There were ancient prophesies of a future king, the ‘stem of Jesse’, chosen by the Lord: many of the most explicit texts about him had been invented under foreign domination during the years of exile in Babylon. Ideas of this future super-star had multiplied freely…”

In writing The Unauthorized Version, Lane Fox, an atheist, set out to explain for himself and others what he meant when he once told a friend, “I believe in the Bible but not in God.” He starts by considering a question. “In John’s Gospel, Jesus tells Pilate, ‘To this end was I born, and for this cause came I into the world, that I should bear witness unto the truth. Every one that is of the truth hearest my voice.’ ‘What is truth?’ asks Pilate and does not receive a reply.” (pp 13)

Lane Fox then explains what he intends to achieve with his book: “I intend to take Pilate’s question and turn it back on the Bible itself. First, I will explore the view that the Bible’s very nature and origin give it a coherence which answers Pilate’s question. Then I will explore its narrative to see if there is a level at which it corresponds to fact.” (pp 14)

I won’t give away Lane Fox’s plot. You’ll have to read the book if you want to learn what he concludes. I will say, however, that there’s a fascinating plot twist in his final conclusion that is moving whether you’re a believer or not. show less

Faced with a jumble of bewildering ruins, modern visitors to Hisarlik in northwest Turkey, the site of ancient Troy, may find themselves perplexed and sometimes disappointed. The wide bay where the Greeks so famously beached 1,000 ships is gone, buried in silt from a local river, while beyond the fine sloping walls, a palimpsest of settlements spanning 4,000 years lies scarred and disfigured by the deep trench gouged by Heinrich Schliemann, its first archaeologist, during two decades of show more digging in the 19th century. Schliemann had been drawn to Hisarlik, and also to mainland Greece, by his passion for the Homeric poems, the Iliad and Odyssey, and his conviction that they described or reflected real societies and events, not least the decade-long Trojan War. So enthusiastic was he that when (in controversial circumstances) he ‘found’ a cache of jewellery at Troy, he proclaimed it had belonged to Helen. At Mycenae, excavating a royal grave, he lifted a gold mask and, swearing that the features beneath it had survived for an instant before crumbling to dust, informed the king of Greece by telegram: ‘I have gazed on the face of Agamemnon.’ In fact, both artefacts were earlier than the presumed date of the Trojan War: the mask by some centuries; the jewels by more than a millennium. In a sense, however, this did not matter. Schliemann had achieved what he set out to do. He had discovered key Homeric sites and shown that the poems were grounded in reality.

But what of those poems themselves, specifically the Iliad, which takes its title from Troy’s alternative name, Ilion (itself derived from the Hittite Wilusa)? Since antiquity, scholars have debated but never agreed on how it came to be written. Multi-layered Hisarlik might well serve as a metaphor for their often-contorted arguments. Most accept that the Iliad has its roots in oral poetry performed at gatherings held in the Greek ‘Dark Ages’ and perhaps earlier; some suggest that it is an amalgam, a ‘stitching together’ of shorter works made over many years; others that it is a ‘snowball’ with a core of original material expanded over generations by different hands. While classical authors believed that it was the product of one man, sometimes imagined as a blind poet from Samos, few in modern times have felt compelled to try to track down who that man might have been. Enter Robin Lane Fox. Having used topographic and literary detective work to ‘find’ Hippocrates on the island of Thasos (in his recent and brilliant book, The Invention of Medicine), he now uses his sleuthing skills to try to discover Homer, the man who he believes authored most of the Iliad.

‘Authored’, not ‘wrote’. Homer was, Lane Fox maintains, an oral poet, taught by great masters, part of a long tradition which may have stretched back to the Bronze Age. But whereas previous reciters were content to link together existing free-standing episodes to form a linear narrative, the Iliad is different, its details interlinked throughout the text, which ‘only make sense in the light of the whole’. It is partly this structure which reveals the genius of a single author who dictated his rehearsed, perfected composition to scribes versed in the newly honed Greek alphabet (which may even have been invented for this purpose). Already well known, his oral Iliad (Lane Fox’s ‘preferred guess’ is that Homer ‘first performed a version for troops who were out at war’) was the product of autopsy and experience. Based on the west coast of Asia Minor, somewhere between Ephesus and Miletus, he travelled south to Lycia and north to Troy to garner detail. But according to Lane Fox he was not simply a poet. He may have been a charioteer – ‘I like to believe he drove a racing team himself’ – a hunter, even a ‘putative gardener’. In fact, as he sharpens into focus, this Homer increasingly becomes a mirror image of Lane Fox, himself a great horseman, who once declared: ‘On my deathbed I will think of Homer, then gardens, the great women I know, and lastly my best days fox hunting. And then I’ll die.’

Read the rest of the review at HistoryToday.com.

David Stuttard is the author of Phoenix: A Father, a Son and the Rise of Athens (Harvard University Press, 2021). show less