Robin Lane FoxReviews

Robin Lane Fox'e accessible and erudite life of Alexander searches through the mass of conflicting evidence and legend to focus on the living actuality of the man and his experience - 'It is tempting', he concludes, 'to see in Alexander the romantic's complex nature for the first time in Greek history.' Beautifully written, perspective, and fluent, it is a a superb example of historical scholarship and psychological insight.

As I wrote in my review, this is a bad book, plain and simple, and should not have been published in its present form.
https://languagehat.com/travelling-heroes/

This book is written in an engaging style and covers the key aspects of these great civilisations in a single volume, bravo! The author focuses his analysis on the historical developments with 3 themes: freedom, luxury & justice. Very insightful on how approaches and attitudes to these cultural aspects change over time especially in Greek democracy, Roman Republic and then Empire. Anyone looking to see the forest rather than the tress this is a worthwhile resource to enjoy.

Not as high audio or lecture quality as courses from The Teaching Company, sadly. Listening was challenging in the car, which made it difficult to follow the narrative.

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 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.

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 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).

The Hippocratic literary corpus comprises many volumes that modern analysis shows, like other ancient texts, were written over many years and by different authors. The name Hippocrates does not appear anywhere in these writings, but over the centuries they have been attributed to a great physician with that name. Robin Lane Fox’s fascinating investigation of Epidemics volumes 1 and 3 from this corpus reveals evidence that they were written by a single revolutionary physician presenting 42 case studies from a few years spent on the north Agean island of Thasos about 470 BCE. He proposes that the author was Hippocrates himself.

RLF discusses the cases in detail extracting from them and from his formidable knowledge of the ancient world multiple clues to support his theory. The cases include the first description of a patient with melancholia; no treatments are described; the word diagnosis is not used (RLF reminds us of the importance of prognosis in the ancient world [has this changed?]); the great principle ‘first do no harm’ is mentioned; and the gods are not mentioned.

Along the way there are many interesting big and small facts including a discussion of the Oath of Hippocrates and a discussion of modern attempts to retrospectively diagnose these patients. Diseases whose identities seem likely include cirrhosis or hepatoma, malaria, mumps, tuberculosis, and possible puerperal fever. Others that are more speculative are Weil’s disease, Behcet’s syndrome, diptheria, erysipelas, typhus, and typhoid fever.

Lastly, I was pleased to hear that one of the later texts advises that a doctor should be of good color with a nice fleshiness.

Once upon a time, my younger brother (aged 12) needed to read a biography for school. My other brother (17) and I (18) took it upon ourselves to drive down to a bookstore and try to find a suitable choice.

A 500-page scholarly dissection of Alexander the Great was our idea of "suitable."

Our mother intervened at that point and found something that our brother had a hope of finishing.

Fox's book is, indeed, scholarly -- sometimes to the point of tedium. Since first-hand accounts of Alexander's exploits are scarce, Fox spends a lot of time backtracking to explain the many alternative possibilities that could have happened. This is all very academically important, but it doesn't help the reader grasp the linear progression of events. On the other hand, Fox does an excellent job of describing the battles and Alexander's tactics therein. His scholarship is hard to knock. At times, he does feel like an apologist for some of Alexander's excesses, but he ultimately presents a balanced view of Alexander-the-human. It's not written vividly enough for a casual recommendation, but it's an obvious read if you're interested in the classical world.

Inspiration to read: NYTBR Nov 22 2015. http://mobile.nytimes.com/2015/11/22/books/review/mary-beards-spqr-and-tom-holla...

I felt mislead by the reviews I used to pick up this book. I was hoping for a noverview of the history of the ideas in bronze age medicine. Instead the book covers how the information we have about this time has been deduced from a variety of writings and artifacts. What it does it does well and is very readable. It was interesting to me to see how little primary source material on Hippocrates and his teachings are available, and how the small threads are stitched together by historians.

I honestly LOVED reading this book. Alexander the Great has always been a point of interest for me, and this book only made that interest grow. Robin Lane Fox did a fantastic job in writing this book and working through the mountain of information - legend and otherwise - that surrounds Alexander the Great. I didn’t feel like I could really give this 5/5 stars, though, due to the fact that my copy is the 1997 Folio Society edition. Don’t get me wrong: I love older books - the smell, seeing the author work through what information they have, and so forth. However, I feel like I would need to read an updated version to see if I’d give this book a 5/5 stars.

I'm interested in this subject, and there were lots of tidbits of information, but the author's presentation of it was almost unbearably dry and slow.

I was rather misled on this one: it's not so much a biography as a close reading of the Confessions, combined with some very nicely done, extremely fine-grained history. It isn't, though, all that much fun; the narrative bogs down in the detail; the comparisons between Augie and two other late-ancients don't really add all that much to the story; it's far too long; Fox has a dubious handle on theology.

On the upside, if you're a scholar or just really into detail, you will love the hell out of this book. It's easier to read than most academic work, but very careful and well-referenced. If you're studying Augustine, definitely read it. If you're just interested, you probably only need Brown's biography.

But it did make me want to (re-)read Augie's works, which is surely the ultimate purpose of books like this. So, well done.

History books are not my usual reading material, but I managed to stay awake through this one and found it enjoyable and informative.

I like the details…each story is told with evidence from many angles, giving a fuller picture of the events and people.

When he disagrees with some other author, he just claims superiority. No reason given. Some good points of the relationship between archeology and bible history.

My second reading of this book does not very closely match my recall of the first reading. I "remembered" far more about Pagan resistance to Christianity, particularly to attacks on shrines both public and private. Either I imagined this material or it was in another book I read at near the same time. Fox gives an extensive examination of the ways in which Pagans experienced their gods: literature, art, private visions and dreams and oracles. He then traces the rise of Christianity, the conversion of Constantine and the resulting decline of Pagan practice.

Right off the bat Professor Lane lets us know how dubio us some of the usual sources for information about Alexander the Great are. I hadn't known that. What I had 'known' about Alexander was how he was supposed to have solved the problem of the Gordian Knot, and that he had supposedly wept because there were no new worlds for him to conquer. The Gordian Knot is mentioned here, but not the weeping. He had plans for more conquering when he died.

The actual lectures are:

1. Perspectives and Sources

2. Alexander's Youth in Philip's Kingdom

3. Alexander's Ascendancy

4. Into Persia

5. Facing Darius

6. The Son of Zeus

7. Victory at Gaugamela

8. Court Style and Conspiracy

9. Homogeneity

10. Alexander in India

11. The Feared Makran Desert

12. Alexander's Vision

13. The Cult of Alexander

14. Death and Beyond

Professor Lane is an enthusiast about his subject. The booklet that comes with the compact discs has nice pictures of Alexander the Great art through the millennia, maps, and photographs, but most of the facts seem rather dry. For the amusing or juicy anecdotes, you'll have to listen to the lectures.

Note. Professor Lane speaks British English, not American English, so please don't complain about his pronunciation.

The first book I read before I delved into Graeco-Roman history and serves as an excellent introduction to the latter, as well as being good for reference.

I bought this because I wanted to get a basic understanding of classical history, and it did the job extremely well. Organised in chronological order, it begins with life in the 8th century BC, seen through the themes of Homer's epic poetry, and charges confidently through the great age of Athens, the Roman republic, Julius Caesar and up to the first century AD (finishing round about the time of the eruption at Pompeii in 79 AD). Lane Fox is one of the most popular classical scholars around, and he writes clearly and simply. I suppose you might say that it's an example of traditional 'great men' history, but it also deals with economic and social trends. Besides, as a newcomer to the subject it makes sense to learn about the most famous figures and their contexts first. I'm sure there are many books to help you pick up the detail and the academic debate at a later point. This is a brilliant way in.

In my mind, there is no book that covers the period of Homer to Hadrian as well as this classic work. It is engaging; it is witty; it is erudite. It covers all the main subjects in just enough detail to ensure readers an overall introduction to the subject without bogging them down in too much detail. On the other hand, it includes the most fascinating 'trivia' that makes such histories page turners. This book is a 'page-turner'. I've just finished re-reading it on a trip around Greece and Italy; it's one of the two books I brought with me (the other is David Abulafia's history of the Mediterranean Sea) and I couldn't have chosen better. Neither can you. (Also available on Kindle if you're backpacking and short of space.)

Robin Lane Fox, one of the most informed experts on Alexander, the ancient world, and gardening. He learns from plants, and studies the bone, stone, and symbols which made our world.½

An excellent supplement to Peter Brown's “Augustine of Hippo,” focusing more narrowly than Brown's book on the period of Augustine's “conversions,” from approximately 372, when he “became fired with the love of 'wisdom' on encountering Cicero's Hortensius to his final conversion (according to Fox) to celibacy and renunciation of earthly ambition in 386 in the garden in Milan. (Fox clarifies his use of the word “conversion” as follows...

“a conversion requires a decisive change whereby we abandon a previous practice or belief and adopt exclusively a new one. It involves a 'turning which implies a consciousness that the old way was wrong and the new is right'.... I do not restrict conversions to changes from one religion to another. Conversions are possible within one and the same religious commitment, as historians of early and medieval Christianity recognize.”

Actually, Augustine's final conversion only takes us up to page 294, with the remaining 268 pages concerned with his conversions of others, and the experiences and developments in his thought that led the writing of his Confessions. In addition to Augustine and Christianity and its competition in the Roman world, Fox broadens the picture by looking at the lives of two other men, comparable to Augustine in education and experience, who help place Augustine's words and actions in the context of his world.

“Modern readers find it hard to remember that much of it [the vividness with which Augustine lays his past before God] may have been less startling in the context of its time. I will therefore present it against two near-contemporaries' lives. My aim is not to write a biography of all three persons, but to place Augustine, with the Confessions in his hand, as the central panel in a triple set of sketches, like a triptych on a medieval Christian altar. On the left side stands a sketch of his older contemporary Libanius, casting a look of profound disapproval up at Augustine, not least because he himself was a pagan and a committed Greek teacher, one who detested Latin and the technical skill of shorthand. On the right side, looking up with tempered adoration, is a sketch of his younger Greek-speaking contemporary Synesius, a Christian, a bishop and a fellow lover of philosophy.

The lives of Libanius and Synesius do not overlap with all of Augustine's early career, but they help to bring out aspects of it, his social class and the demands which it imposed on him, the pressures of his schooling and his worldly ambitions, his relations with close family members and the ideals of friendship which he projected onto those around him. Like Augustine, Libanius and Synesius wrote about ascents to a divine presence. More mundanely, they illustrate the social perils of travel abroad to great cities, followed by a return, like Augustine's, to a home town. They address their own and others' sexual lives in ways which contrast with Augustine's. They also illumine the bitterness which appointments to prominent jobs could ignite, especially, as ever, in a Christian church.”
Fox does not spend a huge amount of time with these two, bringing them in periodically to cast light on Augustine's experiences and choices, but I found their presence helpful.

Fox's non-Christian perspective adds a useful objectivity to this narrative. He doesn't feel obliged to point out where Augustine is headed in the right direction and where he's not, and his expertise on pagan religion and Manichaeism adds tremendously to his presentation of how Augustine's thought differed from and built on other ideas current in his time. Also, if you've ever wondered exactly how Manichaeism differed from catholic Christianity, look no further! Fox explores this in great, great detail. Speaking of detail, this is probably the place for me to mention that this is a very detail-oriented book. Shadings of belief, minutiae of theological quarrels, in-depth consideration of Manichaean practices, etc. did occasionally become a bit much for me, but, in fairness to Fox, I “read” this with my ears (thanks to my friend Nicole for this expression!) while walking a lively young golden retriever, so readers who are better focused might well not have this issue. Anyway, given the length of the book and the ideas under discussion, Fox really does an excellent job. His explanation of the development of Augustine's ideas on free will, grace, and predestination is notably clear, and, while recognizing how disconcerting and unattractive some of Augustine's views on celibacy and perfectionism will be to modern readers, Fox nevertheless manages to render him, on the whole, an admirable and appealing figure.

I'll conclude with Fox's transition, in Chapter 21, from focusing on Augustine's conversions to examining his confessions, as this encapsulates his themes far better than my words could.

”So far, we have followed Augustine's memories with a constant eye on his conversions. There have been three, to philosophy, to celibacy and within Christianity to the supposedly 'true Christianity' preached by Mani. Conversion has been the obvious theme to pursue in his early life because he himself looks back on it in terms of a turning from and towards God. It is also the theme which makes him special for modern historians. He is the only early Christian who has told us in detail about his conversions. They are not conversions to Christianity from non-Christian belief. They have emerged as conversions away from rhetoric, worldly ambition, and sex.
After his decision in the garden many modern scholars continue to look for yet more conversions and make them a guiding theme in their accounts of the following years. Augustine continued to try to convert others, but in my view he underwent no more conversions himself. However, he is also special for being the author of a masterpiece, the Confessions. Confessing, therefore, is the thread which I will trace in the next eleven years until this masterpiece's beginning. Gradually, he will assemble in his mind the pieces which enable him to confess in a novel way. If he had confessed his sins to God after coming indoors from the garden, his prayer would have sounded very different. Eleven years later, he had written on deep questions of free will and grace, sin, faith and predestination, questions which were to become central parts of his legacy to Christian thinking. They are also the themes with which Luther, Calvin, and many others would engage through knowledge of his writings and which would earn him his status as a Doctor of the Catholic Church. They are a far cry from his days as Milan's Libanius, 'selling lies for a living.'”

Four and a half stars, recommended for readers with a real interest in early Christianity, and especially those who have already read Peter Brown's book on Augustine and want to dig a bit deeper.½

Be wary of the historian who presents (personal) opinion as fact. Why do so many insist on bringing our 21st century morals into the ancient world?

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 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#5790353½