Historian meet hubris; hubris meet historian

Posted on | August 1, 2008 | 6 Comments

I started to read this history book – Antiquity by Norman F. Cantor published 2003/2004.  Now before I start on my venom, let me explain, I love reading history books. All sorts of history. Lately I’ve been on an ancient history binge and enjoying every minute of it. I’ve been rereading Plato’s Republic and wanted a bit of background on the Mediterranean. I’ll write more on Plato in a later rant. I found this particular book and thought to my self “Hmmm… should be good, written by a professor emeritus of history”. So I sat down this morning, relishing the idea of a good mental feed.

I made it to page 10 and then my sense of total annoyance kicked in and I threw the book down. I have this overwhelming urge to shred the book. It isn’t worth going any further. The author has made a couple of broad, baseless statements that made me role my eyes, but two paragraphs in particular rankled me.

Contrast this with the real Athenians of ca. 375 B.C. – their bellies full of fishcakes, their throats bloated with cheap resined wine, their far-flung sharp commercial deals a laughable, reverse mirror-image of the noble warriors of the Trojan War era. p. 12

Well, that certainly puts the Athenians in their place. Their diet stinks, they are all drunkards and their jobs are a joke. In Cantor’s interpretation of history, the Ancient Athenians were unworthy inheritors of the Homeric legends. He writes them off as nothing more than cheap, tawdry bead merchants, painting their achievements as second rate and pathetic. Perhaps Cantor was attempting some sort of irony. But given a previous broad swipe he took at Athens and Greece, I don’t think so:

Today, Athens is a small and frugal city surrounded by barren hills, with a second-rate port, Piraeus, ten miles away. Its physical monuments and buildings on a central hill in the city – the Acropolis – are now closed to tourists, so decayed are the structures, above all the great Parthenon. No one today thinks of Athens as an important, or wealthy, or beautiful city. pg. 10

My professors at Queen’s would have shredded me if I dared make such supercilious statements in any paper I presented. The way the paragraph is structured, it leads the reader to believe first that everything worth seeing is located on one central hill and second, nothing is open or worth the time to visit – sorry tourists, don’t bother showing up, all our monuments are decayed and collapsed, and we’ve permanently closed all our sites down. Go elsewhere. Do not even bother showing up, you will just hang about in your hotel doing nothing. This is far from the truth. Athens is a treasure trove of delights with much to see and take in. It is on my list of great cities to visit.

For the record Piraeus is Greece’s main port and manages to transport approx. 19 million passengers annually. It is has of the largest marinas in the Mediterranean and is a bustling urban centre. The way Cantor depicts the port, it seems as though it were some grubby, rough and tumble back water. In fact it is the largest passenger port in Europe! That’s a pretty impressive for a “second-rate port”.

And don’t get me started on “No one today thinks of Athens as … beautiful city”. Thousands, if not millions of people have fallen in love with Athens. This paragraph has NO factual basis and has no place in a history book. This is a purely subjective statement with no anchoring facts from an author who appears to dislike the city and it’s inhabitants. While I concede history is a matter of interpretation and conjecture, this book plunges into cheap shots and silly statements. History must also be backed up with solid factual information. Where is his proof that no one thinks of Athens as beautiful or important. I’m sure a few Greeks may beg to differ.

Statements like these have seriously damaged my impression of the book as a serious work.  Although I was looking for a broad overview of ancient Mediterranean life when I picked up this book, I did expect, at the very least, a scholarly treatment of the subject. I agree, this book was written for the general public, but that makes it vital the author treat the subject with a great deal of respect. Why should an overview of the subject be any less accurate than a hefty tome on the same subject. What if I did not possess a basic knowledge of the area? What a skewed view of Athens – ancient and present – I’d be walking away with.

What was Cantor thinking? It also makes me doubt the validity of the rest of the book. Are there any more silly, sneering statements? I don’t have the patience to find out. As I said, I’m not going to bother with the rest of the book – I don’t trust the author.

Ten pages in and I give this book an F grade. Off to the book store tomorrow to find a much more scholarly work.

P.S. Thank you Queen’s University in Kingston – who’d have thought, all these years later I’d still be using the same lessons in critical thought you pounded into my brain (by Professors who likely thought similar things about my papers at the time as I just posted in this blog) – and to use them for a lowly blog! You never can tell when you might actually use something you learned in the dark, distant past of your youth.

Twitter This

Usuario: Password:

Comments

My name is Catpaw and I approved this blog

Catpaw’s Declaration of War

All comments are held for approval. If there is a link back to an obvious spam site the comment will be deleted, regardless of the comment.
Not all comments will be approved. Abusive and rude comments will end up in the trash with all the spam so moderate your language.
If you post the identical comment over and over, I will assume you are a useless waste of spam space and send you & your comment to spam purgatory. Enjoy the trip.
Whining and complaining I delete your spam and/or rude comments will just encourage me to do so again so go ahead and make my day.


Catpaw - diary of an angry cat by catpaw is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at catpawsblog.com.

Recent Posts

• Hilda has written me of how kind you have been to them
• A wounded man is in far better care than a gassed man
• For King and Country – Letters from the Great War
• This is why you should always proof read your work
• Sun media withdraws from Media Council

Enter your email address:

Delivered by FeedBurner

Subscribe in a reader

Things for the cat to play with

• Log in
• Entries RSS
• Comments RSS
• WordPress.org