How to Win a Roman Chariot Race

Lives, Legends and Treasures from the Ancient World

Jane Hood

• Publisher: Icon Books
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781848319479
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

Who first thought of atoms? How much can you learn about archaeology from an oil lamp? Who came up with the theory of the 'wandering womb'? Oxford Classicist Jane Hood delves into the history, culture, literature, mythology and philosophy of ancient Greece, Rome and Egypt, using her expert eye to unearth unexpected gems, glittering fragments and quotable nuggets from a lost world.From ancient cosmetics to the earliest known computer, from the deciphering of ancient languages to the amazing things the Romans did with concrete, this is the essential miscellany for all curious minds, whether you learned the Classics at school or not.

MODERN SCHOLARS, ANCIENT LANGUAGES

From the scholars who dug up a lost literature in an Egyptian rubbish dump to those who unlocked the meaning of hieroglyphs, these are the stories of talented people who pushed the boundaries. They did extraordinary things that resonate now, all while Alice sped down the rabbit hole.

Academics at war

This is a story about two extraordinary individuals: Edward N. Luttwak and Nicholas Geoffrey Lemprière Hammond, their contributions to ancient history and the outcome of modern warfare.

Edward N. Luttwak: a modern approach to Roman warfare

Luttwak is a contemporary military strategist who has worked with the American government and military in particular, especially the National Security Council, the Office of the Secretary of Defense, the US Navy, Army and Air Force, as well as NATO. Luttwak is partly responsible for the notion of manoeuvre-warfare, in which enemy weakness and speed of manoeuvre, above all, are emphasised in order to attack the enemy in the centre, thus disrupting all their operations, then withdrawing to start a new line of attack. Luttwak talks of the possibility of tanks, transporters and trucks moving in single file deep into the heart of enemy territory undisturbed because of their boldness, attacking the centre of enemy operations.

He is also the one who introduced the concept of the ‘operational level of war’ to the US: it is a term derived from the Russian that signifies the level of command that deals with minute details of tactics under the umbrella of strategy.

Luttwak decided that there were lessons to be learnt from the ancient world. He wrote The Grand Strategy of the Roman Empire, which, period by period, examines the military strategy the Romans employed throughout the Empire. It has received book-length rebuttals from conventional ancient historians. However, for an undergraduate who preferred poetry to battles, this book was a revelation. It showed a way of analysing Roman military tactics through the eyes of a modern strategist. It explained a little more of why the Romans did what they did when it came to conquering so much of the Western world. It opened a way to understanding how people wearing helmets and carrying spears, marching twenty or more miles a day, were the same as us and had the same fears and exhilarations.

Looking at the wider field, writing in 1976, Luttwak begins his book as follows:

In our own disordered times, it is natural to look back for comfort and instruction to the experience of Roman imperial stagecraft … The fundamentals of Roman strategy in the imperial age were rooted not in a technology now obsolete, but in a predicament that we share. For the Romans, as for ourselves, the two essential requirements of an evolving civilisation were a sound material base and adequate security. For the Romans, as for ourselves, the elusive goal of strategic stagecraft was to provide security for the civilisation without compromising the security of an evolving political order.

E.N. Luttwak, The Grand Strategy of the Roman Empire (1976)

Luttwak analyses military tactics throughout the Roman Empire. Their battles are our battles. They might have had spears while we have drones, but the goals have to remain the same, as we remain the same:

We, like the Romans, face the prospect not of decisive conflict, but of a permanent state of war … We, like the Romans, must actively protect an advanced society against a variety of threats rather than concentrate on destroying the forces of our enemies in battle.

Ibid.

In a world dealing with the pervasive threat of terrorism at home and abroad, there are answers to be found from the Romans. We are not throwing spears at each other, but we are still doing what they were doing – looking at diplomatic and social means by which to stop the terror and make everyone work together. Just like them, it is carrot and stick. The carrot was Roman baths, sewers (imagine not having them), festivals and chariot races. The stick, well, that has always been the same.

Hammond of Greece

N.G.L. Hammond, called ‘Nigel’ irreverently by undergraduates, was one of the greats of ancient historical scholarship. He was, in fact, Nicholas Geoffrey Lemprière Hammond CBE, DSO, who was also awarded the Order of the Phoenix by Greece for his undercover work in World War II.

His is an amazing story of a man who loved ancient Greece. After growing up in Scotland, attending Fettes public school and achieving a starred first in the Classical Tripos from Cambridge, he decided that the only way to understand the remote ancient Greek historical sites was to walk to them, learning modern Greek on the way, so that he could piece together the fragments that were left to enhance our view of the ancient world. As a result, he became robust, dealing with hard walking alone through the Greek and Albanian hills, the fleas and the people who didn’t want him there. He learnt Modern Greek fluently, could dress like a Greek and knew a bit of Albanian.

Then the war came. Hammond puts it beautifully in the introduction to his story of undercover war work, Venture into Greece:

In 1938, the War Office asked all dons whether they had any special qualification in the event of war. I replied that I spoke Greek and some Albanian and knew north-west Greece and southern Albania very fully, because I had been making an archaeological survey of those regions since 1930. The call came in 1940, and after a minimal training in the use of explosives I was flown out to Athens on 7 June, only to be refused admission by the Greek authorities. They probably had some suspicion of my mission, which was to enter Albania secretly and instigate a rising against the Italians (they had seized Albania on Good Friday 1939). The Greeks were maintaining a strict neutrality at the time.

N. G. L. Hammond, Venture into Greece: With the Guerillas, 1943–44 (1983)

‘Hammond of Greece’ went on to a distinguished war career: not only was he given military honours, but he was mentioned in dispatches twice. His was dangerous undercover work, sometimes dressed as a peasant, sometimes as a soldier, trying, through the use of explosives, to disrupt the work of the enemy. It is said anecdotally that he would compare the manoeuvres of the enemy to those of the ancient greats, Philip of Macedon and Alexander the Great.

Despite various debilitating illnesses at the end of the war, Hammond continued a sparkling Classical career, almost as though the war had never happened. He wrote over 130 articles, as well as, among other books, a three-volume history of Greek Epirus. A week before he died in 2001, he handed his publisher a book on the tragedian Aeschylus.

One man, Luttwak, lives in the modern world, but learns from the Romans. The other, Hammond, cared about the past and fought to keep Greece free. The modern and the ancient cannot be separated – sometimes even in individual lives.

Liddell and Scott: a Greek lexicon

‘I really don’t remember,’ said East, speaking slowly and impressively, ‘to have come across one Latin or Greek sentence this half that I could go and construe by the light of nature. Whereby I am sure Providence intended cribs to be used.’

Thomas Hughes, Tom Brown’s School Days (1857)

Two men wrote a lexicon, Liddell and Scott;

Some parts were clever, but some parts were not.

Hear, all ye learned, and read me this riddle,

How the wrong part wrote Scott, and the right part wrote Liddell.

Anon. as quoted in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography

The first edition of Liddell and Scott’s Greek Lexicon was published in 1843. In revised versions, it is still the seminal work used as an Ancient Greek-English dictionary. It now comes in three printed forms: the ‘big Liddell’ – the full work (with over 2,000 double-columned pages in very small type) – and two abridged versions known as the ‘middle Liddell’ and the ‘little Liddell’. There is now also an online version.

The story of the creation of this amazing work encapsulates Classical scholarship of its time, the incredible learning and memory of individuals, their dedicated hard work and the Oxford of its day, with its often aristocratic and eccentric characters.

Henry Liddell (1811–1898) was most certainly aristocratic. His father (also Henry Liddell) was the younger son of a baronet (another Henry Liddell). His mother began life as Charlotte Lyon; her father was the youngest son of the 8th Earl of Strathmore and Kinghorn. In 1883, the Liddells’ northern estate measured nearly 14,000 acres.

Of course, a boy with such a lineage had to be sent to public schools. He attended Bishopton Grove, near Ripon, followed by Charterhouse. He is thought to have said this about his school life:

I do not think that any sorrow of youth or manhood equalled in intensity or duration the black and hopeless misery which followed the wrench of transference from a happy home to a school.

However, something good did come out of this despair: a Classical education such that when he studied in Oxford, Liddell is said to have had the best reports of any student ever in Christ Church. He stayed on as a tutor and became a priest too, before serving as the headmaster of Westminster School, then returning to Christ Church to be the dean. In the 1830s Liddell and his once fellow-student, Robert Scott, began work on the Lexicon.

Robert Scott (1811–1887) did not have the sort of ancestors Liddell had: his father was a Devonshire rector. However, he went to Shrewsbury School and gained a first class degree at Christ Church. In 1835 he became a fellow of Balliol, then its master in 1854. His final years were spent as the Dean of Rochester.

As suggested by the doggerel verse above, Liddell was seen as the true craftsman behind the Lexicon, but this may not be entirely fair. What is clear is that Liddell was the bigger character, the one who became the object of fun because of his tall stature, intelligence and, as will be seen, ability to misjudge a mood entirely.

Lord Redesdale – the forefather of the Redesdale lurking behind ‘Uncle Matthew’ in Nancy Mitford’s Love in a Cold Climate (the one with the blood-spattered entrenching tool from the First World War and the instigator...

Table of contents

• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• About the author
• Contents
• Introduction
• What it was like …
• Art and Literature: A Smorgasbord
• Magic and Medicine: Is any of it Rational?
• When Things Go Wrong, or at Least Get Tricky …
• Modern Scholars, Ancient Languages
• Heaps, Triangles and Other Philosophical Quandaries
• Sex, Drugs and Rock and Roll
• Now for some answers …
• Acknowledgements
• Further reading
• Back Cover