This superb book should be in every school or college library. The human body is the focus for an account of how people thought and behaved in the ancient world from the Bronze Age to the early Middle Ages and beyond. Brilliantly written and lavishly illustrated, it is also the nearest thing to a classical page-turner you will read this year, and is both a window into the past and a mirror in which we see ourselves all too faithfully reflected.
The argument of this book is timely, delivering cogent body blows against the absurd ‘supremacist’ readings of the ancient world – readings which elevated the Apollo Belvedere to the status of a white paradigm and dealt in absurd binary accounts of race, colour and gender which the ancients themselves did not share. (How Roman, for example, was the corpse of a serving imperial soldier who was born in Palmyra and died on the banks of the Tyne?). At the same time Vout pulls no punches where the ancients were obviously men behaving badly. She calls out the institutional sexism, racism, genocide and enslavement of conquered peoples, while (equally) seeing the humanity of these conflicted embodied people. The book is refreshingly light on theory, preferring to let the ancient sources speak for themselves rather than make them part of a preconceived pattern.
The book takes us through the main areas where our corporeal nature is at its most obvious – sport, sex, sickness, childbirth, death – and also into less obvious topics such as the ways in which (especially Roman) rulers embodied their dynastic power in the ‘body politic’. The final chapter looks at the way Christianity altered the ancient view of bodily life, producing ascetics whose powers of bodily control would make Milo of Croton look small. This is not a book for the squeamish and Vout does not mince her words when describing bodily functions, although she spares us many of the more eye-watering details of ancient medical practice. She gives us a grown-up and honest account of what it must have been like to live in ancient times, where bodies did what bodies do and people were flesh and blood rather than the stuffed shirts found in later reception. Vout's bodies have sex, they defecate, they grow old and die. She shows us in fascinating and compelling detail how the ancient ability to show ugliness is itself a massive step forward in self-understanding, and these images are often deeply moving: the Munich ‘Drunken Old Woman’ (figure 86) ‘has a certain nobility’ but is very much a detailed study of abandonment (‘in her inebriation… she clings for grim death to the wine jar’). The piece is evidence of a new realism at work in Greek art from the 3rd century BCE onwards and ‘it reminds us that not all Greek art was flawless’ (p. 184). Vout's range of reference – drawing on literature, philosophy, art, archaeology, and graffiti from a good thousand years of the ancient past – is astonishing and lucidly set out. Some of it may be questionable as history (can we really use Juvenal as evidence of Messalina's night-time prostitution?) but it is all part of the evidence showing us how ancient people saw their messy selves and their (often even messier) past.
Vout's style is wonderfully racy and her book is a pleasure to read: Hercules is a ‘lean, mean, fighting machine’ (p. 127) and ‘when not showing him in action or taking a breather, sculptors also showed him pissing’ (p. 135), ‘[athletes’] reasons for exercising starkers will always elude us’ (p. 139), Phaedo ‘takes one look at Socrates’ thick neck and assumes him to be a thicky through and through’ (p. 71). The book is beautifully endowed with 178 plates (many in colour) embedded in the text. These are not merely illustrative: the plates are as much a part of the argument as the words which accompany them, giving us a first-hand glimpse of what these Greeks and Romans thought the world looked like as well as showing us (say) the lengths to which they went to honour their dead or the frankness of their depictions of bodily life. See, for instance, the statue clearly showing a breast cancer found in Smyrna (figure 98), the pot showing the javelin-thrower with his genitals tied up ready for exercise (figure 65) or the plaque from Ostia showing a baby being born (figure 43: a scene worthy of Call the Midwife). Vout also uses more recent artistic evidence to cast light on the way in which the classical past has been interpreted and revalued over the last two thousand years – look for instance at Waterhouse's stunning 1885 Saint Eulalia (figure 170) – and pointing us towards a better way of reading the paintings with her eye for detail and her ability to show the thinking behind the brush-strokes. There are also some surprising images: figure 63 shows us the Prussian strongman Eugen Sandow, commenting that he ‘looks rather deflated as he adds a fig leaf to his Hercules act’ (p. 134); this whole section (pp. 125–137) on the Herculean ‘strongman’ is a model of intelligent reading of the ancient world through its modern reception.
A book like this is the fruit of many years of research and nobody could have done it better than Vout. Behind the simple, user-friendly style lurks a massive library of meticulous scholarship which Vout manages to disguise in what is a footnote-free publication. The references for each section of the book are listed in the 43 pages of ‘Further Reading’, although it would have been helpful if she had also given us an alphabetical full list of all the works consulted or recommended. The book has an excellent index, it is meticulously proof-read and lavishly produced and is excellent value for money.
Open access
