ATHENS:
A History, from Ancient
Ideal to Modern City.
By Robin Waterfield. Basic.
362 pp. $27.50

Classicist Robin Waterfield takes on a daunting task. He aims to provide a concise but detailed history of Athens from the Mycenaean settlements of the 13th century B.C.E. to the preparations for the 2004 Olympics. Waterfield’s love for the land and its history permeates the book. He provides vivid portraits of the major players—Pericles, Demosthenes, Lord Elgin, and Lord Byron—as well as less familiar figures, such as the mournful, scholarly archbishop Michael of Chonae, who labored in the 12th century to restore the Parthenon. His forthrightly “moralizing history” contains a good deal that’s inspiring and edifying, but also, unfortunately, much that’s misleading.

Waterfield blames Athenian imperialism for the agonies of the fifth-century B.C.E. Peloponnesian War and gives a chilling, accurate description of Athenian hubris, exemplified in the eradication of Melos and Skione. But he doesn’t grasp the complexity of the causes of the war. In his account, reluctant Spartans were “forced” to “confront Athens and its imperialist ambitions.” In contrast, the Athenian general and historian Thucydides properly emphasized Sparta’s fear of Athens’s growth as well as Sparta’s long-standing, bitter jealousy of Athens. Unlike Thucydides, Water­field doesn’t mention Athens’s offer to submit to arbitration to avoid war, and he underreports Sparta’s war crimes, such as the massacre of the Plataeans.

The book’s moralizing builds on Waterfield’s notion of an “Olympic spirit of Greek cooperation.” Although he admits that the Olympic truce of Greek antiquity was little more than a guarantee of safe passage for competitors and spectators to and from Olympia, he wants to believe that wars generally subsided. But not only did Greece’s internecine wars continue, the Olympic truce itself was broken on a few occasions and Olympia witnessed warfare in its own sacred precincts.

Scholars have long cautioned against investing the Olympics with undeserved moral status. In the case of the notorious 1936 games in Berlin, precisely this kind of weak history and fuzzy thinking caused the world to overlook the crimes of the hosts in the name of a putative Olympic ideal. In truth, the ancient Olympics were relentlessly competitive and ruthlessly individual; teams and teamwork were unknown. The actual Olympic ideal is no more evidence of the ancient Greeks’ multiculturalism than is their term for non-Greek speakers, barbaroi—“barbarians.”

Athens raises crucial questions about the past and challenges us to apply history to today’s decisions (“If America could look back on Athens’s story . . . it might learn to curtail its use of arms and to become a defender of true culture, not monotonous globalization”), but it doesn’t offer the material that would allow us to do so judiciously. Waterfield’s “Olympic ideal” is no more valid than his insistence on the moral equivalence of Robert Mugabe, Saddam Hussein, and the United States. The book might at least encourage readers to delve deeper, but the bibliography omits many seminal yet readable works. All in all, Athens deserves better than Athens.

—Michael Poliakoff