Site Seers
SIGHTS, in the packaged-tour sense, lie all over the place. Sites, by contrast, imply a nexus, a link with time. In AD 66 the Masada story was graphically reported by Josephus, perhaps the only literate contemporary eye-witness. Not until 1838 was the location identified with the towering outpost which, when I spent a week's leave near by in the 'forties, was still called Es-Sebbeh. Three years ago the famous Israeli soldier and archaeologist Yigael Yadin, leading an inter- national brigade of expert and amateur volun- teers, mapped the whole area from top to bottom, down to the last strand of abandoned human hair, leaving no potsherd unturned.
More recently, in collaboration with the Observer, a notable piece of showmanship was mounted. In his Masada : Herod's Fortress and the Zealots' Last Stand (Weidenfeld and Nicol- son, 63s.), Professor Yadin offers us the book of the show. The expedition's findings suggest new glosses on Josephus : not necessarily those advanced, sometimes on slender evidence, by the author. If the facts are sacred, the comment is somewhat free. Many people, Gentile and Jew, resented with various motives and equally various ploys the colonialism of the Roman Establishment. Civil wars and rebellions care little for kith and kin, resistance movements inevitably harbour treacherous elements. If Herod was a quisling, was Josephus a double agent? Were the Sicarrii an expendable rabble? Certainly they could expect no quarter in the event of capture. Can inscribed ostraca, or tatters of an Essene MS, make them any more romantic than T. E. Lawrence's Arab mer- cenaries?
Plenty of room for speculation, anyway, and for alternative interpretations, in this tale of a classic siege : of a sort endured re- peatediy over the centuries, in the countless settlements and high places of a land much over- run by warring tribes. For the rest, this is a model monograph of its popular kind, readably covering the site, the history, the expedition. It's the right size (small quarto), illustrations really illustrate; colour, besides prettifying, helps explain a photographically obtuse terrain, clarifies maps and plans.
Turning from Biblical to Classical sites, I can commend as no less seasonable two gorgeous picture-albums equally full of puzzles. Early on, the Aegean was filled with commo- tion. Here archaeology has yet to catch up with Homer's vivid confection of myth and history. The latest (West German) attempt to disentangle the two is Erich Lessing's 'photographic inter- pretation' of The Voyages of Ulysses (Mac- millan, £8 8s.), with professorial commentaries on Schliemann and on quotes from the T. E. Shaw translation. The 115 colour-plates feature the dramatis personae by pots, and the land- scapes by 'the light that never was,' often at sundown. They are not so 'closely integrated' with the text as the blurb boasts.
Thus Herr Gall pooh-poohs the idea that the lotus-eaters could be palmed oll with dates: they were 'pot-addicts,' or hashish-eaters, he wildly supposes. So why show (plate 53) a date-palm in illustration? In fact, North Africans are still often palm-wine drinkards: the lotus-like cab- bage crown of various palms is their prize; but this and other possibilities get no mention. And if the Magic Plant of Hermes was indeed the Atriplex habitats portrayed on plate 73, why caption it with an irrelevant note on the virtues of the unrelated garlic family? But this lush coffee-table overturner is full of fascinating sug- gestions, such as that Laertes (Lars, Larth) was Etruscan. Why not? Odd as the Etruscan tongue may appear, its speakers were of as mixed stock as Greeks and Phoenicians. Raymond Bloch's Etruscan Art (Barrie and Rockliff, 75s.) shows in its portraiture—an art they introduced to Italy—that language has no necessary relation to race. Trading between the Aegean and the two Italian seas they named, the Etruscans were responsible, more than any other single group, for almost all that was seminal—for better or worse—in early Roman history. Denis Mack Smith makes this very clear in introducing Milton Grendel's grandiose Illustrated History of Italy (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, £6 6s.), which colourfully surveys something of everything, from prehistoric Cretan influences, via the Renaissance and the Risorgimento, to the day of Togliatti in 1964; over 300 plates, forty-eight in colour, with six admirable maps. Roman decadence remains a hardy perennial for hind- sight specialists. Did Rome, for example, fail to delegate and decentralise its power in time? On the Phoenician site of LPQY or—as it is now pronounced in Berberine Arabic, Lebda- the Romans in the time of Christ built roads, arches, temples, baths, forts, whose imposing ruins are now elegantly fixed in print and pic- ture by various hands in The Buried City : Excavations at Leptis Magna (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, £5 5s.). This Libyan site, sacked by Berbers, Vandals, Arabs, has now been rescued for the sightseer from the encroaching sand.
One massive drain on the Roman economy was the silk trade, ravelled through various intermediaries. with China. If nothing of this is caught in The Lost Cities of Asia (Elek, 84s.), Wim Swaan, with a well-informed running com- mentary on his inimitable colour-plates, enlivens sites in Ceylon, Burma and Cambodia which from ancient foundations flowered around the twelfth century AD, under Buddhism. He makes us think and keeps us guessing. In The Decline of the Ancient World (Longmans, 35s.), Pro- fessor A. H. M. Jones analyses scrupulously some internal and external pressures which de- stroyed Rome and, with a time-lag, the temporal power of its Eastern successors. What survived, and survives, is the province of Mr Stewart Perowne's Christian-slanted illustrated history of The End of the Roman World (Hodder and Stoughton, 35s.).
HUGH GORDON PORTEUS
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