Athens can teach us a lot about real democracy – not the weasel democracy practised so often, British classics scholar Robin Lane Fox tells Kevin Chinnery.
Australian Financial Review
6-7 February 2016
Athens can teach us a lot about real democracy – not the weasel democracy practised so often, British classics scholar Robin Lane Fox tells Kevin Chinnery.
Few historians of Alexander the Great can have known what it was really like to charge with massed ranks of Macedonian cavalry into a line of Persian war elephants. Robin Lane Fox leapt at the chance to ride as an extra in Oliver Stone’s 2004 film, Alexander. Here was insight into the business of world conquest that a library full of books could not quite provide: ‘‘I learned bloodlust,’’ grins the recently retired Reader in Ancient History at Oxford. ‘‘And I learned about complete disregard for risk if you are in a group of like-minded people doing the same.’’
Stone made the film after reading Lane Fox’s 1973 biography of the legendary ruler, published when the author was just 27 years old.
The same age as Alexander, and only slightly less conceited,’’ he says. Critics still call it the most epic and influential academic work on Alexander’s life to be written in the past few decades.
We are at the Botanic Gardens Restaurant in Sydney, around the corner from where, the previous evening, we had both relived ancient Greece at the award of the second Lysicrates Prize.
It’s a play-writing contest in which the audience votes on the first acts of three new Australian plays – just as ancient Athenians did at the famed Great Dionysia festival where the iconic Greek dramas were first acted.
The prize revives all the Athenian ideals: a democratic vote for new, locally written, frontline drama. But it’s not some faux recreation of the classical world either. It’s a reminder, for one thing, that this year’s winning playwright, Mary Rachel Brown, would, as a woman, have barely existed in the public life of ancient Athens.
