REVIEW BY ANDREW SELKIRK
Every year Professor Quinn has the task of sorting out applications from those wishing to study classics. Many of them say that they wish to study classics because Greece and Rome are ‘the roots of Western civilisation’. In this book, Professor Quinn disagrees. Who is right?
Quinn, who has just been stolen from Oxford for an even more prestigious chair at Cambridge, set out her academic stall in her previous book In Search of the Phoenicians, where she offered a new take on this much-debated subject, suggesting that ‘The Phoenicians did not in fact exist as a self-conscious collective or people’. The term ‘Phoenician’ itself, she says, is a Greek invention. She now sets out to do the same thing with the Greeks, arguing that civilisation is essentially a 19th-century British invention. This book is an attack on what she calls ‘civilisational thinking’.
‘I want to tell a different story’, she says, ‘one that does not begin in the Greco-Roman Mediterranean and then re-emerge in Renaissance Italy. I want to trace the relationships that built what is now called “the West” from the Bronze Age to the Age of Exploration… More broadly, I want to make the case that it is connections, not civilisations, that drive historical change.’
