The Children of Athena: Greek writers and thinkers in the Age of Rome, 150 BC–AD 400

by Charles Freeman

In 146 BC, Greece yielded to the military might of the Roman Republic; sixty years later, when Athens and other Greek city-states rebelled against Rome, the Roman general Lucius Cornelius Sulla destroyed the city of Socrates and Plato, laying waste to the famous Academy where Aristotle had studied. However, the traditions of Greek cultural life continued to flourish during the centuries of Roman rule that followed—in the lives and work of a distinguished array of philosophers, doctors, scientists, geographers, and theologians.

Charles Freeman's accounts of such luminaries as the physician Galen, the geographer Ptolemy, and the philosopher Plotinus are interwoven with contextual "interludes" that showcase a sequence of unjustly neglected and richly influential lives. A cultural history on an epic scale, The Children of Athena presents the story of a rich and vibrant tradition of Greek intellectual inquiry across a period of more than five hundred years, from the second century BC to the start of the fifth century AD.

Genres: History, Philosophy, Nonfiction, Greece, Ancient History, Ancient, Greek Mythology

448 pages, Paperback

Published November 7, 2024

About the author

Charles Freeman is a freelance academic historian with wide interests in the history of European culture and thought. He is the author of the highly acclaimed Egypt, Greece and Rome, Civilizations of the Ancient Mediterranean. He has followed this up with The Greek Achievement (Penguin 1999), The Legacy of Ancient Egypt (Facts on File, 1997) and The Closing of the Western Mind, a study of the relationship between Greek philosophy and Christianity in the fourth century and beyond. His The Horses of St. Mark’s (Little Brown, 2004) is a study of these famous works of art in their historical contexts over the centuries. In 2003, Charles Freeman was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.

Reviews

[Beauregard Bottomley · Rating 5 out of 5]

Greek culture dominated Roman ethos while Roman boots stood above all Greeks. Plutarch thought of himself as worthy of being dominated by the Romans and made the Romans worthy of enslaving the Greeks. Plutarch spoke Greek and only slowly taught himself Latin as he would write his historical Roman biographies.

Theological myths need narratives with wildly understood tropes with Greek understanding of wisdom. A mixture of Homeric harmonization and Grecian philosophy gave mimetic certainty through re-interpretation of old fables becoming the foundation of new legends which became new facts: ‘when the legend becomes fact, print the legend’.

Plato is easy to harmonize with theology. Augustine does that through Plotinus and Plato’s Timaeus and further Christianized by pseudo-Dionysius. Plato and Plotinus have the good, the intellect and soul which are easily made into a Trinity and everyone who doesn’t believe is anathema to the harmonic truth as ordained by a man-made council as they discuss man written books all part of an ad hoc creation defending the absurdities of their newly inspired memetic creations.

The importance of the Greeks mentioned in this book cannot be overstated. “What does Athens have to do with Jerusalem?” The answer is almost everything. The post harmonization of the incredible needed a foundation beyond the old myths to believe the new myths and take them to the world of fact, truth, and certainty to the degree such that anyone who disagreed is anathema. Origen is now on my to-read list and the Hellenization within the Roman Hegemony explains the popularity of the Christian myth.

I remember once a Jehovah Witness responded to me that the Greeks did not really believe in Homer. I was dumfounded. He had no idea the connection between Homer’s set of myths and the role that Greeks played in shaping Western Civilization (i.e. Christianity). Without context, relations, and the culture milieu a book was written in nothing worthy can be gleaned except for a bizarre self-reenforcing harmonization of already concluded certainties. This book contextualizes the relationships that help create Western Civilization.

[Stan Prager · Rating 5 out of 5]

In 399 BCE, Socrates was condemned to death, a tragic punctuation mark to the celebrated fifth century that had Athens and Sparta and the multitude of other poleis witness first the repulse of the mighty Persian Empire, the flourish that was the Age of Pericles, and then the carnage of the Peloponnesian War that for nearly three decades battered Greek civilization and culminated in Athenian defeat. In that same era, hardly anyone had heard of Rome, humiliated just shortly thereafter when sacked by Gauls in 390 BCE. A mere century and a half later, the Greeks were themselves subjects of a Rome that had become master of the Mediterranean. But in victory or defeat, sovereign or not, the pulse never failed to beat in the poleis—or beyond it. The life of Socrates, likely embellished, was told most famously by Plato, who founded his Academy in Athens in 387 BCE. Plato’s pupil Aristotle later established his own school, the Lyceum, and served as tutor to Alexander the Great, who in his vast conquest spread Hellenism across the east. By the time that Egypt, the last parcel of territory once claimed by Alexander, fell to Roman rule in 31 BCE, Greek thought prevailed more than a thousand miles from Attica and the Peloponnesus, and it was to dominate Roman intellectual life for centuries to come. As Roman poet Horace once observed: “Captive Greece took captive her savage conqueror and brought the arts to rustic Latium.”
That story is subject to a superlative treatment in The Children of Athena: Greek Intellectuals in the Age of Rome:150 BC-400 AD [2023], a fascinating and engaging work that is the latest to spring from the extremely talented pen of acclaimed classicist Charles Freeman. In a departure from the thick tomes and deep dives into intellectual history that have made his reputation, such as The Closing of the Western Mind1 [2003], and its sequel of sorts, The Reopening of the Western Mind2 [2020], this delightful survey sacrifices none of the scholarship Freeman is known for while expanding his appeal to both an academic and a popular audience. Even better, the volume is structured such that it can just as suitably be approached as a random perusal of out of sequence episodes as a cover-to-cover read.
Books of history often have a slow build, but not this one. The reader is instantly hooked by the “Prologue,” which features an adaptation of The Banquet, a hilarious satirical work by Lucian of Samosata, a second-century CE Hellenized Syrian who wrote in Greek, that has representatives of virtually every school of philosophy attending a wedding feast that degenerates from debate and dispute to debauchery—and even a full scale brawl! Attendees include Stoics, Platonists, Peripatetics, Epicureans, Cynics, and various hangers-on. The point, of courses, for the purpose of Freeman’s work, is both the considerable diversity that was manifested in Greek thought, as well as how prevalent that proved to be in the immensity of an empire that stretched from Mauretania to Armenia.
To animate this compelling cultural history, Freeman has chosen a select group of representative figures. Those grounded in the classics will recognize most if perhaps not all of them, which only serves as underscore to the sheer numbers of Greeks who took leading roles in Roman life over the many hundreds of years that spanned the time when Greece succumbed to Roman conquest in the second century BCE to the fall of Rome in the west in the fifth century CE. There are philosophers, of course, such as Epictetus and Plotinus, but there is also the historian Polybius, the biographer Plutarch, the geographer Strabo, the traveler Pausanias, the astronomer Ptolemy, the surgeon Galen, and a dozen others. Chapters for each are comprised of biographical sketches with an exploration of their significance, as well as the imprint their legacies left upon later Western Civilization. Included too are a number of interludes that explore wider themes to better place these individuals in context to their times.
Rome’s was a martial society not known for organic cultural achievements, at least not until much later in the course of its history. Greek art and epic, already deeply influential on the Etruscans that Rome supplanted in their geography, came to fill that vacuum. The syncretism that gradually integrated Greek mythology into equivalent Roman gods and goddesses, with appropriate name changes, similarly saw Greek culture increasingly borrowed and incorporated over time, even as this latter process met with a sometimes fierce resistance by conservative Roman elites. Philosophy proved especially unwelcome at first, as perhaps best highlighted in a report by Plutarch of an Athenian delegation to Rome in 155 BCE that saw a certain Carneades, a philosopher associated with antidogmatic skepticism, argue convincingly to an audience in favor of one proposition the first day, only to return the next and masterfully rebut his own position—to the horror of Cato the Elder! But such attitudes were not to prevail; Greek philosophy was to dominate Roman intellectual life, even as Christianity gained traction—and some of Freeman’s Greeks are in fact Christian—until repressed by the Church in the last decades prior to the fall of Rome. This was especially facilitated by the Pax Romana that characterized the first two centuries of empire, a period of relative peace and stability that allowed ideas, including spirited philosophical debate, to spread freely across long distances. The Emperor Marcus Aurelius (reigned 161 to 180 CE) was himself a Stoic philosopher!
Freeman’s book demonstrates the vitality of Greek thought in Roman life not merely through the various schools of philosophy, but even more importantly in the realms of science, medicine, and scholarship. Long ago, in my own studies of ancient Greece, I read both Polybius (c.200–c.118 BCE) and Plutarch (46-119 CE) while carelessly overlooking the implications in that these were Greeks who resided in Rome. Plutarch himself even became a Roman citizen. It is a telling reminder that Greeks remained a critical influence upon Western Civilization—long after their city-states ceased to be anything other than place names on Roman maps.
I once ran across a claim of Christian triumphalism in the literature that argued that the rise of Christianity was enabled by a paganism that had so run its course that it had doomed itself to obsolescence, leaving a gaping spiritual hole that begged for a new, more fulfilling religious experience for the masses. It’s a nice fairy tale for the faithful, but lacks support in the scholarship. Even as the “catastrophic” notion of the demise of polytheism (associated with Gibbon) has given way to the more realistic "long and slow" view by historians, it is often surprising to discover how vibrant paganism remained, well into late antiquity. And the best evidence for that is the flourishing of Greek philosophy, and the paganism associated with it, in the Roman world—both which finally fell victim to the totalitarianism of the early Christian Church that at first discouraged and later prohibited anything that strayed from established doctrine. With that in mind, The Children of Athena serves as a kind of prequel to Freeman’s magnificent The Closing of the Western Mind, which chronicled the course of events that came to crush independent inquiry for a millennium to follow in the Western world.
There is possibly no more chilling metaphor for this than in one of the final chapters of The Children of Athena that is given to Hypatia (c.350-415 CE), a Neoplatonist philosopher and mathematician who lived in Alexandria, Egypt in the twilight of the empire. Hypatia, the rare female of her times who was a philosophical and scientific thinker, fell afoul of a local bishop and was murdered by a Christian mob that stripped her naked and scraped her to death with shards of roof tiles. And so the Western mind indeed did close.
For the record, I have come to know Charles Freeman over the years, and we correspond via email from time to time. I read portions of drafts of The Children of Athena as it was coming together, and offered my ideas, for whatever those might be worth, to help polish the narrative. As such, I was honored to see my name appear in the book’s “Acknowledgements.” But I am not a paid reviewer, and I would never praise a title that did not warrant it, regardless of my connection to the author. I genuinely enjoyed it, and would highly recommend it.
This is, in fact, one of those works that is difficult to fault, despite my glaring critical eye. Freeman’s depth in the field is on display and impressive, as is his ability to articulate a wide range of sometimes arcane concepts in a comprehensible fashion. I suppose if I were to find a flaw, it would be for the lack of much needed back matter. Readers may bemoan the absence of a “cast of characters” to catalog the names of the major and minor individuals that occur in the text, a key to philosophical schools and unfamiliar terminology, as well as maps of ancient cities and towns. Still, that is a minor quibble that should best be taken up with the publisher rather than the author, and hardly diminishes the overall achievement of this book, which does include copious notes and a fine concluding chapter that for my part found me motivated to go back to my own shelves and read more about the men and women that people The Children of Athena.


1 A link to my review of: The Closing of the Western Mind: The Rise of Faith and the Fall of Reason by Charles Freeman

2 A link to my review of: The Reopening of the Western Mind: The Resurgence of Intellectual Life from the End of Antiquity to the Dawn of the Enlightenment, by Charles Freeman

Review of: The Children of Athena: Greek Intellectuals in the Age of Rome: 150 BC-400 AD, by Charles Freeman – Regarp Book Blog https://regarp.com/2024/01/16/review-...

[Robert · Rating 5 out of 5]

A very engaging and readable discussion of Greek philosophy and thought as it existed under the Roman Empire.

While there is a discussion of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle who were all before the Roman conquest of Greece, Charles Freeman explains how the philosophic schools that sprang up after them and others continued to flourish and develop in the Roman Empire.

As the commercial once went: "Names you must know" Freeman very usefully puts into the historical timeline and context all these Greeks that one might sort clump together as "Ancient writers and philosophers" discussing them chronologically showing their influence over time, and it is a pretty big list: Polybius, Posidonius, Strabo, Dioscorides, Plutarch, Epictetus, Arrian, Ptolemy, Lucian, Galen, Pausanias, Dio Chrysostom, Aelius Aristides, Herodes Atticus, Plotinus, Clement of Alexandria, Origen, Themistius, Libanius, and Hypatia.

Definitely worth checking out.

[Lisa Myers · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book has really interesting info, but it needed to be better written/edited.

[Sajith Kumar · Rating 4 out of 5]

Athena is the Greek pagan goddess of wisdom and the patron deity of the city of Athens. The flower of Greek thought blossomed in the sixth century BCE and spread its delightful fragrance to the rim of the Mediterranean world from Libya, Egypt, Syria, Turkey, Italy and Spain. Hellenistic cultural centres sprang up on these parts which continued the pursuit of knowledge pioneered by the Athenian savants. Greece was a conglomeration of city states and vulnerable to a hegemonic kingdom as evidenced by Alexander of Macedon. The story repeated itself around 150 BCE when the Romans conquered Greece proper and the places where its culture had spread. This is a period generally considered to be an era of decline and eventual downfall. The budding religion of Christianity would gruffly obliterate the Greek culture in the fourth century CE. This book argues that even with the loss of political freedom, the scholars referred to as children of Athena kept the flag of inquiry and innovation fluttering high in the peaceful breeze offered by the Roman empire. The classical period (480-330 BCE) and the Hellenistic period (330-30 BCE) are well-covered in books on cultural history, but the period from there to the time when Christianity became the dominant religion is kept a blank. This was no mean period, being that of Galen, Ptolemy and Plutarch, and this book attempts to fill the gap with biographical narratives of several prominent Greek scholars. Charles Freeman is a specialist on the ancient world and its legacy. He has worked on archaeological digs on the continents surrounding the Mediterranean and is the author of many books.

Freeman assesses the vigour of Greek intellectual thought and examines the effects of accepting Roman hegemony on the political side even though the new masters were appreciative and in awe of the calibre of Greek thought. The Greek scholars of this era were imbued with a powerful sense of an intellectual heritage that was believed to be superior to any other. Thus they radiated self-confidence. The Roman empire was disparaging about the peoples they conquered. Though Greece enjoyed peace and stability and intellectual pursuits thrived, they were very careful not to cross the invisible line and offend the Romans. The Greek scholars are seen to be the courtiers or supplicants to Roman governors of provinces or other imperial officials. The Romans ridiculed the lack of fighting qualities among the Greeks while the latter saw the Romans as boorish and uncultured, but the elites of both cultures collaborated and were on fraternal terms. The Roman administration was remarkably light and this allowed Greek cities to run their own affairs and prosper. The Greeks were accommodating to include the cults of Roman emperors in their temples along with the deities of their religion. But one was not to be misled by the facade. Plutarch had warned the Greeks that the boots of the Roman soldiers were just above their heads - always.

The invasion of Alexander, who was himself a barbarian as far as the Athenians were concerned, caused pockets of the Greek culture to be established as far east as Alexandria-in-Sogdia (present Ai Khanum in Afghanistan). Gymnasia in these places taught philosophy to young men. Present day Turkey was the greatest exponent of Greek culture as seen in the number of philosophers it produced. This region spatially coincided with the Greek province of Asia with its capital at Ephesus and turned out to be the most sophisticated of all Greek outposts. Even though conquered and kept under the yoke by the Romans, Greeks were extremely proud of their own and contemptuous of other tongues. Galen once said that Greek was the most pleasant tongue and that 'if one observed the words used by other peoples in their languages, one would see that some closely resembled the wailing of pigs, others the sound of frogs and still others the call of the woodpecker'! Public oration was a skill carefully fostered in young men of an aristocratic background. The importance of sermons in Christianity is a remnant of this early focus on public speaking. It was not permitted for everyone to speak in public. Only if one person is of distinction or could display pedigree, upbringing and education would he be allowed to become an orator. They could charge fees for their appearances on stage. A bit of xenophobia was also present in elite minds. As described by Lucian of Samosata, it was difficult for an outsider to gain entry to the Greek cultural elite. However much he mastered the texts, he had still to acquire the manner of dress, the way of using language that harked back to Attic dialects and even a way of walking reminiscent of the ancient masters. As in classical period, Greek social life revolved around urban centres. 'City before self' was deeply ingrained within the Greek mind with loyalty to one's city often predominating over any form of shared ‘Greekness’.

Freeman gives a brief introduction to the various schools of Greek philosophy and why specific people were attracted to individual ones among them. Order and discipline was so important for the smooth functioning of Plato's state that he prescribed banning poetry and bringing up children in common. The school of philosophy known as stoicism resonated much with the Roman mind as seen in emperor Marcus Aurelius writing his book 'Meditations' in Greek rather than Latin, which was the lingua franca of the Roman empire. The book includes many biographies which start with Polybius, a Greek who was sent to Rome as a hostage and later made it his home. His 'Universal History' in 40 volumes must have been a massive work but only the first five volumes survive. He encouraged the Greek audience to recognize that Roman hegemony could not be reversed. Orators had become so successful that they felt themselves superior to entire cities, not subservient to emperors and even equal to the gods in some cases. Many oratories of Dio of Chrysostom survive in written form which attest to his prolific faculty to control the masses through his words. Their sense of pre-eminence rested partly on their meticulous knowledge of the Greek past. The author also notes some errors and inconsistencies in the literary output of the scholars he examines. Some of the herbal remedies suggested by Dioscorides in his De Materia Medica are now known to be poisonous and should not be consumed. Some effects are imaginary and solely depends for its efficacy on the placebo effect. Similarly, Ptolemy had calculated the size of the universe. This was wrong and infinitesimal than the real one, but it was the first time that the universe had been calculated as being so immense. Human beings were thus found to be at the core of a vast creation and this idea permeated Islamic and medieval Christian astronomy.

The Middle Ages witnessed great religious strife due to the intolerance of the monotheistic faiths as evidenced in crusades and jihads. Christian holy scriptures took their present shape in the third century CE. They were there already, but philosophers ironed out the discrepancies. Origen's writings made the Old Testament a Christian, rather than a Jewish text. Philosophical tussles with paganism appeared in works like that of Celsus who found the concept of a jealous god difficult to swallow. The inherent tolerance of Greek religion is evident in a remark made by Plutarch, who was a staunch devotee of Apollo. Regarding the worship of the Egyptian deities Isis and Osiris, he says: "Nor do we regard the gods as different among different peoples nor as barbarian, Greek, northern or southern. But just as the sun, moon, heaven, earth and sea are common to all, although they are given various names by the various peoples, so it is with one reason which orders these things and the one providence that has charge of them" (p. 119). Celsus, as mentioned above, argued that there was indeed one supreme force, but it had been given different names by different cultures and peoples. Origen claimed that Christians are not burdened with temples, altars and extravagant processions which Celsus considered vital for a functioning society. It is ironic that Christianity would later take on all these features! The cruel death of the lady philosopher Hypatia at the hands of early Christians is chillingly described in the text. Hypatia was probably the last famous pagan philosopher in the early fifth century CE. Being a woman, she was not allowed to hold public office but was widely respected for her erudition. Christian fanatics waylaid her, dragged her out from the vehicle, taken to a church on the seafront in Alexandria, then stripped and killed brutally by flaying her skin off with discarded roof tiles. Her lifeless body was then burned (p. 319). In 529 CE, Justinian closed the Platonic schools of Athens and closed the door on more than a millennium of Greek intellect and tradition. The light went out of free, intellectual exposition and Christian thought spread out in its place.

The book provides only an introductory survey of the Greek mind in those centuries when they were under Roman control. Interested readers can use this as a stepping stone to deeper topics. It's amusing for Indian readers to understand how the country influenced Greek culture in this era. Arrian, in his book on the life of Alexander, describes about India which had a bustling trade with Rome in the second century CE. Arrian relates a tradition that many of the fruits of Indian civilization, its cities and even its agriculture, was brought to the subcontinent by the god Dionysus and suggests that the god Hercules was born in India. He talks about a caste of wise men who dispense wisdom naked. The author then remarks that 'clearly the book does not provide much accurate information about Indian society'. However, Arrian's observation, even though appearing fantastic to European minds, might have been an attempt to describe Jain monks who travelled widely and dispensed wisdom while renouncing all clothes. This book contains information on how the Greek and Roman societies began its descent to collapse. Weak emperors, rise of rival kingdoms and barbarians created a grave problem in the third century CE which eventually led to the Greek culture's disintegration. Strife with the newly ascendant Sassanids in Persia did not help. A tribe called Heruli ransacked Athens. Money for buildings and public activities dried up. Greek religion declined and Christianity exploited the situation to turn strident.

The book is strongly recommended.

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is important because, as the author wrote, "There are certain epochs in European cultural history that many historians choose to ignore, leaving a gap in the record rather than exploring important intellectual trends and developments and addressing the achievements of some remarkable intellectuals. One such is the period of Greek history between the point when Greece came definitively under Roman rule in the second half of the first century BC up to the time when Christianity became
the dominant religion of the empire in the fourth century AD.

This is a well-written and well-paced profile of the Greek intellectuals of this much-neglected period of history.

[Toby Martin · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an absolutely wonderful resource for quite a specific area of history, one that wouldn't be as easy to research for a layperson. Fortunately, Freeman lays out the concept swiftly, the background of Greek culture within the Roman world, and goes into detail of the lives and contributions made by the book's subjects, plenty of which I knew, but others were completely new to me.

This would have been five stars if not for the fact that I don't always enjoy biography, and whilst none were excessively long and always talked about contributions as much as personal lives, it was still true that plenty of individuals mentioned were more interesting to me than others. Furthermore, the 'Afterlives' epilogue, whilst detailed and data-driven, was kind of boring for the most part. I feel there may have been a better way to present the information about how the manuscripts of particular works have got to us in the present day, perhaps in a timeline without any more text than necessary.

Still - when this book's engaging, it's very engaging, and it's a must-have for anyone interested in antiquity and the cultural history of Greece and Rome.

[Chuck_Les · Rating 4 out of 5]

It’s all Greek to me! (by which I mean that although it bit dry in places, Freeman does a terrific job illuminating the varied intellectual accomplishments of Greek thinkers during the era of Roman domination, highlighting the threads of continuity between Greek thinkers of the Roman era and their fore bearers of the Classical era and offering a powerful refutation to the standard narrative in which Greek culture after the third century BC is separate from, and inferior to, the glories of Plato, Homer and Herodotus)

[Chadwick Ciocci · Rating 5 out of 5]

An excellent survey of classical thinkers, periods and schools of thought. The author does an excellent job laying the groundwork and then connecting and dissecting thinkers and thoughts across time. Good reading for academics and excellent reading if you are looking for a general survey. You will walk away feeling more educated. The writing is also highly readable and the book moves quickly, which made it a joy to read.

[Matthew · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an excellent general survey of the key intellectuals of the Greek Roman Empire. The bibliography is excellent and is split by chapter with recommended readings for each one. This makes the book excellent for building up a base of knowledge to expand upon with scholarship.

[Sidney Forbes · Rating 4 out of 5]

Super interesting, the only reason I took off a star was because it hurt my brain