Customer Reviews

Antiquity: The Civilization of the Ancient World

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(7)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(17)

 

 

I was really looking forward to reading this book, having read and learned much from Cantor's previous books on the Middle Ages. As for the present book, in Cantor's own (rather grandiose) words, "This book is an attempt to communicate to the educated reader and to students of history some basic knowledge about antiquity from 2.5 million years ago - the dawn of humanity - to the fall of the Roman Empire in the fifth century A.D. ... focusing on the Mediterranean and Western Europe... [Part I] lays out the fundamental knowledge about antiquity that every educated person should possess." (p. ix) Unfortunately, this book does not meet its stated goals, and its reach far exceeds its grasp.

The first 50 pages consist of very brief (6-7 pages each) essays about Egypt and the Middle East, Greece, Rome, classical philosophy, Christianity, and the decline and fall of Rome. The remaining 150 pages cover the same material, all over again. The most successful are Chapter 10, on ancient Judaism, and Chapter 14, on the Civil Law. Chapter 13, an imaginary dialogue featuring Saint Augustine of Hippo, is also of interest. The exposition is admirably clear throughout.

On the other hand, there is little continuity between chapters, and an amazing amount of error, muddle, and hyperbole along the way. Reviewer Jennifer Sposito has accurately identified many of these "Cantorisms;" here are just a few more.

1. "humans reached Europe... about 10,000 BC. Earlier [sic!], around 6000 BC,... civilization had emerged in the Near East." (p. 4) Humans reached Europe about 35,000 years ago. The Venus of Willendorf (Austria) dates to 30,000 BC. Chauvet painted cave dates to 18,000 BC. In the Middle East, Jerico (a walled city with perhaps 1,000 inhabitants) dates to 8000 BC.

2. "[Hebrew] monotheistic theology that resembled that of Pharaoh Akhenaton" (p. 7). Hebrews did not worship the Sun Disk. The Hebrew god was *invisible*.

3. "[Athens'] physical monuments... [on] the Acropolis - are now closed to tourists." (p. 10) The Acropolis remains accessible, in the midst of ongoing restoration.

4. "From the Egyptians, the Athenians learned literature, art, and religion." (p. 11) The Greeks learned literature from Homer, art and architecture from Crete, and religion from the Aryans (Indo-Europeans).

5. "There is really no evidence that [Alexander] initially set out to develop a new multiethnic, universal citizenship." (p. 14) Alexander took a Persian wife, required every man in his army to do the same, and set himself up as a universal monarch on the Persian model.

6. "[Alexander] was a great general; he was also very lucky." (p. 14) Alexander won because of superior technology (siege engines), military genius, and God-like (as all the ancient biographers attest) personal charisma.

7. "Tiberius and Gaius Gracchi" (page 166). Make that, "Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus."

8. "[Hagia Sophia] is today a somewhat musty and run-down museum." (page 211) Please go and see for yourself this glory of the ancient world. I promise that you will not be disappointed.

In summary, you might want to give Cantor's "Antiquity" a quick read-through for its chapters on Judaism, Civil Law, and Augustine; but the thing to really have from this author is his Medieval History (newly revised), a standard that ought to be on everybody's bookshelf.

I purchased this book hoping to reestablish my foundation in ancient and classical civilizations. I wanted a quick survey from which to pursue other more specific topics of interest. After buying the book I read the negative reviews posted here but decided to read the book and judge for myself. I wish I hadn't wasted my money.

First the positives. I found the chapters on the Egyptians and Romans interesting. I am no historian but the gross inaccuracies detailed by others below are concerning. It is difficult to enjoy a read when I must wonder about the accuracy of any given sentence. There end my positive remarks.

These worthwhile chapters are distracting because he jumps back and forth between centuries and topics without any clear organization. You will be in the 4th century BC in one sentence and then find that he has moved to the 1st AD at the end of the next sentence. Very distracting.

One very prominent theme throughout the book is Cantor's disdain for Christians and Jews. The following sentence describing the covenant between the Jews and God is indicative of his tone throughout.

"The covenant idea is the polar opposite of democracy, multiculturalism and ethnic equality. It is intensely elitist."

"The first millennium of Jewish history, as presented in the Bible, has no empirical foundation whatsoever."

I am not Jewish and I am no apologist, but Cantor clearly has an agenda and spends a great deal of this book describing Christians and Jews in condescending terms and uses every opportunity to bash people of faith. His presentation is so biased that it is distracting because one cannot take anything he writes at face value.

Others have pointed out that Cantor is out of his element with this period. I have not read any of his other books, but if his personal agenda colors his other histories with such fervor then I am not interested.

In the chapter "Christian Thought," he changes his style to account a fictional conversation between St Augustine and a contemporary. This chapter is so ridiculous that I wasn't able to finish. He succeedes in creating a ridiculously weak straw man for Christianity in his Augustine character. His agenda could not be more blatant in this chapter. It is grossly out of place in this self-described "analysis."

Others found the chapter on civil law to be of some interest but it is difficult to sift the wheat from the chaff since the layperson cannot tell what is historically accurate and what is not.

There are much better, more accurate and less biased surveys available for the periods and civilizations Cantor attempts to cover in this title. Look elsewhere.

Like all Norman Cantor's work, this book is extremely readable and it allows the mind to relax, and to put in order a wealth of information about immense subjects. My library and study are filled with books on details of ancient history, and how refreshing it is to pick up "Antiquity" and step back from the details and see through Cantor's eyes great patterns and great developments, to see relationships that have eluded me as I drown in specialized studies. The energy in Cantor's writing is always inviting. I don't agree with all Cantor's conclusions, but he teaches me things all the way through. And this book is particularly illuminating now when East and West are at war, and we are being compelled to learn about the East as never before, perhaps, in our lifetimes. We need scholars like Cantor who can and dare to make statements about the big picture. Anne Rice, New Orleans,La

Shockingly Inaccurate

Norman Cantor has made his name primarily in medieval studies, and this seems to be his first popular foray into antiquity. Being a student of the ancient world, I was eager to see what a professor emeritus from NYU could further teach me about our shared heritage from Sumeria through Rome.

This book, frankly, an astonishing glance at exactly what passes for history these days. It should be called "The World According to Cantor." There is a wealth of information here, and I believe that reading any book contains value, but Cantor consistently botches dates, presents evidence in a misleading light, and asserts his own opinion as certain fact. A few glaring errors which pop out within just the first few chapters:

--Cavalry was not a factor in the Roman army until the 4th Cen. AD? Cavalry has been a major factor in battles for more than half a millennium before that.
--The blithely state that the Exodus has zero historical basis, while in fact the arguments both for and against the Exodus are strongly competing, substitutes personal bias for fact.
--Certainly Alexander spread created the Hellenistic world primarily on a Greek model, but to see "no evidence" that Alexander tried to form a multicultural society is ridiculous. Alexander forced his troops (much to their dismay) to take on Persian customs and even wives! And certainly his conquest of Egypt greatly affected him as well.
--The idea that Paul inserted Resurrection into the first generation of Christianity and that the followers of Jesus of Nazareth simply swallowed the idea wholesale is nothing short of laughable.
--Human beings did not arise 2.5 million years ago. That is when the hominid genus arose with Homo habilis. Anatomically modern humans (Homo sapiens) evolved 130,000 years ago.
--To say that humans reached Europe in 10,000 B.C. is a gaffe so obvious that even history undergrads must be taken aback.
--And on, and on. I hate to think what blatant errors exist within the sections which address subjects which I know even less about!

Cantor dismisses some arguments as "faith rather than history," and certainly one expects objectivity from a historian. But this book contains as many leaps of faith as any Torah, Koran, or Gita. Time and again he presents theories as certainties rather than arguments, and thus robs the reader of the true richness (and mystery) of the historical narrative that he is attempting to convey. Jewish readers may find his one-sided (and rather negative) view of Hebrew history to be particularly insensitive and oversimplified.

Read the book for what information you can lean from this seasoned scholar, but take everything with a large grain of salt. The entire work feels as if the author has an agenda -- or an axe to grind.

I'm a professor and I picked up this book thinking it might be useful to assign a chapter or two to students as background information for a comparative cultures course I will teach. Like many other reviewers I thought the book was remarkably poor. In addition to factual errors and tendentious interpretations, the book is incredibly poorly written. I thought it might be suitable to teach at the undergraduate level, but in fact it reads as if it were written by an undergraduate, or a very gifted high school student. At times it seems as if portions of the book weren't finished and the sentence-long paragraphs that appear in it are the remains of the outline the author wrote from. I'm saddened, but not surprised, that Cantor wrote a book like this. What does surprise me is that his editors published it in this form. Frankly, its an embarrassment. Given the enormous amount of good books on antiquity available, there is no reason to read this one.

I am a prolific reader of historical novels, so when I saw "Antiquity" by Norman Cantor, I was intrigued. Inside the covers, however, lies one of the worst researched, terribly opinionated, and worse, outright disingenuous books purporting to be historical analysis I have ever read.

One could chalk this up to a novice's first attempt, but Cantor is a well known author with his work on Medieval life. Perhaps, under a rush of a deadline he forgot that history is supposed to be told truthfully. He skewers or ignores facts, presents blantantly opinionated views which leave a novice reader with a wholly untruthful view of what happened, and provides no documentation of research for his outlandish postulations (presented as fact) of actions, locales or politics which he covers.

My greatest concern, is that there are what apperared to me to be several anti-Semetic references or characterizations, several disparaging remarks of middle-eastern cultures, and an haughty presentation of the Macedonian Empire's world view. Has Cantor lectured so long that he thinks the whole world are easily intimidated as his 18-22 year old audiences?

If you are wanting to know about ancient history, this book isn't for you. If truthfulness doesn't matter, well then, you might enjoy what really is a self-aggrandizing doorstop.

This book is partitioned into two sections: "Basic Narrative," which is a summary of antiquity from the agararian communities of the ancient Near East (Mesopotamia and Egypt) to the fall of the Roman Empire and the emergence of the Christian community and; "Societies and Cultures," which is a more detailed look at those societies and cultures that fall within the book's qualifications and, to a certain extent, the relevance of those cultures to contemporary, Western society/culture. Every sentence if not every paragraph of the first section is a bold, arguable statement that begs further exposition, discussion or reading. Actually, it appears from the "Guide for Further Reading" at the end of the book, that the first section of this book may be a derivative summary of Cantor's readings of those materials. One might be better off reading those materials for oneself rather than relying on Mr. Cantor's syncretic book reports. Mr. Cantor's use of informal, laymen language makes this book further unsuitable for use as a reference or quotation within a thesis or other scholarly endeavor. The second section of the book loses some of the somewhat cavalier arrogance (which Mr. Cantor may have meant to come across as wit) of the first section but the disjunct writing styles within the section is perplexing. The created interview with St. Augustine is clever but the section on Civil Law lacks clarity and overall what has been cited as "authoritative insight" appears to be Mr. Cantor's ruminations or opinions. While the attempt to cover the breadth of the topic within a couple of hundred pages could be construed as either laudable or [a] folly, the result in this case is an embarrassing attribution to Mr. Cantor's erudition.

It gives me no pleasure to state that no one should read this book. It is an engaging read, but that only makes it all the more dangerous. I have two problems with Dr. Cantor's offering. The first is the way he throws his political opinions around in what purports to be an historical narrative. For example, he compares the democracies of Hellenistic antiquity to "the technocratic monstrosities" of our time, without specifying just which governments he counts in this category. Then he states that the sexual decadence of ancient Rome was unmatched until the twentieth century USA. But these personal asides can be excused, given the common practices of modern academia to mix politics with any and all subject matter.

But impossible to forgive is the gross factual inaccuracy. I am not a classical scholar by any means, and was turning to Cantor to be educated in new areas. But very early on, the red flags began to appear. The dates and eras he put forth for the emergence of modern man were not quite ringing true, but I let that go. That is, until on page 26 he told of the Gracchus brothers (misspelled, as one reviewer pointed out) and their role in the fall of the Roman republic in the middle of the first century BC. But I happen to know that Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus lived a century earlier, and were murdered when Sulla was but a child, and Caesar's birth still decades away. Given this high school level of error, I had to wonder how much of the rest of this book is simply wrong. A visit to Amazon reviews revealed the that this is one of many inaccuracies, and I should not be trying to learn about antiquity from this work... and neither should anyone else.

This is really too bad, because Cantor is an excellent writer with a captivating style, and a talent for distilling massive amounts of information into a concise and memorable form. This is a very valuable book, in concept. In execution, it is a "monstrosity" that will mis-educate a lot of people. Perhaps a revision would be the thing. Meanwhile, it's a worse than a waste of time to read this book.

I am mid-way through this book, and I am having a hard time coming up with a compelling reason to continue. Here's why:

1. The author asserts as fact his opinions and highly subjective--and comical in their absurdity--characterizations of various races, religions and nations.

2. So far, nearly every "fact" presented by the author is in conflict with many other sources of information that I have read. For example, he asserts that St. Peter is not buried in Rome, but provides no evidence to support this position, which is in direct conflict with widely accepted history.

3. The author's biases are shocking; he condescendingly refers to Christian practices as a form of magic. He asserts that basic, fundamental tenets of Christianity are false, and even ridicules them, without providing any supporting facts; it's just all his opinion, and he clearly has an agenda.

4. To his credit, the author treats Judaism with much more clarity and fairness (and at least 20 times as many pages as Christianity), but his mischaracterization of the ancient Greeks, Romans and Christianity results in anything he writes about other ancient topics being questionable.

5. The author's writing style is inconsistent. Sometimes, it is easy to read; other times, his sentences make no sense and the author tries to impress the reader with words that are pretentious. It seems as if the author spent more time researching synonyms for basic words than he did researching his topics. Some of the author's sentences do not even include verbs.

6. The author's intellectual laziness is manifest in his cartoonish descriptions of the Roman Empire. It's common to ridicule Italians (and others) by minimizing the accomplishments of Rome, but that's not to be expected in a book that is billed as an educated survey of the ancient world. Dr. Cantor, ancient Rome is one of the most magnificent accomplishments of mankind, of all time, and it did not grow to be the sole super power of the ancient world by sheer luck or accident.

If you are curious as to why US college graduates leave school with a poor understanding of history and the world around them, reading this work, by an author who claims to be a professor emeritus of history, sociology and comparative literature at New York University, will explain it all.

If you agree with the concept and theory of man-made global warming, then do not buy this book because the trees wasted by producing the book are not worth the damage to the climate.

Perhaps Dr. Cantor's objective with this book is to be provocative. However, this would be far more effective, and provocative, if he used facts and provided support for his odd-ball opinions.

It is possible that the author is attempting to use this book as a counter-point to other surveys of the ancient world that do not promote the author's strange political views. However, that is not how the book is described or marketed. I do not agree with the author's political philosophy, but I am open to other ideas, if they are based on facts and not pure emotions and whimsical opinions. I'm also open to other philosophies if they add to our knowledge; this book just reduces our knowledge by presenting wild claims and misinformation; kind of like a lot of sites on the Web.

There is so much more here to use to critique this book, such as the author's attempt to use this book as a platform for his extremist, and not surprisingly bigoted, political views. In the interest of efficiency, however, the best critique is: this is a poorly written political screed disguised as history, full of thinly disguised bigotry and hate, and not worth reading.

This book serves as a rough and ready introduction to antiquity. It's short and covers a lot of ground. The writing is breezy and easy to digest.

If you have no background in this area and want some rough guidelines-- go for it. It covers the most important broad stokes well.

If you are familiar with ancient history this book suffers from many generalizations, oversimplifications and even some outright errors. Oh and the writing isn't very elegant. But Cantor still makes many good points and it's a challenge to spot some of these above problems and turn them over in your mind. Kind of auto-Socratic! Any big survey book spanning this range of time and cultures typically has lots of problems. At least this one makes some useful bridges between the ideas and cultures of antiquity and is a quick read.

This book has it's place among many better books on ancient history in my library.