...in Syracuse, the ghosts feel like they raise the city up; in Ravenna, Nicola thinks they hold it back. [loc. 3703]
Pangolis explores five ancient capitals (Tyre, Carthage, Syracuse, Ravenna and Antioch) leavening historical detail with her own impressions of each city's modern remnants: a blend of history and travel writing which works better in some chapters than in others. This book won the Somerset Maugham Award (which, I learn, is 'to enable young writers to enrich their work by gaining experience of foreign countries'): Pangolis's previous work was Queens of Jerusalem, which I have not read.
One aspect of the book that I found fascinating was the intermingling of past and present: for instance, 'at least 30% of the [male] Tyrians are indeed descendants of the Phoenicians'. Though this is a source of pride, it's also been used to differentiate between Christians and Muslims. Carthage, which began as a Phoenician settlement, has an only slightly lower percentage of Phoenician genes amid its populace, but Pangolis writes that she did not 'meet a single Tunisian who describes themselves as Phoenician'. History can be a mixed blessing. As one artist in Ravenna tells the author, he grew up with 'this phantasmic history, which dwarfs everything the city is in the modern day. That trumps the reality of the city. ... Ravenna is so much more than her history, but you grow up with these ghosts.' [loc. 3699]
Some of the cities she explores are in ruins -- more now than at the time of writing, 2023, when 'the thunder of Israeli rockets could be heard in the city of Tyre'. Massive Israeli airstrikes in 2024 destroyed much of the ancient city. Antioch, where Pangolis had bathed in the hammam with the local women, suffered severe damage in the 2023 Turkish earthquake: the chapters on Antioch and its modern overlay Antakya are an elegy for a shattered city.
The chapters are sometimes repetitive, and sometimes read like potted histories (lists of battles, kings, religion). Pangolis often omits the BC on dates: this confused me at first ('recent results do indeed put the foundation of the city sometime between 835 and 800') and would be more acceptable if the histories she recounts didn't span both BC and AD. And the section on Ravenna (with its lengthy description of Lord Byron's affair with a Ravennese lady) didn't quite fit with the other cities under discussion.
Also, I think the author was confused: 'In the archaeological museum in Syracuse there can be found the skeleton of a curious one-eyed dwarf elephant. In 1914 the palaeontologist Othenio Abel suggested that the presence of these giant one-eyed creatures in Sicily gave rise to the legend of [the Cyclops] Polyphemus' [loc. 1852]. No, the elephants weren't one-eyed: their skulls, though, do have a large central opening, the proboscis cavity.
Overall an interesting read, but I would have liked more of the author's modern experiences ('the crackle of the live coral'; climbing over walls to visit the stones of Carthage) and less of the battles-and-kings history.
Some things I learnt:
- 'In 1985, the mayors of Carthage and Rome finally signed a peace treaty, officially ending the Third Punic War, which otherwise had lasted 2,131 years.'
- Justinian's Plague wiped out nearly a quarter of the population in the eastern Mediterranean
- The Marsala shipwreck 'reads like an instruction booklet for ancient shipwrights, with letters from the ancient Phoenician alphabet demarking where sections joined another, and which piece went where' [loc. 1174]
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