Greece and Rome: Builders of Our World!

Our book today is one I’ve mentioned briefly before: The National Geographic Society’s Greece and Rome: Builders of Our World from 1968, one of the series of great volumes they put out forty years ago and that are now staples of flea markets and yard sales all over the United States. At one time or another, I’ve owned virtually all of these volumes, especially of course Man’s Best Friend and Men, Ships and the Sea (although I’ve never yet found a copy of Song and Garden Birds of North America, so if you encounter it at your next yard sale, feel free to snap it up for me and ship it out to Hyde Cottage), but this one is probably my sentimental favorite.

These wonderfully inviting productions were overseen by National Geographic Society Editor-in-Chief and Chairman of the Board Melville Bell Grosvenor, and they feature artwork by Society stalwarts like Peter Bianchi, Louis Glanzman, HM Herget, Tom Lovell and half a dozen others. Like all the other historical volumes, Greece and Rome features a very pleasingly solid advisory board of actual experts, all of whom, like Merle Severy in the opening chapter “Quest for Our Golden Heritage,” try to strike that ‘informed general reader’ tone the National Geographic magazine has been hitting so perfectly for a century now:

Renaissance men proclaimed the rebirth of Greece and Rome, drank deeply at the wellsprings of their art, and enriched us with the masterpieces. The American and the French revolutions flamed with ideals of the Roman Republic and Athenian democracy. Our forefathers looked at their bold new world through Rome-colored glasses. The Roman patriot became the ideal citizen, the Roman tribune the guardian of man’s rights, the Roman general the most valiant of leaders. Rome’s laws and monuments were a vision of grandeur.

All the key marquee players in the Roman saga are here, most of them in chapters of their own, as with “The World of Alexander”:

A hero-worshiper, he was himself a hero on a grander scale than even Homer conceived. The single decade that brought him from youth to death took him beyond the known boundaries of civilization. Though his epic empire broke up in less time than it had taken him to win it, in death he achieved the ultimate ambition of his hectic life: He joined the demigods in the realm of legend.

Or “In the Footsteps of Hannibal,” where we get ancient history overlaid on present-day reality in the time-honored National Geographic way:

Glitter hides Hannibal’s trail along the Costa Brava. High-rise hotels and escuelas de esqui – schools for water-skiing – have tamed the Wild Coast, today the Spanish Riviera. Hoping for a detour into the past, I turned down a dirt road. It ended abruptly at an old deserted church, set in a deep cork-oak forest overlooking a broad valley – the kind of valley that would lure Hannibal’s foragers. Here slingers and spearmen might bring down game. Raiding parties would seize cattle and grain. Some natives, anxious to see the marauders move on, would surrender their crops and livestock. But not all yielded without a fight. In the 200 miles between the Ebro and the Pyrenees, Hannibal lost thousands of men in unchronicled skirmishes and desertions.

I was very pleased to find a copy of Greece and Rome: Builders of Our World the other day (at the Brattle Bookshop, of course), and unlike the previous copy I owned and mysteriously discarded, this one still had the little pouch in the back containing an absolutely wondrous huge fold-out map of the greater Mediterranean with hundreds of overlaid annotations marking all the various historical and even mythological events that took place in every nook and cranny of the region, back when giants walked the earth. I’m going to try to hold onto this copy.