Tuesday Book: Too much Greece in the recipe

The Pimlico Dictionary Of Classical Civilizations By Arthur Cotterell, Pimlico, pounds 12.5

"WHAT IS a Classic?" asked T S Eliot, not in jest, and gave a rather staid answer. Snappier by far was Italo Calvino's article "Why Read the Classics?", available in his brilliant collection The Literature Machine. Eliot and Calvino were talking about classical texts, but their questions apply equally to whole cultures. Yet there is no entry for "Classical" in Arthur Cotterell's dictionary, nor any relevant discussion in the preface. He seems simply to assume that ancient Greece, Rome, Persia, India and China were in some uncomplicated way "Classical" civilisations. There is no discussion of canon, heritage, reception, the whole cultural paraphernalia underpinning the judgement that these civilisations, and not others, are "classical".

The breezy reference to "the classical age" merely compounds the felony. Ages are not born, but made by historians. They do not exist as a kind of Platonic Form, somehow "out there" and needing only to be recognised. They are constantly subject to retrospective revision and, if need be, replacement. Karl Jaspers' idea of an "axial age", linking the Buddha, Zoroaster, Confucius, Solon and Numa, was one such attempt.

Here is an opportunity missed, an especially culpable failing in a volume positioned for the "intelligent general reader". Greece and Rome, we are told, have for too long been allowed to hog the "Classical" tag. Persia, India and China deserve their place in the sunlight alongside them.

Fair enough. But, if that is not to be a mere gesture towards multicultural inclusivity, why not include the civilisation of the Jews, creators of "classical" Hebrew and one of the classical texts, who are granted merely a single two-page entry? And why have so much, still, on the Greeks and the Romans?

One answer is that Cotterell's categories are predominantly political rather than cultural, with a lingering outmoded bias towards military descriptions ("Ionian Revolt", "Persian Invasions", for example). Another, less flattering, is that this dictionary is by no means his first foray into this terrain. It is claimed on the cover that this is an "original and unique work of reference which breaks new ground by treating for the first time the classical era of the Old World as a whole". It is nothing of the kind.

Consider only two of Cotterell's own previous volumes, The Penguin Encyclopedia of Ancient Civilisations (which in 1980 already included the five selected Old World "Classical" civilisations, and much more) and The Penguin Encyclopedia of Classical Civilisations (the civilisations are - you've guessed them). Not only have these two already done that allegedly groundbreaking job, they have done it much better, visually as well as verbally. In Ancient Civilisations, for example, there is an entry (by Colin Renfrew) addressing the primary issue of what "a civilization" is, and how it may emerge and change.

The initial suspicion that this "new" dictionary is a case of mere bookmaking hangs heavy. It is not dispelled by the performance. We are promised up- to-date references for further reading; often, they are well out-of-date - the prize perhaps going to a 1926 volume, the only work cited for "Thrace". Choice of what and whom to include or exclude will have been taxing, but the decisions are not always transparently self-justifying. Vietnam is in, but not Korea, the Ptolemies, but not Claudius Ptolemy, Herodotus and Thucydides, but not Polybius.

"Population" is an unmissable topic, but its treatment here is not. "Sacrifice" and "Slavery', on the other hand, are adequately done. On the whole, those "intelligent general readers" would be far better advised to consult last year's Routledge Companion to Historiography and the 1996 edition of The Oxford Classical Dictionary, both multiculturally inclusive and, more to the point, properly comparative and interdisciplinary.

Look to the end, as Herodotus and Sophocles sagely advised. Here at last Cotterell's format comes vaguely into its own. No "Zeno" (see Stoicism) or "Zeus" (see Olympia), true, but China is well-represented by the Qin General Zhang Han, the inventor Zhang Heng, the envoy Zhang Qian, the court eunuch Zhao Gao, the Zhou dynasty, and Zhuang Zi, founder of Daoism; bringing up the rear comes Persian Zoroastrianism. Nor is the back matter to be overlooked entirely: chronological tables from 600 BCE (or BC, as Cotterell oddly prefers) to CE (AD) 600, 19 maps and - last but not least - an index of names and subjects which are not titles of entries, from Academy (Plato's) to Zoroaster. But, all the same, let there be no more such dictionaries.

The reviewer teaches classics at Cambridge University; his most recent book is `Democritus' (Orion Great Philosophers, pounds 2)

Paul Cartledge