‘Who are you?” asks Ingrid Rossellini at the outset of “Know Thyself: Western Identity From Classical Greece to the Renaissance.” It’s a question that she intends her survey of art, literature and ideas to help us answer. She declares in her preface that she proposes “to return to the early times of our history with the intention of rediscovering the building blocks of our contemporary personality.” This grand claim goes beyond what she actually attempts in “Know Thyself,” to say nothing of what she achieves.
The injunction “know thyself,” in its original Greek version, was inscribed at the entrance to the oracular shrine of Apollo at Delphi. It was addressed to those who sought knowledge of their futures. Before we can gain such knowledge, Apollo seemed to say—before we can know where we are headed and steer our course straight—we must know who we are and from where we have come.
The story of Oedipus exemplifies the maxim’s meaning. Oedipus learned, when consulting the Delphic oracle, that he was destined to kill his father and marry his mother. Because he had a mistaken notion of who his parents were, he ended up fulfilling the oracle’s prophecy in the course of trying to escape it. Running away from his adoptive parents, lest he commit murder and incest, he fell in with the birth father and birth mother he never knew and could not recognize. Only later did he discover that his ignorance of the past had led him into fate’s trap.
Encountering the title of Ms. Rossellini’s book, readers would guess that it includes prominent discussions of the Delphic maxim and of the myth of Oedipus or the play based on it, Sophocles ’ “Oedipus Rex.” In fact, despite a long chapter on Greek thought and literature, the myth is barely mentioned, and the play receives a single thin paragraph. One soon comes to realize that the book’s title and preface are window dressing for what is, in essence, a Cook’s tour of European civilization from Greek antiquity to the end of the Renaissance. The larger themes of “identity” go unaddressed as we trot through three millennia of cultural evolution.
Know Thyself
By Ingrid Rossellini
Doubleday, 469 pages, $30
A Cook’s tour is not a bad thing in itself. The BBC has offered up a valuable one in its recent “Civilisations” broadcasts, an update of the earlier “Civilisation” hosted by Kenneth Clark in the late 1960s. Before Clark came Will and Ariel Durant, co-authors of the “Story of Civilization” books. “Know Thyself” might be described as an update of that well-loved series, with the pacing quickened and the time frame stopping short of the modern period. Analyses of paintings and sculptures take a lead role in each of the book’s chapters, especially when Ms. Rossellini, whose biography describes her as an itinerant university teacher, comes to her own field of expertise, the Italian Renaissance.
As a tour guide, Ms. Rossellini is a stalwart if uninspiring companion. Her voice is closer to the dry tones of the college textbook than to Clark’s deeply personal oratorical flights. She never pauses from her itinerary for, say, first-person reflections or glimpses of her own moments of discovery.
A bigger problem concerns her reliability. No single author could claim mastery of all the areas she covers, but she commits errors that should have been caught by fact checking. Discussing the Persian invasions of Europe described by Herodotus, Ms. Rossellini confuses a bridge built by Darius with a later one constructed by Xerxes. She shows a bust of the Roman general Pompey to illustrate its evocation of Alexander the Great—by means of “the same leonine hairstyle”—though the style she refers to belongs to a different bust. Such missteps are small, but they undermine Ms. Rossellini’s authority. So too her off-target translations of foreign phrases, like the rendering of puer aeternus, Latin for “eternal boy”—a child who refuses to grow up—as “Immortal Baby.”
The subtitle of “Know Thyself” claims “Western Identity” as its theme, raising questions of how “Western” is defined and how other, non-Western cultures are to be regarded. Ms. Rossellini is certainly entitled to limit her survey to Europe, but she occasionally hints at a troubling dichotomy between that continent and the two that border it. Imagining what might have happened had the Persians conquered the European Greeks in the fifth century B.C., she speaks of the snuffing out of “the light of civilization that the Greeks had so brilliantly achieved” and of a descent into “the darkness of chaos and confusion.” This demonizes the Persians far more than the Greeks did and imposes a Manichaean scheme of light versus darkness onto an ancient world where shades of gray were far more common.
Ms. Rossellini’s discussions of the Muslim rule of Spain and of the Crusades, two other cases in which Europe came face to face with non-Europeans, give rise to a similar discomfort. Her longest quotation is taken from a speech delivered by Pope Urban II in 1095 urging a crusade to wrest Jerusalem from the “wicked race” of the Seljuk Turks. She doesn’t endorse such views herself, but merely to quote them at length, without any distancing comment, shows a lack of sensitivity at the least. When she takes note of the cultural fusion that resulted from the Muslim presence in Spain, she mentions Arabic absorptions of Greek and Judeo-Christian traditions but seems far less interested in what Europe learned in return, though she does circle back to this in a later discussion.
“Know Thyself” ends with an exhortation toward inclusiveness and the breaking down of boundaries between the West and “the other.” This timely plea feels at odds with the way that Ms. Rossellini herself has presented other cultures and, like her title and grandiose preface, outstrips the more limited goals of the book itself.
Mr. Romm is the editor and translator of “How to Die: An Ancient Guide to the End of Life,” a just-published selection of Seneca’s writings.