Ancient and modern

‘And lo, there were shepherds in the fields, watching over their flocks by night...’   Reading recently that it was the 25th anniversary of the invention of the world wide web, I reflected (yet again) on the difficulty of creating in any of our minds that sense of the world as experienced by the Greeks and Romans. So the ancients did not have Xboxes, Y-fronts, or a ‘knowledge’ economy? Or a civil service, a banking industry, or any industry? Or any institutions like universities, the BBC or the FA? Well, well. In his Works and Days (c. 680 bc), the Greek farmer-poet Hesiod gives us some sense of the unrelenting peasant life which was the lot of most ancients — that daily wrestling with nature for simple survival.

To watch the Revd Paul Flowers being grilled by the Treasury Select Committee on his role in the demise of the Co-op Bank is to watch a master charlatan at work: dignified, polite and supremely self-assured, even as he is stripped to the bone by Andrew Tyrie. The ancient world boasted plenty of such, and they all exhibit identical characteristics. Take one Peregrinus, whose story is told by the Greek satirist Lucian (ad 115–180). He was exiled for killing his father, but saw there was advantage to be gained through the new religion on the block, and became ‘Christian’.

The grim tales of ‘modern slavery’ that are currently emerging across the UK make one wonder whether ancient Roman slavery was preferable. The fact that it was institutionalised means that it could, if you were lucky, be endurable. There was nothing secretive about slavery in Rome. It was felt to be part of the natural order of things — some people were ‘born’ to be slaves — and that was that. As ‘property’, without any legal status, a slave could be treated in any way his or her master liked: tortured, whipped or executed. Over time, however, some degree of legal protection was permitted.

Prime Minister Cameron has rejected the proposal that the age of sexual consent be reduced from 16 to 15, arguing that it was needed to ‘protect children’. In the ancient world, there was no such notion. Girls were to be protected from rape and seduction, but that was because they were destined for marriage, whose purpose was the production of legitimate children. It was fertility that was important, not age. For ancient Greeks, women were reckoned to become fertile at 14. The theory was that in a woman blood and fertility were linked and, by that age, a woman had collected enough blood in her body to have children. If that did not evidence itself in menstruation, sexual activity would bring about the desired result.

On 21 November The Spectator is hosting a discussion about addiction — disease or choice? — and how we should best treat it. This neatly coincides with ‘Live like a Stoic’ week (25 November–1 December), which culminates in academics and doctors discussing how far problems of everyday life can be solved by the Stoic practice of thinking rationally about them — in modern parlance ‘cognitive behavioural therapy’ — rather than by expensive medical intervention. Stoicism was invented by Zeno, a Greek from Citium in Cyprus. In about 301 bc, he began teaching in one of Athens’ covered walkways (a stoa, whence ‘stoicism’). His work was to influence two thinkers in particular: Epictetus (c.

‘Democracy has bad taste’, declared potter Grayson Perry in his Reith Lectures on the BBC about art. Tell that to the inventors of democracy. Ancient Greeks would have been appalled at the reverence accorded the views of potters, artists, chefs and other riff-raff about their work, let alone anything else. The satirist Lucian says of the would-be sculptor: ‘You will be nothing but a workman, doing hard physical labour and investing the entire hope of your livelihood in it. You will be obscure, earning a meagre and ignoble wage, a man of low esteem... a workman and one of the common mob...

A new book about Colonel Gaddafi goes into shocking detail about his monstrous sexual appetites. He used rape as a political weapon and instrument of blackmail. Viagra was on constant supply for himself and his soldiers. His harem travelled with him under the guise of ‘delegations’ or ‘journalists’ (‘Hi, girls,’ Tony Blair greeted them). It was ever thus with tyrants. Herodotus (5th century bc) reports a conversation about the best form of rule between three Persians plotting to overthrow the government. Otanes attacks the single ruler, arguing that, being subject to no institutional control, he can indulge his wishes as he sees fit and this makes temptation irresistible.

Party conferences always provide the most agreeable spectacle of politicians desperately trying to appeal to both the diehards among the party faithful and the soft underbelly of the general public. Aristotle (384-322 bc) lived at a time when democratic and oligarchic groupings within any polis (city-state) were regularly in conflict to impose their system of government, and was all too aware of the problem. In his Politics, Aristotle began by reflecting on the advantages that these two different systems of government offered to citizens within a polis. Democracy, he concluded, appeals to the many poor, because it gives them a say in the assembly, but oligarchy to the rich few, who use their birth, wealth and influence to run the show.

Momentarily banish thoughts of policemen on duty at the House of Commons, and picture a Roman pleb. You will probably visualise a toothless peasant howling for ‘bread and circuses’ (i.e. chariot races), and rioting if refused. But if you were then told that the Roman statesman Cicero and Caesar’s rival Pompey the Great were both plebs, you might reconsider; even more so if you were to discover that the plebs were involved in shaping some of the most dramatic events in the ancient world. For Romans, the term ‘plebeian’ took them right back to the foundation of Rome in, as they calculated, 753 bc. Rome was an agricultural society.

As a result of Russian laws against propagating homosexuality, there are calls to boycott the 2013 Winter Olympics in Sochi and 2018 Fifa World Cup due to be held there. The West’s first historian Herodotus (5th century bc) would not have sympathised. Herodotus’ magnificent Histories of the wars fought between the Persians and the Greeks (491-479 bc) regularly digress into lengthy discussions of the culture and customs of the peoples with whom the expanding Persian empire came into contact. The subject thrills him. He is amazed at the discrepancies beween different cultures. Sex and marriage are of especial interest. Babylonians, for example, gather all girls of marriageable age in the square and sell off the beauties to the highest bidder.

So the USA must launch its onslaught against Syria without the Brits. Well, if Obama will make public announcements of what he is going to do, more fool him. The Roman military tactician Vegetius (c. AD 400) would be shaking his head in despair. Vegetius was writing after Rome had suffered a devastating defeat against the Goths at Adrianople (AD 378), a foretaste of things to come in the western empire. Consequently, he regularly counsels caution in attacking an enemy unless you can be sure you will achieve your ends. Fabius Maximus, nick-named Cunctator (‘delayer’), provided the archetypal example.

Personal privacy in the modern sense became a cause in the USA in the late 19th century, with the massive expansion of newsprint and the development of cameras and professional snappers. Prince Harry clearly has not quite caught up yet. Even the Romans knew what the problem was: privacy was very hard to come by. The reason then was that every top Roman had, as a mark of his status, an army of slaves with him most of the time, ready to do his every bidding. Crassus had 800. Horace composed a poem announcing that he was accustomed to walking alone, but in a few lines it appears he had his slave with him.

Whatever problems Greeks and Romans faced, a politicised priesthood was not one of them. They might have made three observations on Egypt’s current plight. First, though Roman emperors were autocrats, the plebs regularly expressed their displeasure at them, sometimes in street riots, over matters like food shortages. But they did so fully expecting the emperor to respond. Only very rarely did he fail to do so. He was not that stupid: for all his power, he knew he had to keep the plebs onside. This basic insight seems to have escaped the fanatic ex-president Morsi. Second, the most important consequence of the Athenian invention of democracy was to generate a politics in which decisions were reached not by force but by public persuasion.

Richard Dawkins has been confusing his categories again, comparing Trinity College, Cambridge, with Islam. His attack on religion does precisely the same, as if the pre-scientific Biblical account of the world somehow disproves the whole religious phenomenon. The Roman poet Lucretius (c. 100–55 BC) had argued in this way long before Dawkins. In his great poem On the Nature of the Universe, Lucretius built on earlier Greek thought to argue that the whole universe — mind and matter, body and soul, god and man, earth, sky, sun, moon and stars — was made up of atomic particles, below the level of perception, and to explain how it all worked. Further, the gods, made up of self-regenerating atoms, were serenely uninterested in us and our worries.

One definition of addiction is repetition of a behaviour despite adverse consequences. Twitter users will know all about it, especially those on the end of abusive or illegal threats. All communication systems are, of course, liable to such misuse, but presumably technology will fix this problem. Meanwhile, Epictetus (AD 35–135), a freed slave, would advise the abused to (wo)man up. Aristotle defined a decision as ‘a deliberate desire to do something within the agent’s immediate range of alternatives’. Building on this definition, Epictetus argues that our range of alternatives is restricted to our rational faculty, what goes on in our heads: ‘our opinions, impulses, desires, aversions’ and the actions that result from them.

The NHS 111 line, designed to deal with problems that do not count as emergencies, is in financial and organisational trouble yet again, but the Greek historian Herodotus (c. 490-c. 425 BC) may be able to help. In his travels he came across a ‘most ingenious’ public medical service. Many ancient cultures made important observations about the workings of the body and cures for illness, but it was ancient Greeks who tried to rationalise the process. Hippocrates, the father of rational medicine (5th-century bc), laid down the key principle as follows: ‘What escapes our vision we must grasp by mental sight, and the doctor, being unable to see the nature of the disease nor to be told of it, must have recourse to reasoning from the symptoms with which he is presented.