Ancient and modern

A woman is invited to join the Today programme, and the chatteratae are immediately a-twitter on the subject of female equality. Unlikely as it seems, Plato was all in favour of it, as he argued in his Republic, and for a hysterically incorrect reason, too. Women in the ancient world had, in fact, far more important things to do than chair Footsie companies or hold down tightly scripted TV chat shows. The very existence of the state depended on them, for one simple reason: the biological imperative. Any state that did not maintain a viable population level did not survive. So since life was short and survival at birth precarious for both baby and mother, women had to start on the production line as soon as they were fertile.

No one seems to know, or is willing to say, whether the Egyptian army’s intervention in Egyptian democracy was legal or not. Presumably that means it was illegal. But who defines the term ‘(il)legal’? The Athenians, inventors of democracy, decided the dêmos (citizens in Assembly) was sovereign: it made the law, enacted it and revoked it. A famous incident made them realise how dangerous such power could be. In 406 BC, the Athenians defeated Sparta in a sea-battle. But a storm prevented the sailors picking up their dead. Delight turned to fury, and the eight admirals in charge were brought to trial (two fled).

Lord Hennessy has been arguing that, as a result of TV debates between party leaders prior to elections, ‘the plausible tart bit will play too powerfully in [parties’] choice of leader and therefore rule out the decent but non-tarty people.’ It is good to see the modern world finally catching up with Socrates on the question of rhetoric and persuasion. Socrates is in conversation with Gorgias, the famous teacher of rhetoric, about what he thinks he is teaching. The skill of persuasive speech, Gorgias replies, whose purpose is to produce conviction. But, Socrates asks, conviction about what? Right, or wrong? Right, obviously, says Gorgias, which the orator will be able to teach. Socrates demurs: why should an orator, simply by being an orator, know the difference?

One assumes that it will eventually dawn on those so deeply committed to slaughtering each other in Syria that, whatever interest they represent, diplomacy is the only way they will ever reach some sort of settlement that will allow some sort of normality to return. Ancients knew all about treaties, and ancient Greeks had a particularly interesting condition which they always imposed. The Latin for ‘peace’ is pax, which derives from a verb meaning ‘agree to a price, reach a settlement, make an arrangement’ and even ‘engage oneself to marry’. The Latin for ‘treaty’ is foedus (cf. our ‘federation’), associated with a word meaning ‘trust, good faith’. In the end it is all about one’s word.

David Cameron wants the international community to do something about big business avoiding paying tax. If only it were as simple as that. Ancient philosophers, beginning with Aristotle (4th C BC), made a distinction between man-made law, which was peculiar to a state that made it and derived its validity simply from its adoption by that state, and natural law, which was universally valid. One could say that the former was right because it was law, the latter was law because it was right. Cicero (1st C BC) called this universal ‘world’ law ius naturale, identified it with divine reason and associated it with another concept, that of the ‘law of nations’, ius gentium. Fine for philosophers.

Syrians continue to slaughter each other, and seem eager to draw others into the conflict. Thucydides, the great Greek historian of the Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta (431-404 bc), would strongly resist. Thucydides starts by saying that he began his history because he expected the war would be ‘great and very well worth recording’. After assessing previous conflicts, he concludes that it was indeed ‘greater than all others’, but qualifies what he means by that: ‘there was suffering unparalleled on such a timescale... never before were so many cities captured and laid waste, never before were there such numbers of refugees nor so much slaughter, both in the war itself and as a result of civil strife.

Sir Alex Ferguson is going to be in big trouble in retirement: how will he control or defuse his famous rages, now that they have no outlet? Ancients took a mixed view of the emotion. ‘Anger’ is the first word of Western literature — the anger of Achilles, with which Homer’s Iliad starts. Even though it results in the death of his dearest friend Patroclus, Achilles admits that there is pleasure in it, ‘sweeter than the dripping of honey’. The Stoics, regarding control of the emotions as the key to virtue, were entirely hostile to it.

The Culture Secretary, Maria Miller, has said the arts world must make the case for public funding by focusing on its economic, not artistic, value; it must ‘hammer home the value of culture to our economy’. The ancients would have wondered what she was taking about. There was no concept of ‘the arts’ in the ancient world; nor any concept of ‘art’, at least among the Greeks. What we call ‘art’ was, in Aristotle’s definition, ‘the trained ability to make something under the guidance of rational thought’. It was, in other words, craftsmanship. So ‘artists’ were regarded rather as we would regard car mechanics or dentists.

Every Polly in the country is up in arms about the ‘divisiveness’ of Mrs Thatcher. But for ancient Greeks, opposition, or polarity, was as inherent in the nature of things as it is in our adversarial political system. The first Greek philosopher Thales said: ‘There are three attributes for which I am grateful to Fortune: that I was born, first, human and not animal; second, man and not woman; and third, Greek and not barbarian.’ This is a very typical Greek sentiment.

The new Archbishop of Canterbury has argued against ‘pinning hopes on individuals’. The Roman historian Livy (59 BC–AD 17) would have found that most bizarre. Livy’s 142-book Ab Urbe Condita traced the history of Rome from the city’s foundation in 753 BC to the first Roman emperor Augustus (died AD 14). For Livy, it was individuals above all that counted. The seven early kings of Rome shaped by their own decisions much of Rome’s later history. In the early republic (from 509 BC), the elite patricians, the land-rich, wealthy families who had advised the kings and now held all the top posts, were in constant conflict with the non-elite plebs, who wanted a share in power and a fairer distribution of the land.

Every ancient Greek juror would have warmed to their descendant Vicky Pryce, when she admitted in court that she wanted revenge on her faithless husband. Revenge, in other words, did not just happen in Greek myth. It was a splendid reason for going to law. In Plato’s Republic, ‘justice’ was defined as ‘rendering to every man what he was owed’, taken to mean ‘doing good to your friends and harm to your enemies’. This was a principle of conduct said to have been ‘laid down’ and ‘prescribed’ by one orator, and so common that Xenophon could say that true manliness was to ‘excel friends in benefaction and enemies in harm’. It was endlessly touted as justification for a case in Greek courts.

The Catholic tradition of priestly celibacy (Latin caelebs, ‘unmarried’), by which Cardinal O’Brien was bound, is not a dogma, but a discipline. In other words, it can be altered at the rotation of an encyclical. Like much else in the Catholic tradition, it has its roots in the pagan world. Asceticism derives from the Greek askêsis, ‘training, practice’. Pagans had long believed that humans could be transformed through mental and physical discipline. Pythagoras, for example, thought that the element of the divine in us could be brought out by fasting and contemplation.

So many people’s reputation is under threat these days — from bankers to cardinals to the Lib Dem peer Lord Rennard — that one imagines reputation management agencies, online or otherwise, are doing terrific business. The ancients got there more than two millennia ago. Greeks regularly expressed their desire to be virtuous in terms of being ‘seen’ to be so, as if there were no point in virtue per se unless people knew about it. One law-court speaker puts it like this: ‘What is at stake for me is not simply to recover a large sum of money, but to avoid being thought to have dishonestly coveted what was not mine. That for me is the most important consideration.