Ancient and modern

Andrew Motion’s tenure as Poet Laureate is about to end, and the search for a successor has begun. It is accompanied with the usual tidal wave of claptrap about this not being ‘the sort of job which any real poet would want’ and the importance of not involving public opinion in the choice. What is it about modern poets that they feel so threatened by the idea of public opinion? Ancient Greeks would have thought them barking. When in Homer’s Odyssey the pigman Eumaeus reported to Penelope the effect that the (disguised) Odysseus’s stories had on him, he says, ‘Sitting in my hut, he held me spellbound.

In the last two columns we have considered Barack Obama as novus homo and orator. But what about his mixed race? The racist seeks the cause for the differences between groups of people in either physiological or genetic determinism. The resulting characteristics are unalterable and define them as inherently inferior. But are prejudice, xenophobia and stereotyping ‘racist’ in those terms? If they are, Romans were certainly racist, as probably all people of all colours, ages and backgrounds have been and always will be. A major theme is the contamination that results from contact with foreigners. Romans living in the East, we are regularly told, stood a fair chance of being corrupted by foreigners’ low morals and love of luxury.

It is no coincidence that the rules of persuasive public speaking were being formulated by Greeks in the 5th century bc when real democracy was in its first flush in Athens; for if a man was to be given the chance to take an active part in open debate in the assembly, he must know how to do it. Handbooks (as well as expensive educations) could help him. Democracy was not just for toffs. But there was a rub: while such resources might be able to show a man how to persuade, would they also help him discern right from wrong? As Plato pointed out, imagine the outcome if a man thought a horse was a donkey and persuaded the assembly to equip its army with a squadron of donkeys to ride into battle.

It is a relief that there is one magazine in which one will not be hauled up on a charge of libel or sexual harassment for writing that Barack Obama, the President-elect of the United States, is a novus homo. So too was the 1st-century bc Roman orator, philosopher and politician Cicero, and he never stopped boasting about it, as well he might — there were only 12 novi homines in the last 300 years of republican Rome. In strong contrast to our system, Romans sensibly designed their ‘constitution’ to make it impossible for anyone with no background in or experience of politics to reach a position of power. From the earliest days, it was families who were patrician by birth who held the top jobs.

‘Are they talking to the trees?’ asked my husband as he banged his stick against a sign attached to a plane tree near the Tate Gallery. He does not need a stick to lean on. He uses it on pedestrians in the way, or, in this case, annoying signs. The sign said: ‘Low tree.’ The tree was quite high, but it leant into the road a little. One would think the sign was intended for bus drivers who might otherwise barge into the obtruding trunk. Yet a big tree is more obvious than a sign, so perhaps it was intended for the benefit of those in authority, lest they give insufficient warning of any conceivable hazard. Then I thought that perhaps my husband was right after all, and that it was a final warning to the trees concerned.

Last time we saw that the Romans did not have anything like a banking system i.e. a machinery for creating credit through various negotiable instruments. What they did have was minted coin — and that was the sole monetary instrument. So at a personal level, if you wanted money, you went to a rich friend and hoped he would help you out with a loan. But if there were no bankers in our sense, there were small-scale businessmen such as money-changers, charging up to 5 per cent to change high-value into low-value coins, who also received deposits and advanced credit. We hear of one Novius receiving a short-term loan of 10,000 sesterces from such a businessman against collateral of grain, chick-peas, lentils and spelt. Penalties for late payment are often attached.

In the banking chaos, we should recall the words of the American president Thomas Jefferson: ‘The principle of spending money to be paid by posterity, under the name of funding, is but swindling futurity on a grand scale.’ There was no such swindling in the ancient world because minted coin was the sole monetary instrument, and there was no machinery for creating credit. So there were no banks in our sense, and only two sources of wealth: agricultural and mineral, the former far more important, but the latter having more dramatic instant consequences. For example, in 483 bc, it would never have occurred to the Athenians to borrow the money from somewhere to build a Persian-defeating fleet. But the lead mines at Sounion suddenly revealed a fabulous seam of silver, and bingo!

A group of 200 pagan worshippers gathered recently at the Parthenon to beg Athena not to allow material to be removed from her temple and relocated in the new, specially designed museum nearby. The goddess was obviously not impressed. One cannot blame her. The ancient relationship between men and gods was perfectly reflected in the way prayers were offered to them. First, you identified the god, and gave him his titles (you must get the right god for the job); then you listed everything you had done for the god and the god for you; then you made your request; and finally you promised that, if the prayer was granted, the god would in the future receive yet more handsome favours. Ancient gods, in other words, were biddable.

Apparently some scientists believe that the patterns in which bumblebees search for food — ‘geographic profiling’ is the technical term — could help detectives hunt down serial killers. The ancients would not have been surprised. It is largely to Virgil in the final book of his ‘farming-manual’ Georgics (c. 29 bc) that we owe our understanding of the extent to which the ancients saw in bees a model for human life. ‘I will set out in order for your admiration,’ Virgil explains, ‘the spectacle of a tiny world, with its great-hearted leaders, its customs and pursuits, its people and battles.’ It is as if bees alone shared in the divine logos (‘reason’) that raised humans above the level of animals.

Last time we saw how Socrates and Plato were among the majority of ancient thinkers who supported the ‘creationist’ theory of the world. But there was an ‘anti-creationist’ lobby too, led by the 5th-century Athenian atomists Leucippus and Democritus. Not that they set out to oppose the creationists; it was just that their understanding of the nature of the world led them, inevitably, to quite opposite conclusions. The atomists hypothesised that minute, unsplittable atomoi, below the level of sense-perception, were the basic stuff out of which the world was made. These atomoi grouped themselves in various ways to produce the world we see around us.

The debate between creationists and anti-creationists is nothing new. As David Sedley shows in his extraordinarily interesting Creationism and Its Critics in Antiquity (Cambridge), it raged as strongly in the ancient world as it does in the modern. The ancients were, for the most part, creationists. The big debate for them was what happened next, i.e. how the physical world came to be. The natural science, therefore, was just as important as the ‘theology’. On this issue the spanner in the ointment [sic] was Socrates. He tells us that, as a young man, he was thrilled by speculation about the natural world: ‘whether it was blood that makes us conscious beings, or air, or fire; or is it the brain that supplies us with our sense of sight and hearing or smell?

The Anglican bishops have met and reached their grave conclusions on a number of doubtless vital issues — except one. What about the Olympic Games? Are they not pagan rituals? And was it not for that excellent reason that the Church banned them? It was Constantine the Great, founder in ad 324 of Constantinople as the ‘new Rome’, who encouraged the spread of Christianity without condemning other beliefs. But bishops like Ambrose of Milan were not enthusiastic about tolerating polytheistic cults or pagan intellectual movements, and their influence began to be felt.

The recent exchange of the bodies of two Israeli soldiers for five living Hezbollah (and much else) has produced outrage in some sections of the Israeli press. Admittedly, it lays Israel open to further blackmail from Hezbollah who, glowing with high-minded idealism, long to capture and murder as many Israeli soldiers as they can. But the press is wrong. Last time, we saw how important it was for ancient Athenian families that their dead be properly buried and their graves tended. This was felt to be even truer of its soldiers who died in battle, whom Athenians deemed worthy of hero-cult.

The recent return of the bodies of two Israeli soldiers in exchange for five living Hezbollah prisoners exemplifies one of the most deep-rooted human feelings: that the dead must come home. At one level, it seems irrational. What do the dead care? But as the ancients knew, it is not the dead who count in this matter, but the living. In some respects, ancient Greeks were fairly relaxed about death. Corpses were not regarded as objects of horror. The prospect of death did not seem to fill them with terror. But while Greeks often expressed doubts about whether the dead possessed any faculties of perception, they equally often spoke as if they valued the goodwill of the dead and feared their disapproval.

We are happy that terrorist suspects be held for 28 days without charge. So there is no problem about the principle. But the government now wishes to extend this to 42 days, and all hell breaks loose. But on what grounds? Since the principle of holding without charge has been established, the time-scale is neither here nor there. Or is it? Though there was no such thing as a state-controlled prosecution service in the ancient world — all actions were brought privately — there was intense discussion about what the law was for and how it should be applied. As we saw two weeks ago, Cicero was in no doubt about what its main purpose was — security. ‘Our ancestors wrote laws whose sole aim was the stability and interests of the state.

Hamid Karzai’s government is said to control a mere 30 per cent of Afghanistan. The rest is in the control of tribal leaders and the Taleban. As David Miliband says, we will ‘win’ only by diplomacy. The long-term stability of the Roman empire depended on the Romans’ ability to rule through local elites. That was fine where the culture was largely urbanised i.e. with administrative structures conducive to governance and taxation, as it was in the Mediterranean and the Greek East where Alexander had been.  But tribal north-west Europe was generally different. True, where tribes were centralised and hierarchical, as in southern England, Romans could get to work.

Boris Johnson has vowed as mayor to emulate his hero Pericles, turning London into ‘an education to Britain’ as Athens was (Pericles claimed) to Greece. In one sense this will be difficult since the mayor has limited responsibilities, mainly transport and police, none of which feature in any known Periclean policy document. But if Mr Johnson is referring to a generally Periclean tenor to his period in office, there is much he could usefully achieve. First, Pericles (like every other Athenian citizen) wielded power over the decision-making Assembly (all Athenian males over 18) only by his ability to persuade it that his policies were best. He was, in other words, a master orator. But he did not try to fine-tune the Assembly.

Peter Jones investigates whether the Olympic Games have always been political. The sight of Chinese thugs invading the streets of our capital in the name of the Olympic Holy Flame Protection Unit (OHFPU — most people’s thoughts exactly) should banish once and for all the idea that the Olympic Games are not ‘political’. Since the Olympic Games do not do God either, the idea that the flame is ‘holy’ is also rather rich, especially coming from China. The ancient Greeks did do god in a big way at the Olympic Games, since the Games were held in honour of Zeus, god of Olympus (not that Mount Olympus was anywhere near the site).