Ancient and modern

According to Mohamed Al Fayed, the Princess of Wales was murdered on the orders of Prince Philip working in cahoots with some 30 named individuals, the Home Office, the CIA, the Inland Revenue and the French intelligence and emergency services, judiciary and police. Ancient Athenians would have loved it. They saw conspiracies everywhere. Let there be the slightest suggestion, for example, that someone might be at work to (say) destroy the democracy, and panic ensued, ranks closed and politicians would rush to say that Athens was safe in their hands. Take the famous affair of the mutilation of the Hermai (good-luck statues of Hermes) and the profanation of the Mysteries.

Macavity-like, Brown was never there when he was Chancellor, and rarely seems to be there now he is Prime Minister. When he is, he is always blaming someone else or avoiding the question. This is highly reminiscent of the second Roman emperor Tiberius who, like Brown, was following someone, Augustus, who had revolutionised the whole system. But there is a significant difference between them. Emperor was the last thing Tiberius wanted to be. Brown has been dreaming of nothing else. The Roman historian Tacitus could not believe that at Augustus’ death in ad 14 Tiberius was so antipathetic to the idea of assuming power. He therefore considered him duplicitous, cloaking ambition under the image of diffidence.

Last time we saw that the currently fashionable buzz-word ‘change’ was anathema to the Romans, because they looked for stability and permanence, and change implied failure. Romans reinforced this perspective by using the past to act as a guide to the present. The technical term for any particular instance was exemplum. Romans had always seen the old Roman family as the great exemplum, reliable, solid, held together by bonds of affection, the foundation of the stable society; and the key to that bonding was pietas, the respect for man and god that created those bonds and the duty that nourished them.

‘Change’ is the latest buzzword of contemporary politics. Change is, of course, quite meaningless until one knows what (precisely) is being changed and to (precisely) what; and, for a government in power for ten years, it leaves hanging in the air the objection, ‘If you want to keep on changing things, it rather suggests that you have kept on getting things wrong.’ The Romans had a terror of change. ‘Moribus antiquis res stat Romana virisque’, /intoned the epic poet Ennius — ‘Rome’s foundations are its tried and tested values and its men’ — and even when the going was at its roughest, Romans went out of their way to deny that change had happened at all.

One moment laws against ‘religious hatred’, the next against smoking in cars, now mobile phones. What next? But then, law-making has been expanding ever since the Romans drew up their XII Tables, c. 450 bc, which were themselves originally a mere X until they decided they needed II more. In ad 533, when the Roman empire in the West was no more, the eastern emperor Justinian published a Digest of Roman law. It was condensed from some 2,000 volumes. Romans despaired of the problem. Julius Caesar decided to reduce the statute book to a manageable size but was assassinated in 44 bc before he could begin. The great Roman historian Tacitus took up the theme, commenting that there seemed to be no end to law-making, and with his usual sharpness put his finger on an exquisite paradox.

One moment laws against ‘religious hatred’, the next against smoking in cars, now mobile phones. What next? But then, law-making has been expanding ever since the Romans drew up their XII Tables, c. 450 bc, which were themselves originally a mere X until they decided they needed II more. In ad 533, when the Roman empire in the West was no more, the eastern emperor Justinian published a Digest of Roman law. It was condensed from some 2,000 volumes. Romans despaired of the problem. Julius Caesar decided to reduce the statute book to a manageable size but was assassinated in 44 bc before he could begin. The great Roman historian Tacitus took up the theme, commenting that there seemed to be no end to law-making, and with his usual sharpness put his finger on an exquisite paradox.

Mission statements and codes of practice are all the rage today among business communities. Everyone has to have one. The trouble is, they are all the same, and consist mostly of strings of platitudes about ‘best practice’ and ‘personal integrity’. ‘Investors in People’ is a favourite example, invented (probably) by the CEOs of the 17th-century slave trade. Had Aristotle been asked to do better, he might well have come up with the following approach. Discussing what the good man needs to do to produce good results, Aristotle says that of any action we undertake we need to ensure that we have got it right in relation to: 1. The time at which we are acting; 2. The issues on which we are acting; 3. The people with whom we are engaging; 4.

Time, now, for a slightly different tack, to point out another great advantage of the Athenian model towards which Prime Minister Brown might even appear to be groping. It has to do with the party system. When Athenian male citizens over the age of 18 gathered on the Pnyx to take decisions about whatever matters of state confronted them, they must have brought with them a raft of prejudices on any number of matters, including their bias towards one or other of the influential, big-name speakers (like Pericles) who would be almost certain to address them. But what they did not bring was any preordained commitment to a party line imposed from above — unlike MPs, who for the most part know what the right answer is before what is laughingly called ‘debate’ is ever joined.

In AD 212, partly to raise tax, Caracalla made citizenship automatic for all free peoples within the empire. But even though many foreigners/barbarians (e.g. Germanic peoples such as Goths, Visigoths and Vandals) settled within the empire to serve in the Roman army (etc.) after that date, we know of very few granted full citizenship. What was going on? The answer lies in Rome’s most brilliant, and certainly influential, invention — a public, structured and codified system of civil law (ius civile). Access to this guarantor of civilised dealings between men was eagerly sought, but it all depended on one’s status. Various disabilities (e.g. being a slave, or a freedman, or guilty of certain crimes) debarred one from all or some aspects of it.

Apparently Gordon is planning another tax raid on savings, this time life-insurance companies which have ‘too much’ money in reserve against rainy days. After his last pension raid, this will not be a popular move. The Romans can help him solve the problem. Apparently Gordon is planning another tax raid on savings, this time life-insurance companies which have ‘too much’ money in reserve against rainy days. After his last pension raid, this will not be a popular move. The Romans can help him solve the problem. Roman finances under the emperors had two destinations: the Aerarium and the Fiscus.

As globalisation of business and communications grows, to what extent will we see globalisation of values? The experience of the ancient world suggests it could be to quite a large extent. Greek and Roman society was, at one level, notoriously conservative. With a social structure that privileged the (very) few at the top of the scale against all the rest, slave-labour, an education and religious system that looked to the past for its justification and continuation, and the absence of technological or economic advance, change was never going to be top of any agenda. Yet Greeks and Romans never ceased to absorb foreign influences and turn them to their advantage. Greeks happily adopted Persian customs in fashion.

Grammar schools? Comps? Sec. mods? City academies? Faith schools? Selection by race? Background? Locality? The argument about education is now, in fact, an argument about the social mix of schools for children between the ages of 11 and 16. What has this got to do with education? In the ancient world, education was run not by the state — though Aristotle thought, in principle, it should be — but by teachers offering their services to anyone who had the leisure and could afford the fees. Since childhood was seen not as an end in itself but a transitional stage leading to manhood, the purpose of education was not to develop the child but to turn him into a functioning adult.

Cinematically fascinating, historical tosh, eye-goudgingly tedious and designed for boys of a mental age of about 13 — such was the general judgment of 300, the film about the holding operation of the Spartans and their allies at Thermopylae against the massive Persian army (480 bc). But how the Spartans would have loved it! First, Spartans are presented in the film as the only Greeks prepared to take on the advancing enemy. In fact they were the leaders of a coalition of Greek states, who had long debated where to attempt to hold up the Persian advance, only finally settling on Thermopylae. Second, the Spartans are portrayed as upholders of freedom and reason.

Primary school pupils in Clackmannanshire, taught to philosophise ‘like Socrates’, have evidently demonstrated dramatic improvements in IQ and other tests. But since the philosophy they are taught is all about working together to seek answers to problems — a worthy aim, of course — it is not at all clear how Socratic they are actually being. The whole point about Socrates is that he began from one simple premise: that he knew nothing. That was why he was so baffled when a friend of his, Chaerephon, asked the oracle at Delphi whether there was anyone wiser than Socrates, to which it replied ‘No’.

Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran — how intelligently is the West, especially America, handling the East? The Romans may have something to say on the matter. When the Romans took on Carthage in the two Punic wars for mastery of the western Mediterranean (264-241 and 218-201 bc), they engaged with an enemy as militarily brutal as themselves. Carthage defeated, Rome turned its attention to states that had supported Hannibal and took them out as well — and so the Roman empire grew. Such a strategy was wholly typical of Rome, the method by which this small city-state had earlier won power across all Italy.

Last time we saw how the Athenians always reverted to type when they established large-scale alliances with other Greek states: what started off as a free union of states pursuing mutual interests slowly turned into an empire run by the Athenians pursuing their own interests. The parallels with the EU were all too clear. How, then, do we finish the whole thing off once and for all? Very simply, if we look at what happened to the Roman empire in the West. Some three years ago this column listed the 210 reasons for Rome’s collapse that the German scholar Alexander Demandt had unearthed in the literature — everything from earthquakes to female emancipation via hyperthermia, marriages of convenience and public baths.

The country ‘needs’ more scientists, but no one yet seems able to crack the problem. Ancient attitudes may suggest a way ahead. The earliest Greek ‘scientists’, c. 600 bc, speculated about how the world was made. They assumed there was a basic stuff (or stuffs) from which everything derived, and argued about what it might be and how it changed into the different forms of matter we see around us. From such speculation an atomic theory of matter emerged. It was Socrates (469-399 bc) who changed all that, becoming disillusioned with cosmology because it did not seem to have anything to do with ‘the one thing it is in a man’s interests to consider, with regard both to himself and anything else — the best and highest good’.

Elephants have been characterised as highly sensitive, socially aware and intelligent because they have noticed in the mirror a white cross marked on their head. What a pathetic test! Jumbo can do far better than that. The ancients speculated whether animals knew God, had memory, foresight or emotion, could distinguish between the good and the bad, the just and the unjust, could be happy, were political, could count, knew shame and so on. In relation to elephants, however, the elder Pliny (killed in the eruption of Vesuvius ad 79) had no doubts. He summarises: ‘The elephant is the nearest to man in intelligence.

Whatever the eventual result of the West’s incursion into Iraq, the Iraqi people will have to rewrite their history to make sense of the occupation. Doubtless the West will try to influence the outcome — but surely not as cleverly as the Roman emperor Hadrian wooed the Greek world. It helped that the Romans in general held the Greek, in particular the Athenian, cultural achievement in awe. The poet Horace talked of Greece educating rustic Rome in the liberal arts, and the emperor Nero felt his own artistic abilities were more appreciated there than anywhere else. In the ad 130s Hadrian set about proving his admiration for Greek culture by re-developing the city of Athens.

When an emotional Tony Blair bade farewell to the Labour party conference, he said how hard it was to give up, but needs must. The ancients too knew all about the love of power: but at least there was a serious price to pay for failure. Today’s failures simply wind up in the House of Lords. Ancient Greeks were as power-mad as anyone — despite the fact that, of the top ten executive officials appointed every year, two on average incurred the wrath of the people’s Assembly so badly as to be condemned to death. But it did not prevent candidates lining up for the jobs. The price of power came high for Romans too. Assassination of emperors was not uncommon, and damnatio memoriae greeted those who did not come up to scratch.