Ancient and modern

David Cameron, once a PR man for a TV company, has brought all his skills to bear on becoming the epitome of everything New Tory stands for, like, er, yes, of course, families (wow!) and the NHS (no!). Is this why he comes over as little more than a pretty windsock, without an idea in his head, but keenly pointing in whatever direction the zephyr blows? Very probably. Such a contrast with so many ancient Greeks and Romans. Take, for example, Pompey. On one occasion he could not make up his mind whether to describe himself as consul tertium on a stage he had had erected in 55 bc or consul tertio (a subtle grammatical point is at stake). He consulted widely among the most learned men of the day, who could not reach agreement. He therefore phoned up Cicero.

A group of gangsters’ molls in Pereira, which evidently has the highest murder rate in Colombia, has decided to withhold sex from their boyfriends until they give up their guns. Inevitably they have been likened to the women in Aristophanes’ comedy Lysistrata (staged in Athens in February 411 bc) whose purpose was to persuade their men to make peace in the war between Athens and Sparta that had been going on for some 20 years. But the Colombian ladies have not been reading their Aristophanes. The point about Lysistrata, the heroine of the play, is that she fully understands the nature of her fellow Athenians, i.e. that the women (in the best comic traditions of the ancient world) are as crazy for sex as their men are, while the men just love fighting.

Gordon Brown has promised that, when he comes to absolute power, he alone (not parliamentary colleagues, let alone the people) will appoint a cabinet ‘of all talents’ to do his bidding. Even the Romans were more democratic than that. Roman toffs naturally took it for granted that none but they could legislate effectively. As Cicero argued, ‘Many evil and disastrous decisions are taken by the people, which no more deserve to be regarded as laws than if some robber had agreed to make them,’ and placed responsibility for law-making firmly with the Senate. That was because the people could in practice override the Senate, since the Senate contained tribunes of the plebs who could veto any legislation which they did not feel to be in the people’s interests.

The government ardently denies that its proposal to allow 24-hour drinking will lead to streets filled with drunks. It then legislates to, er, deal with streets filled with drunks. Nothing could more perfectly exemplify Plato’s brilliant image of law-makers as people ‘slashing away at a kind of Hydra’ — the many-headed monster which grew two heads for every one chopped off. In his Republic, Plato (429–347 bc) argues that it is the mark of a badly governed society to need constant rafts of legislation. He likens such societies to the sick, who imagine that they will get better by stuffing themselves with varieties of medicines, when they should be changing their way of life instead. Plato’s contemporary Isocrates develops the point.

Whenever the subject of the EU comes up, someone is bound to compare it to the Roman empire. If the comparison relates to the beginning and subsequent development of that empire, it fails. But the end of the Roman empire in the West in the 5th century ad may well offer quite a good model of how EUthanasia will set in. Rome entered the imperial stakes after defeating Carthage in the first Punic war (264–241 bc). The two greatest powers of the western Mediterranean had been fighting it out over control of Sicily, which became Rome’s first provincia when Carthage surrendered.

Since Christmas is the season of good cheer but seems to leave millions squabbling, resentful and as miserable as sin, it is an appropriate time to consider what the key to happiness is. The ancients provided two distinct but highly practical theories, easily condensable into the average cracker.