Ancient greece

Our former culture secretary, Maria Miller, is still apparently baffled at the fuss created by her fighting to the last to prevent her expenses being examined. It was a mere ‘legalistic’ transgression; that’s what MPs do. So that’s OK, then. Socrates once discussed with the young Euthydemus the question of going into politics. Euthydemus’ assumptions about what it entailed were all too simple, which led Socrates into discussing the importance of examining oneself. ‘Isn’t it obvious,’ said Socrates, ‘that people are successful, when they know themselves, and failures, when they do not? Those who know themselves know what suits them best, because they can distinguish between what they can and what they cannot do.

Nigel Farage rather missed a trick in his debate over the EU with Nick Clegg. The Prime Minister has promised us an ‘In/Out’ referendum on the EU in 2017, if the Tories are returned to power. But there is a condition: the referendum will be held (his words) ‘When we have negotiated a new settlement...’ (23 January 2013). The problem is that word ‘When’. Does he really mean ‘If’? As it stands, Cameron’s ‘promise’ has all the hallmarks of the Delphic Oracle. Take poor old Croesus, king of Lydia. The historian Herodotus tells us that he asked the oracle what would happen if he fought the Persian king Cyrus. ‘You will destroy a great empire,’ it replied.

In last week’s Spectator, Rory Stewart, MP for Penrith, was reported to be proposing that we should create in Britain ‘1,000 little city states, and give power right down to all the bright, energetic people everywhere who just feel superfluous’. What did they teach him at Eton? The ancient Greek city-state (polis, source of our ‘politics’, etc.) was certainly ‘little’. There were at any one time about 1,000 of them dotted round the Mediterranean, most consisting of a city plus its surrounding countryside; and because of the nature of the terrain and the limited resources it could command, the average polis was c. 5,000 strong. The explanation of Athens’ power is that it was the largest of all poleis (pl.

Last week Matthew Parris argued that Ukip was ‘extremist’ because its supporters thought of the EU’s ‘methods, despotism and oppression of them and their daily lives as barely distinguishable from those of the Soviet Union’. All right, if Mr Parris insists; but not all ‘despots’ are like Stalin. We entered the EU voluntarily, but as this column noted a few weeks ago, Athens quickly turned a voluntary agreement among Greeks in 478 BC to keep the Persians at bay into something like a tyranny under Athenian control.

Ukip is on the march, and the F word on the lips of every ashen-faced MP in the House — or the NF word, to be exact. What should be NF’s next step? Let the Athenian comic poet Aristophanes insert a tiny thought under his seething trilby. Aristophanes’ Men of Acharnae (425 BC), reflecting the feelings among ordinary, farming people during Athens’ long war against Sparta (the Peloponnesian War, 431–404 BC), opens with the hero farmer Dikaiopolis waiting for the democratic Assembly (all citizen males over 18) to begin. The war has been going on for six years now, and like everyone else he is cooped up inside Athens’ impregnable walls, his farm ravaged by Spartan troops.

The EU’s decision to ignore its own rules and steal money directly from the pockets of the citizens of Cyprus is an important development in the history of an institution that long ago gave up any pretence of being a ‘Union’. It may as well rename itself the European Empire and be done with it. The impetus behind the EU was the prevention of war. So with the Athenian empire. After the Persian Wars (490-479 BC), the Greek city-states decided to form a defensive alliance to end for ever any renewed threat from that part of the world. Each Greek state therefore agreed to donate ships or cash to provide a fleet that would keep the Persians out of the Aegean.