Ancient greece

Sir Trevor Nunn is directing a play called ‘Dessert’. It seems to be a virtue-signalling riff on the evil of possessions. Doubtless Cicero and Aratus will not feature. On the face of it, the Roman statesman Cicero (1st c bc) was a passionate upholder of property rights. He said ‘it is the proper function of the state and its citizens to ensure for everyone the free and undisturbed guardianship of their possessions’. But that did not mean ownership of property overrode the state’s central purpose and therefore duty — the maintenance of social cohesion and so social harmony, that concordia to which Cicero returned again and again.

In a political ‘post-truth’ world, currently the subject of a slew of books, emotions and personal belief are said to shape opinion more than ‘objective’ fact. But as Aristotle pointed out in his Art of Rhetoric (4th century bc), there are facts only about the present and past; about the future, politics’ main concern, there are only interests and aspirations.

When Gerry Adams rose to announce at his funeral that Martin McGuinness was no terrorist but a ‘freedom fighter’, the historian Thucydides probably allowed himself a grim smile. He knew all about these sort of people. In 427 BC, Corcyra (ancient Greek Kerkura, now Corfu) was in the grip of a ferocious civil war between oligarchic and democratic factions for control of the state. The feature that stood out for Thucydides was the reversal of all normal, civilised values on both sides of the divide. Most striking of all, ‘men reversed the usual evaluative force of words to suit their own assessment of the situation’.

Now that Philip Hammond is promising yet more tax hikes, he might consider how Athens managed it. During the whole period of their direct democracy (which ended in 323 BC), the decision-making assembly was dominated by the poor. Their empire made Athens a wealthy place, and the poor ensured that wealth came their way, not that of the rich, in forms such as payment for jury service, rowing the triremes (which kept the empire together) and much more. Meanwhile, tax was paid only by the rich. The 300 top richest every year paid property taxes to, for example, construct and maintain Athens’ triremes and fund state festivals for public enjoyment.

Hardly a week goes by without someone applauding Thomas Carlyle’s objection to democracy: ‘I do not believe in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.’ In other words, infinitely wise politicians should tell the unenlightened mob what to think, not vice versa. Such feelings have been common ever since the Athenians invented direct democracy in 508 BC, which lasted till 323 BC and handed to citizens in the assembly (the dêmos) the power to decide all Athenian policy. One anonymous writer described the dêmos as ‘ignorant, ill-disciplined and immoral’, ascribing it to their ‘poverty and lack of education’. The philosopher Plato thought a state could be well governed only by Platonic philosophers.

The governor of the Bank of England, Mark Carney, raises his growth forecasts and suddenly everyone believes the ‘expert’. So is it wrong to say that people ‘have had enough of experts’? Yes, totally wrong. Expertise exists: the question is, with what scope? Socrates dissected the problem. In debates in Athens’ democratic Assembly, he pointed out, topics such as building or ship construction were taken to be the business of builders and shipwrights, and anyone who, though no expert, attempted to give advice in those areas was jeered off the platform.

Ex-chancellor George Osborne is planning a book to be titled The Age of Unreason. He says that ‘it will be my attempt to understand why populist nationalism is on the rise in our western democracies’. An Athenian would have been most surprised by that title’s implications. If the ancient Greeks are famous for anything, it is for the invention of western ‘philosophy’. By that is usually meant the attempt to explain the world in humanly intelligible terms, i.e. by the exclusive use of reason and evidence, without calling in aid the supernatural. This sort of thinking, begun by eastern Greeks in the 7th century BC, reached something of an apogee (at least in the eyes of most later generations) in 5th- to 4th-century BC Athens with Socrates, Plato and Aristotle.

As self-important comics fantasise about unseating Donald Trump with their wit, they should remember the great Aristophanes. In 424 BC, he presented a comedy about the controversial politician Cleon. He was (apparently) the son of a tanner (ugh!), and was seen by contemporaries, including the historian Thucydides, as a ‘brutal’, ‘insolent’ but ‘very persuasive’ braggart — and all too successful. The play opens with two slaves driven out of their house after a beating by their new master Paphlagon (Cleon); he has risen to power by fawning on and flattering the gullible and senile Demos (‘the people’) and telling outrageous lies about his political rivals. So far, so Trump.

Theresa May wants to use grammar schools to create a meritocratic, ‘socially mobile’ society at a cost of £50 million. But that raises the question: merit in what, precisely? In his Republic, Plato envisaged Socrates wondering how society was created, with a view to determining how best to establish a just one. Socrates suggested that society originated out of universal needs which individuals could not necessarily satisfy themselves. Food, shelter and clothing were the most basic ones, demanding therefore farmers, builders and weavers; and since everyone had different aptitudes, workers best served the whole community by sticking to their last. Then again, the farmer needed his plough, the builder his tools, etc.

What to do about today’s Olympic drug cheats? Since ancient Greeks did not do chemistry, drugs were not a problem. They could, however, be banned from competing on many other grounds. The system worked as follows. The one-week games, always staged at Olympia, were overseen by a panel of judges from the nearby town of Elis (36 miles away), and it was these judges who determined the eligibility or otherwise of any competitor. Their key requirement was that every contestant turn up at Elis a month before the games began. Here the athletes completed their final training in the facilities provided for the events (various categories of running, jumping, throwing, fighting and riding), under the eye of Elean trainers and judges.