Greece

I have only been to Alexandria once, some years ago, when Hosni Mubarak was still in power, but it struck me as a sad city. Of course the library was not the library. The lighthouse was not the lighthouse. The city was not the city. I looked around for the remnants of the Greeks who had made it their own, but there seemed little left of them. Is there a cause we are financing so considerable it is decent to pass the cheque on to the next generations? Alexandria was on my mind again this week while reading a new biography of the city’s most famous modern poet, Constantine Cavafy (1863-1933). He was part of that world which migrated across the Mediterranean.

It is agreed that the National Lottery revolutionised British athletics, pouring money into the training of athletes with potential, especially in expensive sports like rowing. In the ancient Olympics, only the equine events demanded serious financial outlay – in theory any male could run, jump, throw or fight – but though we hear of goatherds and ploughboys winning events, the games were still the playgrounds of the rich. The point is that reaching the highest level of any sport requires time, training and doctors, i.e. money. Further, sport, like education, requires leisure, and only the rich could afford that. But the rewards in terms of public fame and acclaim were very high.

Joe Biden, President of the United States, may not have any criminal charges on his record, but his son Hunter does. When ancient Greeks discussed whether aretê (‘virtue, moral excellence, goodness, bravery’) could be taught, or not, such examples came into play. Plato discussed the problem in a dialogue in which Socrates raised the question with the famous sophist Protagoras who claimed to be able to teach anything to make people better. Socrates’s example was Pericles: here was a man of supreme aretê, but his two useless sons simply ‘browsed randomly about like cattle, hoping to bump into it’. Protagoras answered as follows.

In his Art of Rhetoric, Aristotle (384-322 bc) sets about identifying the various headings under which you can be persuasive about any topic. One of the topics is the nature of the young, and as today’s students pick up their loud hailers to make demands about events more than 2,000 miles away in alien cultures which despise most of them, there is much of interest in the similarities and differences. In general, Aristotle says, the young, not having lived long, are inevitably ignorant and lack experience. So they are inclined to do whatever they feel like doing, and are easily satisfied because their wants are not overwhelming. They also lack guile and are trusting, because they have not experienced double-dealing; they tend to assume all men are honest.

The Sentencing Council, consisting of various legal authorities, has told judges and magistrates to consider, when sentencing the young, their ‘difficult and/or deprived backgrounds or personal circumstances’. To what end? To induct the young into proper moral behaviour, Aristotle thought that family discipline should go hand in hand with the community’s laws, customs and education. But it was also possible for the young to receive bad training, on which Aristotle thundered: ‘It makes no small difference whether we form habits of one kind or another from our very youth; it makes a very great difference, or rather, it makes all the difference.

The temperature has hit 40°C in Crete, where I am writing this, and although there have been no fires, nothing is quite how it ought to be. I can’t work out whether this is a great opportunity to get a tan or, effectively, the end of the world. My 60-year-old taxi driver tells me that unfeasibly hot summers were a regular occurrence when he was young and that there’s nothing to worry about. But, he adds, he’ll be dead soon anyway so why should he care? Right or wrong, this is the paradox at the heart of the climate change debate. Older people, who could be held responsible for the destruction of the planet, don’t need to worry. And young people, who have so much more to lose, don’t really have a say. We invented plastic. They live with it.

Thirty-five years ago, the late Christopher Hitchens published a book about the Elgin Marbles. Unsurprisingly, it was a polemical work; he was passionately campaigning for the return of the sculptures to Athens. But that was not the reason why I wrote a scathing review of it for The Spectator. Parts of it were plagiarised, as I showed, from the classic book by William St Clair; and in some places Hitchens dealt with the awkward fact that the evidence did not fit his claims by abbreviating the quotations, filtering out the unwanted bits. Hitchens replied with a thunderously disdainful attack on me in the letters page. I said to the then editor, Charles Moore, that I feared that if I met Hitchens at a Spectator party he would punch me on the nose.