History

The last King Charles was crowned in 1661. Samuel Pepys attended the ceremony. He was captivated by ‘the sight of all these glorious things… sure never to see the like again in this world’. He later became so merry, he told his diary, that ‘my head began to turne and I to vomitt…Thus did the day end, with joy everywhere’. We live in a more decorous age, but I think Pepys imbibed the right spirit. The coming coronation of King Charles III should be joyful too. The paradox is that joy will not be achieved unless the ceremony is solemn and magnificent. Early signs give slight cause for concern. On Tuesday last week, the coronation was announced for 6 May, half the traditional time gap.

The Labour MP Rupa Huq, of Pakistani heritage, has been suspended for suggesting that Kwasi Kwarteng, of Ghanaian heritage, was only superficially black and did not sound black on the radio. The ancients would have been baffled by her comment. They were fascinated by their world’s many different cultures, but colour held no significance for them. People’s beliefs, however, were a matter of great interest. The widely travelled Greek historian Herodotus (5th century bc) produced a fine example (among many others): while Greeks expressed utter revulsion at the Indian idea of eating their dead, an Indian tribe also did so at the idea of burning their dead. Conclusion: there was no right and wrong way to do it. It was simply a matter of custom.

The German branch of the ‘green’ organisation Peta (‘People for the ethical treatment of animals’) is demanding that, until men stop eating meat – apparently they cause 41 per cent more pollution than female carnivores – women must deny them sex. The same sanction had its origin, of course, in Aristophanes’s comedy Lysistrata (411 bc), staged during the war between Athens and Sparta (431-404 bc), just after Athens had suffered a disastrous defeat in a failed attempt on Sicily. Naturally, an organisation like Peta might well think the play was in earnest. Was not Lysistrata proposing a noble, female-instigated sex-strike, by the women of both sides, to stop a war?

The death of Her Majesty raises the question of a commemoration of her extraordinary years of service. Augustus ruled the Roman empire from 27 bc to ad 14 and was the longest serving of the roughly 70 emperors of the western empire (which ended technically in ad 476). He may have cracked a joke on his deathbed, asking those around him to applaud if he had played his part well in the comedy of life, but he was in deadly earnest about documenting in the first person a selective record of his own achievements (res gestae) for posting across the empire in both Greek and Latin. For example, he tells how he gave every Roman citizen 400ss. (nearly half a soldier’s annual pay) in 29, 24 and 11 bc and more than 1.2 billion ss. in handouts to soldiers.

James Howells has spent years trying to persuade Newport council to allow him to spend millions digging up a rubbish tip to find a computer hard-drive, possibly containing yet more millions, which he threw away in 2013. The ancients, who found obdurate behaviour fascinating, often explored such human failings in their myths, many of which featured horribly appropriate outcomes. Erysichthon (‘one who pulls up the land’) provides a good example. Let the poet Ovid explain. Erysichthon, a man who never sacrificed to any gods, hacked away at and pulled down a much-venerated oak tree, hung with votive offerings and sacred to Ceres, goddess of the grain that feeds the world; further, he both beheaded a man who tried to stop him and ignored the tree’s threats of punishment.

It is clear that the country will soon need a Water Czar. Augustus’s right-hand man Agrippa would be the one to reshape the whole system, and Frontinus to ensure it all worked. Of Rome’s aqueducts, ‘cut-and cover’ masonry channels, following the contours of the ground, made up 80 to 90 per cent of their total mileage, with tunnels and arches only as necessary. Rome’s first three aqueducts, built between 312 bc and 144 bc, were ten miles, 40 miles and 56 miles long, the last with arches along the final flat seven miles into the city.

The battle to be PM raises the question: in a functioning democracy, how should arguments be won? Surely, by persuasion. But for ancient Greeks, too often it seemed to be by flattery. The Greek for ‘flatterer’ was kolax, and a comedian described a kolax’s lifestyle as follows: he would dress up in his best cloak, hire a slave and head off into town looking for someone rich and stupid, whom he would load with grotesque flattery. With any luck this would result in a dinner invitation, where he would make witty comments, turn the host’s vices into virtues and express delight at being the butt of his jokes.