Sparta

If Nigel Farage is so confident that the £5 million donation he received from a friend is entirely kosher, why is he so frightened of being subjected to the official parliamentary code of conduct on the matter, or does he think he is above such scrutiny? That is a dangerous tightrope to tread. In 406 bc, after a naval battle in the long war between Sparta and Athens, a ferocious storm prevented the Athenian generals from picking up their survivors and the dead. In the law-making democratic Assembly, consisting of all Athenian male citizens over 18 (the dêmos), fury was high, and there was a demand from one Callixenos that the six out of the eight generals who had returned to Athens should be tried en bloc.

Americans never tire of asking themselves whether their country is turning into Rome. A Latin motto on the Great Seal of the United States proclaims a novus ordo seclorum – a “new order of ages.” But in the poem from which that phrase is adapted, Virgil’s fourth eclogue, the words mean a quite exact replay of past events: there will be, for example, another voyage of the Argo and another Trojan War. Our new order might likewise repeat the history of Rome. One philosopher who gave a great deal of thought to new orders and Roman history as a template was Niccolò Machiavelli, particularly in his Discourses on the First Ten Books of Titus Livy.

Boris Johnson’s Unleashed imagines him, like Cincinnatus, leaving his plough, saving Rome, and returning to it. But given that Boris is among the international elite, perhaps Alcibiades (c. 451-404 bc) would fit him better. Athenian elites had long had connections with the other power-brokers of the classical Greek world, Sparta and Persia. Born into such a family, the young Alcibiades, at the death of his father in 447 bc, was placed in the care of the great Athenian statesman Pericles, who chose Socrates as his mentor (we are told he tried to seduce Socrates but failed). A charismatic and handsome young man, he led a life of ‘lawless self-indulgence’ but, as a formidable strategist, he built an alliance to sustain the long war against Sparta, though it was defeated in 418 bc.

Serifos There’s no high life here, only family life, so I’ve been hitting the books about great Greeks of the past, and they sure make today’s bunch look puny. Philosophers, playwrights, statesmen, artists, poets, orators, sculptors; the ancients had them all. After 2,500 years, they’ve never been equalled. I was once walking around the Greek wing at the New York Met and I ran into Henry Kissinger, whom I knew slightly. He asked me what the population of ancient Athens was. ‘About 20 to 30,000 citizens,’ I answered. He shook his head in amazement. ‘And they produced all this,’ he said.