Peter Jones

By the 5th century bc, probably thanks to the Babylonians, enlightened Greeks were well aware that eclipses were natural phenomena. On 3 August 431 bc, Pericles was about to lead his triremes into battle when a solar eclipse occurred, and panic broke out among his men at the ‘omen’. Pericles promptly wrapped a cloak around his helmsman’s eyes and asked whether he thought that was an omen. ‘Of course not,’ replied the helmsman. ‘Same difference,’ said Pericles. ‘The eclipse has just been caused by something bigger than this cloak.’ There was a very different outcome when a lunar eclipse occurred as the Athenian army was about to retreat from Sicily (27 August, 413 bc): the general Nicias ordered a fatal 3 x 9 day delay.

If the great Rod Liddle was a satirist, as many columnists have suggested, he was not one in the Roman tradition. They invented satire, which often worked by contrasting a corrupt Rome with the golden years of the past.  But Rod was a political animal, like the Athenian comedian Aristophanes (5th C bc), whose plays attacked the living, like Socrates, and even his audience, if he felt they were being too easily deceived by politicians he hated, such as Cleon. In 424 bc, he imagined the Athenian state as a household, headed up by Dêmos (‘The People’). Dêmos is served by two slaves (= politicians), who are fed up that a foul-mouthed new slave, Bullshitter (Cleon), has taken total control of their master.

Elon Musk, who does not rate Christopher Nolan’s film of The Odyssey very highly, has said: ‘Before this year ends, Grok [Musk’s AI] will make a full-length movie of The Odyssey that is historically accurate and true to the art of Homer.’ Will it, now? Around 1200 bc the city that Homer calls Troy or Ilium was destroyed by fire and warfare. In 1873, this site (which archaeologists now call Troy VIIA) was excavated by German adventurer Heinrich Schliemann, who announced to an astonished world that it was the well-spring of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey. The problem is that there is no evidence at all that VIIA was attacked by Greeks. But there are passages in the Iliad which could be said to match some of the features of VIIA.

‘Things are just completely coming full circle here. For me to be here with you all in the heart of Manchester this Friday morning, at the end of a fairly big week, is just everything to me,’ said a Mr A.M. Burnham MA (Cantab.) after he had sent all his advisers up the hill to Manchester only to send them back down again. Seneca would have had something to say about that. Addressing his friend Lucilius, Seneca points out that it is no surprise that his travels have done nothing for his state of mind and goes on to quote Socrates: ‘Why do you wonder that globe-trotting does not help you, seeing that you always take yourself with you? You cannot shake off the reason that sent you on your travels.’ So what was that reason? Mr Burnham knows about Manchester already.

The McKinsey Institute says that health outcomes for women are less successful than those for men, and it has been argued that men should take a greater interest in the problem. We have names of about 50 female doctors from the ancient world, and one wonders what they made of the male theorists’ views of their bodies. Health in the ancient world was understood to depend upon the balance of the four ‘humours’ (liquids) inside the body: yellow bile (vomit), black bile (from the spleen and liver), phlegm and blood. Having no idea what the purpose of menstruation was, doctors argued that women’s soft and spongy bodies tended to corrupt their blood, which the body very sensibly expelled every month.

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.

A Mr Burnham, A.M. (Andrew Murray) fancies being PM and Labour MPs have decided to humour him. Needing to assert what a democratic triumph this is, they will welcome ideas from Menander, the ancient Greek orator. Menander would suggest starting their acclaim as follows: ‘With favourable omens have you come to us, as splendid as a bright day of sunshine, appearing to us from on high. A welcome report announced your auspicious arrival and the good fortune that your subjects had fervently prayed for.’  MPs should then explain why he is needed, not slandering the previous leader but suggesting the subjects were unhappy, and go on: ‘Just as if night and darkness had held the world in its grip, you appeared like the sun to our eyes and scattered all our hardships at once.

Last week David Hockney was cited as an example of a great English artist who insisted on working, like ancient Greek sculptors, in a well-established tradition. But how did Greek painters work? Let Pliny the Elder remind us. According to Pliny, Apelles (fl. c. 330 bc) from the island of Cos ‘surpassed all painters before and after him’. Court painter to Alexander the Great, he published volumes on the principles of painting – he favoured a palette of white, black, red and yellow – and was modest enough to recognise excellence in others: indeed, he thought a certain Protogenes his equal (he bought his paintings to sell as his own), except in one respect – that he (Apelles) ‘knew when to remove his hand from the picture’.

David Hockney has died, and there has died with him an artist whose work has given those of us who are not artists a very great deal of pleasure, in striking contrast to most art that wins prizes these days. The ancient Greeks did not have a word for ‘art’. The closest they got to it was tekhnê (cf. ‘technical’), brilliantly defined by Aristotle as ‘the trained ability to produce something under the guidance of rational thought’, always difficult to discern in the work of most modern artists. So in the ancient world, the artist was on the same level as (say) a dentist – someone whose purpose it was to serve the ordinary public to the best of his technical capacity.

Newcastle University is advertising for a Director of Academic Advising, which will offer guidance that is ‘inclusive, compassionate, and genuinely personalised to [student] goals’. Plato would have been appalled. Should not students be meeting the university’s goals? In 361 BC Dionysius II, tyrant of Sicily, invited Plato to come to Sicily to educate him on the matter of ruling a country. Plato agreed, but had grave doubts whether Dionysius would respond well to his method, which was to ‘demonstrate the nature of the subject as a whole, and all the stages that must be gone through, and how much effort is needed’ in order to acquire ‘the daily routine which will best foster his powers of learning and remembering and conducting sober debate within his own mind’.

King’s College Cambridge has lost (according to the papers) a ‘famous’ classicist, who resigned because he slobbered wet kisses all over an unimpressed woman. But everyone knows there is only one famous classicist, and she is not at King’s. The classicist at issue surely cannot have been paying too much attention to the literature which one assumes he has studied, because Eros was seen as a sickness, a madness, a god who robs us of our wits, creating a strong and obsessive desire (‘desire doubled’ as an ancient puts it). Plato saw sexual incontinence as a ‘disease of the soul’. Sophocles thought of sex as a ‘mad and savage master’.

An artist, J.R., working with something called Snap Inc., has covered the Pont-Neuf bridge in Paris with a gigantic tarpaulin shaped like a cave, through which the public is invited to walk. It is supposed to represent the underground cave where Plato (d. 348 BC) thought most of mankind metaphorically lived. Of course it bears no likeness whatsoever, being empty of everything with which Plato filled his cave. But then he is an artist, beyond such banausic considerations. Plato’s cave is seen as an allegory of the human situation. Plato sees mankind chained into position from birth like prisoners, able to see only the wall directly in front of them.

Money is a pagan god because it has value only as long as people believe it does. Refuse to believe, and the value disappears. In the 3rd century ad, the Roman empire was under intense pressure, and emperors resorted to increasing taxes and debasing coinage to fund its protection. The result was terrifying inflation. Cash became worthless. Soldiers refused to be paid in it and the state to accept tax in it. So ‘requisitioning of supplies’ – goods, materials, labour – became, in effect, taxation ‘in kind’ to pay for the military; and the army plundered at random to ‘collect’ it. The emperor Diocletian rationalised the system by organising this requisitioning of supplies into a coherent tax scheme.

One could go on endlessly about what the ancients have done for us, but one of the most interesting things is that Plato could be said to have invented women’s lib, though it seems to have taken 2,500 years to catch on. Since most ancient states were at war much of the time, putting the male population especially at risk, women had to commit to the production line as soon as possible if the state were to survive. But Socrates, in Plato’s dialogue The Republic, portrays a utopia in which women shared the same status as men. The ruling class of this state are called Guardians and Plato likens them to dogs hunting and protecting the flock, an activity in which female dogs engage just as much as male dogs (though the males are stronger).

Rumour has it that Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, is selling his agreeable little yacht Koru because it will not fit into places like Monaco and Venice and costs far too much to run. Poor old Jeff! Had he studied Classics, he would have known this was not a wise project. In 240 BC, we are told, Archimedes designed for Hiero II, tyrant of Syracuse, the cargo boat Syracusia, protected by fearsome armaments, carrying 400 tons of grain and 500 tons each of pickled fish, wool and other cargo. It had interior panelling of cypress, ivory and aromatic cedar. Multi-coloured mosaics re-telling the Iliad covered the three floor-levels. There was a temple to Aphrodite, the ship’s guardian deity, and statues and artworks were liberally scattered about.

A Greek essayist c. 420 BC argued that Athens’s radical democracy, giving the vote to every adult male citizen, resulted in the poor having total power to impose their will on the rich. Zack Polanski, leader of the Green party, must dream of such a world. The essayist agrees that, since the poor row the ships which control the Athenian empire, they have a right to enjoy political power which allows them to serve their own interests in the weekly Assemblies. But he thinks that, while the educated rich are most concerned about what is just and good, the common poor are ignorant, disorderly good-for-nothings. Their power simply ensures that they can satisfy their own lawless needs.

Even the most Magaddicted Maga supporter might have had doubts about Donald Trump depicted as Jesus healing a sick man with his touch, however thrillingly realistic. The trend in Greco-Roman culture for linking mortals with gods was started by Alexander the Great in Persia. In 334 BC, Alexander took his terrifying Macedonian army into Anatolia (Turkey), where Persian power met Greek, and after nine years had conquered most of their vast empire as far as Pakistan. He knew that there was much more to running an empire than conquering an army: one had to win over the people and that meant winning over their leaders, especially the Persian aristocracy at the heart of the governing elite. So he began wearing Persian regal dress and holding court in Persian style.

Apollo, Artemis and Orion have not been named at random. The first two are brother and sister, and all three are known in myth as hunters – which is what the astronauts are. Ancient Greeks would have been very envious of them. The satirist Lucian (c. AD 125-180) had great fun with space travel. In his True History, he describes how he sets off with his companions to sail the Atlantic when suddenly a typhoon whirls them up to the Moon, but after many adventures he is able to return and describe what he saw. There are no women, but men act as wives. They produce children in the calf of the leg. The children are born dead but brought to life by breathing in the wind. Men then become husbands. Their noses run with honey and when they exercise, they sweat milk.

What do you do with a captured soldier? In 255 BC, fighting the Carthaginians, the Roman consul and general Marcus Atilius Regulus was taken prisoner near Tunis. They sent him back to Rome, having sworn an oath that he would ensure the release of some important Carthaginian prisoners; but if he failed, he himself would return to Carthage. Regulus went back, informed the Senate of his mission, took no part in the discussions or the vote, except saying that the prisoners were fine, active young officers, while he was bowed with age. The Senate decided not to return them, and Regulus made his way back to Carthage, well aware of the consequences.