Peter Jones

Ancient states did not produce ‘budgets’. Ninety per cent of Greeks and Romans lived in self-sufficient farming communities; the rest sought work in the cities. No one expected the state to provide them with ‘services’ except in the case of famine or natural disasters, while state budgeting played a role only when war threatened or an attack planned. In 483 bc Athens’s miners at Laurium struck a massive vein of silver, and the Assembly decided to distribute it among the population. Then the far-sighted Themistocles intervened, suggesting it would be better spent on building 200 triremes with which to create a maritime empire that would rule the Aegean. The Assembly agreed.

All too often complaints are made about MPs, civil servants or other officials who hold on to their jobs despite their failure to deliver the goods. No ancient Athenian would have put up with that. They believed in real democracy: power to the people (the demos), a power expressed through the Assembly, consisting of all Athenian males over the age of 18, who actually made the law (the courts merely passed decrees). Athenians made public appointments by lot. Any Athenian male in good standing over the age of 30 could put his name into the hat to serve for one year as an unpaid state executive in charge of e.g. roads, market controls and much else. The only exceptions were military and financial positions, decided by a vote of the Assembly.

Donald Trump, who has decided not to allow the televising of the spectacle of a soldier being executed by firing squad, has clearly been reading Seneca the Younger, as he would. After all, Seneca was one of Nero’s advisors. In a letter to his friend Lucilius, to which the modern title ‘On Crowds’ has been added, Seneca gives an account of his day at the gladiatorial games. In between the slaughter of animals (in the morning) and of other gladiators (in the afternoon), there was a midday interval which Seneca decided to attend in the hope of finding amusing and witty entertainment of some sort. Far from it. What he saw were condemned criminals, with no armour, fighting each other to the death and being urged on enthusiastically by the crowd. Not that the winner was released.

How much longer has Sir Ed Davey got as leader of the Lib Dems? One gets the sense that his efforts to appear as a spring chicken rather than a serious political problem-solver are leading him ever closer into the pot, with a sprig of bayleaf between his teeth. The ancients tended to take the view that there was a behaviour appropriate for each age. Cicero talked of ‘Nature’s single path’, weakness being characteristic of childhood, seriousness of middle age and maturity of old age. But youth’s intensity led them to view their elders and betters as worse than useless.

What is it in our interests to do about immigration? The ancient Athenians came up with an interesting answer. Any non-Athenian who wanted to take up residence in Athens had to register as a metoikos (‘one who changes home’, metic) with the state and their local authority. They paid a monthly tax, were liable for military service, but could not own land or engage in politics. They had to find themselves a citizen sponsor, to support their application for metic status and (possibly) to continue to sponsor them when it had been granted. A metic thought not to have a sponsor risked enslavement.     The purpose of all this was to ensure metics did not get ideas above themselves.

Princess Diana’s brother, Earl Spencer, appears to be out for revenge for the treatment of his sister by the King, particularly for a phone call in which he claimed that Prince Charles, as he then was, said :‘Rest assured, we’ll forget her soon enough.’ Aristotle would have been delighted at how precisely the Earl’s reaction matched his analysis of the angry man. The emotions, said Aristotle, especially anger, alter one’s judgment, causing both distress but also pleasure. At this point Aristotle quotes Achilles who in the Iliad (the epic of Achilles’s destructive wrath) acknowledged anger as ‘far sweeter than oozing honey, spreading in a man’s heart and expanding like smoke’ (what an image!).

If Gary Lineker wants to convert his footballing OBE into something better reflecting his wealth, he will have to try a little harder. His latest suggestion that all rich men should be taxed more was not a hit. Let him pause the day-job hawking crisps and instead propose an ancient Greek solution to our financial problems. Every year in Athens, the richest 300 citizens could be instructed to carry out a leitourgia, lit. ‘work in the interests of the people’, i.e. an obligation to subsidise a state activity (origin of our ‘liturgy’). The wealth in property that qualified a man for such a duty was 3-4 talents (18,000-24,000 drachmas). This duty could involve anything from equipping a trireme for a year to underwriting cultural festivals. These did not come cheap.

The problem with Nigel Farage is that he seems to be something of a chancer and, as a result, tends to attract chancers to his cause. The notion that ‘like attracts like’ goes back to the ancient world. It first occurred in Homer’s Odyssey, and was picked up by Plato, for whom good people are naturally attracted to other good people. The philosopher Democritus even observed how mixed pebbles of different types, when agitated, naturally resolve themselves into groups of the same size and shape. Aristotle saw three categories of friendship. One sort is driven by usefulness, the advantage that two people can bring each other. But once that mutual benefit disappears, the friendship disappears with it.

A Mr A.M. Burnham announced at his elevation that he would bring ‘hope’ to the country. A fine sentiment. But hope in what? And how many parsnips will it butter? Greek myth told of Pandora, the first female. Because of the tricks Prometheus had played on Zeus to help men, Zeus made her irresistible to males, but the source of men’s woe. She was given a jar said to be filled with all (‘pan’) the gifts (‘dora’) of the world but filled instead with all the evils. She opened it, flooding the world, with only hope left as a counterbalance. But the Greek word we translate as ‘hope’, elpis, had strong overtones of ‘expectation’. It could be a source of comfort and resilience, but equally of delusion.

A Mr A.M. Burnham has introduced a clear blueprint and legislative goals intended to lift hundreds of thousands of children out of hardship. One can hardly wait – but for the record, in ad 101 the emperor Trajan reintroduced a system invented by Augustus, of alimenta (‘maintenance, means of livelihood’) for poor children. Perhaps this could hold the fort while Burnham’s legislation for the blueprint, or vice versa, is clarified. Alimenta worked as follows. The imperial treasury offered loans to farmers against the security of a proportion of their land. These loans were not repayable, but interest on them was charged, though at a lower than usual rate. That interest was diverted into the local community to support poor children.

The Chancellor of the University of Cambridge has said the university has ‘lessons to learn from the Jason Arday tragedy’. Well, you can make words mean what you want – the ancient Greeks invented the word tragôidia and it meant ‘goat-song’ – but is ‘tragic’ really the word for Arday? Tragedies reworked the fate of great ancient heroes, whose death was of high significance and meaning to the watching audience. Such dramas were typically characterised by a number of markers. They could include prophecies, warnings, ignorance of the true state of affairs (generating irony), over-confidence accompanied by self-delusion and understanding too late to avoid disaster.

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.