Peter Jones

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.

Given the tonnage of missiles launched at Iran, it seems remarkable how relatively few Iranians have been killed. But the Americans have no interest in wasting multi-million-dollar ordnance on pain-in-the-ass innocent bystanders. However, Donald Trump is now considering a land invasion. That would have been unwise, as the ancients knew. Understanding all about the problems of land assaults against defended cities, the ancients often preferred to lay siege. That could be a long and wearisome business and did not necessarily guarantee success. Troy was besieged for ten years, but it took the trick of the wooden horse to take it. So when the Persian king Darius (c.

A discussion has broken out about the end of liberalism and emergence of the age of the tyrant. Our political term ‘liberalism’ refers to civil liberties, constitutional government, free trade and so on. It used to mean something very different. ‘Liberalism’ comes from the Latin word līber, ‘free’ (nothing to do with liber, short i, ‘book’). The noun lībertās carried the full range of words relating to the idea of ‘freedom’. But the adjective līberālis referred to the status of a human being in the full meaning of that word, who was not a slave, a non-person, without rights of any sort, but gentlemanly, well educated, noble, magnanimous, munificent, lavish.

The Oscars mark the end of the awards season, with their annual rituals of self-applause to which actors are so addicted, as Oscar nominees are to the $350,000 gift bags. The ancient Greeks are to blame. Greek luvvies and athletes formed the world’s first trade unions to wring from their sponsors privileges and guarantees which make the Olympic Committee look like beginners.  The luvvies’ worldwide union, founded in the 3rd century bc, lasted 600 years. It came to be called the ‘Artists [some said ‘Toadies’] of Dionysus’. They negotiated freedom of travel and immunity from military service, taxation and arrest, and came from all over the Greek-speaking world to perform.

Those for whom the welfare state does not provide as much welfare as they would like might care to reflect on the plight of the Romans, for whom there was no such thing as the welfare state. A superb monograph by Kim Bowes, Surviving Rome: The Economic Lives of the Ninety Percent, drawing on papyrus and other finds from across the Roman and Egyptian worlds, shows in fascinating detail how the poor survived. She defines the poor as the c. 90 per cent who ‘worked with their hands’, most of whom were farmers renting their farm (rents were not cheap). One Soterichos rented a number of small, scattered plots, with small yields, and died in debt. His wife and children budgeted carefully and started breeding farm animals (very profitable).

In 500 BC, Persia (modern Iran) was the most powerful state in the known world, ruling an area of more than two million square miles from the Balkans and Egypt to central Asia (nearly half of the world’s population). In 499 BC, Athens and a number of other Greek states rebelled against its empire and incredibly defeated it in the ensuing Persian Wars (390-379 BC). The Greek historian Herodotus (d. c. 425 BC) wrote up those wars after travelling extensively around the whole region. He was as fascinated by different cultures as he was by the war itself, contrasting the Persian way of life with the Greek. For example, he said that Persians did not put up statues or temples or altars, or treat their gods as human in nature, as the Greeks did.

Some Labour MPs are demanding that Colonel Alistair Carns, a former Royal Marine who served in the military for 24 years and was awarded the Military Cross for his service in Afghanistan, become leader of the party. The Romans would have approved, but might have felt he was not quite rich enough. Rome fought its rivals for control over the only resources anyone had: land and its products and people. The more territory a state controlled, the more powerful it would be. Those doing the fighting were led by the phenomenally wealthy landowners who, combining political authority with military command, controlled the Senate. Success in the field of battle virtually guaranteed an influential political career.

What a lot of friends Jeffrey Epstein appears to have had! But what did friendship mean to him? Was it simply a matter of reciprocal benefits and obligations? In the ancient world, such interactions were a matter of life and death for the poor (there was no such thing as the welfare state), and of political success or failure for the wealthy and ambitious. But many thought there was far more to real friendship than such purely practical considerations. For Aristotle, having a friend was ‘one of the greatest goods, because there is an unbreakable connection between friendship and virtue, since friends do not wrong one another: justice and friendship are either identical or very close to each other’.