Peter Jones

The extraordinary sporting achievement of Emma Raducanu and the response it has received from royalty and politicians alike makes one wonder whether she, too, might start to encourage popular initiatives of the sort Marcus Rashford supports. Roman elites were keen to use such figures in the public eye to keep the people happy. Romans were a rough and ready lot and used rough and ready tactics when it came to drawing the attention of the elites to their concerns, e.g. food shortages. A street riot was one way of getting through to the bosses, and plenty of street leaders were happy to organise them.

A ‘State of the World’ report warns that a third of the world’s wild tree species are threatened with extinction. Agriculture and logging are the main culprits. They were in the ancient world too. It is hard to overestimate the importance of trees for past societies: they were the only source of fuel for heating, cooking, potting, including tiles and bricks, and smelting (coal came into play only from the 16th century), and of timber for building. The emergence of palace states and the growth of trade during the Bronze Age from c. 3000 bc — bronze, made by smelting tin and copper, was far more durable than copper — increased its use dramatically.

In the 18th century, art historians’ admiration for the beauty of white-ish ancient Greek marble statuary led people to draw conclusions, on the back of their belief in classical ‘authority’, about white superiority. This, we are told, turned many classicists into racists. Today some members of the Cambridge Classics Faculty feel the white-ish plaster-cast replicas of those statues in their museum ‘entrench[es] racism’ in the same way. Their proposal is to put up a notice about it. Wow. Go, Cambridge! That’ll show those racists! And surely those still disgustingly white originals all over the world need notices as well. Two things need to be said.

‘No one is stupid enough to choose war over peace. In peace sons bury their fathers; in war, fathers bury their sons,’ said Croesus to his conqueror, Cyrus of Persia, according to Herodotus. But actually man’s stupidity has lasted thousands of years, and one rather doubts whether the fanatical Taliban will buck that doleful trend. Romans were proud of their pax Romana, but it had been won in blood, over centuries, as they were well aware. ‘Who wishes for peace, let him prepare for war,’ said Vegetius. ‘Peace was secured by victories,’ boasted Augustus; Virgil talked of Rome ‘imposing the practice of peace’. Tacitus made the Caledonian leader Calgacus remark that Romans ‘make a desert and call it peace’.

Oxfam is arguing that if all billionaires forked out 99 per cent of their profits made during the Covid pandemic, the whole world could be vaccinated and every unemployed worker given a handy payout. Dream on. The ancient Athenians had rather more intelligent ways of soaking the rich. They raised annual taxes only for specific, stated ends (‘hypothecation’). These were funded by the 300 richest property-owners. A typical wealth-level was four talents (2,400 drachmas; an average wage was about 350 a year) and around 100 events a year needed to be covered. The tax was called a leitourgia (literally ‘work for the public’) from which we get our ‘liturgy’.

The government’s promise to fund a pilot scheme promoting the teaching of Latin in secondary schools is music to the ears of the charity Classics for All, which has introduced classical subjects into more than 1,000 state schools. Latin has been taken up with especial enthusiasm in primary schools, where word derivations have proved very popular. The ancients loved them too. The Roman Varro (116-27 bc) wrote a 25-volume de lingua Latina (‘On the Latin Language’). Six survive, three discussing etymology, all full of interest because Varro, ignorant of scientific etymology (it developed only from the 17th century onwards), produced total nonsense.

Winners at the Olympics were thought to have come as close to a god as any man could. But that did not stop some Greeks wondering whether it was all worth it. The poet Xenophanes commented that ‘a noble boxer would not make a city better ordered, nor keep its granaries filled’. Diogenes the cynic once met an athlete boasting about how fast he was. Diogenes replied: ‘But not faster than a rabbit or deer, the swiftest of animals, and also the most cowardly.

Every red-blooded Englishman has believed that exercise in the open air is the finest prophylactic against popery, adultery and the fine arts. Baron de Coubertin, who dreamt up the modern Olympic Games, took a different view. He admired the spirit of games on the playing fields of Eton and thought that they might provide a model for games of the sort he imagined the ancient Greeks enjoyed at Olympia: competitive but amateur, fair, wholesome, played for the sake of it and also, he hoped, acting as a stimulus to world peace. Up to a point, Lord Copper. The Olympic Games, founded in 776 bc, celebrated Zeus, god of Mount Olympus, at his sacred site, Olympia (the actual mountain is more than 160 miles away).

The Prime Minister is urging citizens not to throw caution to the winds when lockdown ends on 19 July but to behave ‘responsibly’. But there seems little incentive when legions of psychiatrists, lawyers, counsellors, social workers etc appear to insist you must never blame people (only ‘society’ or ‘the Tory cuts’) for anything. Can the ancients help? For ancient Greeks, it was the prospect of public shaming that kept people behaving responsibly. In Homer’s Iliad, the first work of European literature (c. 700 bc), the heroes who always feared what other people would say about them if their behaviour did not come up to what was expected of them exemplified that sense of shame (aidôs). A myth explained all.

The recently unveiled funerary monument of Princess Diana prompts comparison with Greek and Roman archetypes. To many, Diana was a heroic figure. Greek sculptors represented females as dignified figures, intricately coiffed, in graceful, loose-fitting, free-flowing tunics and ankle-length cloaks, with contrasting vertical and diagonal folds. Males were nude, a public statement of power and physical perfection, as if human significance did not end in death. Both were idealised figures, illustrating character and quality, not likeness. There is no hint of heroic ideals in this Diana, dressed presumably as a nursery teaching assistant. She does not even look like Diana, an attractive, delicate-featured woman.

The delicious hypocrisy at the heart of today’s cancel fraternity is that it is strongly opposed to censorship. Romans grappled with the issue; the historian Tacitus nailed it. Since the Roman republic sprang from the expulsion of a tyrant-king (509 bc), anti-monarchic views became standard fare in legal and political debate whenever anyone suspected tyranny. Julius Caesar, seen by some, and slain, as a tyrant, was well aware of such republican sympathies and ‘bore with good nature’ abuse of himself. So did his successor Augustus (27 bc). True, he ended publication of senatorial minutes, but senators still had their say. Vitriolic pamphlets directed against him were initially met with written rebuttals.

The EU has regularly been likened to the Roman Empire. But its current direction suggests that the Athenian Empire (478-404 bc) is a better parallel. The EU began as an attempt to unify countries economically after the second world war. By slow accretion of powers via the single market, Maastricht, the euro and finally Lisbon, the EU became, drip by drip, a full political union run by an unelected central authority, which now threatens to end vetoes and intervene domestically, suing member states with whose policies on immigration, civil rights, freedom of speech etc it disagrees. After the Persian wars, Athens in 478 bc assembled on Delos an alliance of Greek city-states (poleis) to keep Persia at bay.

The mob is at work again in Oxford, protesting against the existence of Oriel’s statue of Cecil Rhodes. But this is a mob of dons who, rather than doing anything about it, have decided just to stop teaching at Oriel. And that will solve the problem? The Romans were a little more proactive. ‘Statue’ derives from statuo, ‘I place X so as to remain upright’. That was its correct position, where it could be kissed, garlanded and so on. Cicero mentions a deity whose mouth and chin had been worn down by worshippers. Vandalism and indeed theft were known, but it was damnatio memoriae (‘condemnation of memory’, a designation invented in 1689) that the powerful, especially emperors, feared.

On the subject of leadership, the Athenian soldier, historian, biographer and essayist Xenophon (c. 430-354 BC) had much to say, having led the retreat of 10,000 Greek soldiers from Cunaxa (Iraq) through hostile territory back to Greece. Had Dominic Cummings paid more attention to him when he studied ancient and modern history at Oxford, his time in government might have been more successful. The key to Xenophon’s thinking was that the good leader had a positive relationship with his men, calculated to be of mutual benefit to everyone: the image of friendship between leader and men was never far away.

The publication of the new Cambridge Greek Lexicon reminded the comedian and classicist Natalie Haynes of her frustrations at school, when she found that the lexica either translated sexual vocabulary into Latin or otherwise bowdlerised it. So when she read the comic poet Aristophanes, she decided that any word she could not identify meant ‘vagina’. Fair enough, but did her school not teach her that it takes two to tango? For the sexual organs, the poet’s hysterically anarchic inventiveness draws largely on rustic images of agricultural instruments, plants, animals, birds, and food, with military images from land and sea battles added for the male organs. Many of these terms are matching pairs (e.g. ‘bolt’ and ‘bolt-hole’).

Charles, Prince of Wales, is having a little trouble with his son Harry. Romans knew about difficult offspring. They told a story of a father who discovered his son was plotting against his life. Unable to believe a son would commit such an outrage, he received confirmation on oath from his wife that he was their son, and then summoned him to a meeting. There he gave him a sword and told him to cut his father’s throat. The son, horrified by his father’s reaction, threw it away, saying: ‘I ask only that you should not think my love for you to be of little value because it arises from repentance.

Almost no ancients cared whether animals felt pain or not. The classical Stoic belief that man’s reasoning capacity elevated him above all other creatures was the intellectual justification. Cruelty to animals could be frowned upon, but only because it might encourage man’s cruelty to man. Descartes (d. 1650) raised the question of whether animals really were conscious and, deciding they were not, concluded they did not feel pain: their reaction to it was purely mechanistic. Behaviourists of the 20th century took the same line. But there is one ancient dissenting voice to that view: the Greek essayist Plutarch (c. ad 100). Now that UK law has legislated that animals are sentient, it has finally caught up with him.

‘Georgics’ are an ancient form of poetry about agriculture and the land. The term derives from Greek gê ‘land’ + ergon ‘work’ (cf. farmer George) and emphasises the necessity of working hard to counteract deprivation, build a nation and forge a civilised world. Virgil’s Georgics (29 bc) in four books are a supreme example of the genre and not without relevance to the modern ‘green’ agenda. Its opening outlines the subject matter: field crops and tilling the soil, viticulture, and the care and skill required to tend cows, sheep and bees.