Peter Jones

When a major crisis strikes in the modern world, the state and international bodies such as the IMF and World Health Organisation come to the rescue. The ancients in such situations had recourse only to a culture of personal or public benefaction, self-help and (where relevant) legal action: when in ad 27 a ramshackle stadium built for a gladiatorial show at Fidenae collapsed with 50,000 maimed or killed, the impresario was exiled and new building regulations passed. It was the first emperor Augustus (d. ad 14) who created a template for imperial intervention, establishing a rudimentary fire service, putting in extreme measures to deal with famine in Rome and initiating flood-prevention schemes for the Tiber.

It must be infuriating for those who see the Prime Minister as a prisoner of a rigid elitist mindset that he is reacting to the pandemic not by crushing the workers but by doing what needed to be done, however radical. Pericles, his hero, was equally pragmatic, as the historian Thucydides said — and reaped the reward. Consider Pericles’s reaction in 431 bc to Sparta’s effective declaration of war. Athens at that time had walls that ran the five miles from the harbour up round the city, and back down to the harbour again. This made Athens impregnable by land, and since its triremes controlled the seas and could import goods from its allies, easily supplied.

Those with signs of Covid-19 are being asked to ‘self-isolate’ (Latin insula, ‘island’). But do they have the mindset for it? That requires self-sufficiency, for which the Greeks had a word: autarkeia (our ‘autarky’; contrast ‘autarchy’, ‘absolute rule’). Such a mindset was essential in the ancient world, where the threat of starvation, disease or disaster was permanent, and death everywhere. Only the self-sufficient, who had the capacity to provide a basic living for themselves and their families, and the mindset to be content with that ‘basic’, stood a chance of survival. In that world, you were on your own. Democritus (5th century bc) likened it to living in a foreign country.

The plague that struck Athens in the summer of 430 bc was a killer: it lasted for two years, returned after a year, and carried off a third of Athens’ manpower, including Pericles. From the historian Thucydides’ famous description, the plague — he caught it but recovered — bore certain resemblances to Covid-19 (allowing for differences in severity), but also invites reflection. He is the first Greek to mention two common illness-related phenomena: contagion — he says that, because of their exposure, there was a high death-rate among doctors and among those with the courage and sense of duty to try to care for the sick — and some immunity from further attack among survivors who, he says, concluded they would live for ever.

Last week Ross Clark expatiated on the hysteria and panic generated by Covid-19 that threatens to send the world into lockdown. These are aspects of the emotion of ‘fear’, and the Greeks certainly had words for that. The root of Greek deos ‘fear’ meant ‘two’, and was cognate with the Latin dub- (cf. ‘dubious’), i.e. being ‘in two minds’, the feelings ‘in the balance’. Greek phobos (cf. ‘phobia’) meant ‘running for it’; and the ekplêx- stem (cf. ‘apoplexy’) referred to being driven out of one’s mind by any overwhelming emotion, (e.g. love), including being stunned by fear.

The PM is insisting that the briefings he finds in his red box every evening should be, well, brief, and has limited them to four sides of A4. That is three too many. Emperors too had in and out boxes and knew what hard work they could be. Seleucus, Greek king of Asia, was said to have complained that ‘If people knew what a burden it was reading and writing so many letters, they would not bother to pick up a discarded royal crown’.

The PM was filmed introducing his new cabinet by getting them to answer in unison how many hospitals, how many buses etc. he was planning to provide. This is ‘performance politics’, the remanipulation of a ‘stage’ (here the Cabinet Office) and its ‘performers’ (MPs) to send a message to an ‘audience’ (us). Another example would be Dominic Cummings’s attire, resembling that of a protesting sixth-former. To get rid of him, performance theory would suggest, the PM should just tell him to wear a suit and tie. The Roman emperor Augustus too saw his life as a performance. On his deathbed in ad 14, he said to those round him: ‘If this play has any merit, clap and dismiss us joyfully’, as if he were some Greek mime actor.

An impeachment trial is overseen by Congress and Senate, who both make the law and (in this case) sit in judgment on it, ignoring the modern legal principle of the separation of powers. Athenians would have been shocked, not because they believed in the separation of powers (their citizens too made the law in assembly and sat in judgment in the law courts) but because in democratic Athens it was citizens that decided verdicts, and in randomly selected and therefore unpredictable juries. By contrast, two elected oligarchic cabals decide impeachment trials, usually making acquittal a foregone conclusion. Athenians would have been appalled: what was even remotely democratic about that? Statistics make the point about Athenian citizen control over the performance of their leaders.

Lord Heseltine’s electrifying hair once whipped the party faithful into paroxysms of euphoria. But since today he sees his hopes of staying in Europe finally squashed, he is a shrunken, diminished figure, and low lie his leonine locks. Let Dikaiopolis restore their vibrancy and bounce. Dikaiopolis was the hero of a Greek comedy composed by Aristophanes in 425 bc. An Athenian farmer, he had come early to that week’s citizen assembly, determined to end the war between Athens and Sparta that had destroyed his living. All he wanted was peace, but no one else seemed to share his concerns. So he sat there, waiting for business to start, fed up with being cooped up behind the protective walls of the city: ‘I’m always here first.

There are as many explanations for Harry and Meghan’s problems with the royal family as there are commentators. May as well let the ancient Greeks have their say. Greeks placed enormous importance on philoi, those with whom one made common cause: and one’s prime philoi were one’s family. So when an Athenian citizen put himself forward for any official position, he underwent a public scrutiny to ascertain that he had fulfilled a number of familial, state and religious obligations: in the case of the family, had they treated their parents with proper respect? To that question Harry and Meghan might well have found it difficult to respond. The central importance of family to a Greek can be gauged from Greek tragedy.

The candidates battling for the leadership of the Labour party never stop banging on about ‘social justice’ and ‘equality’. But they never define them. Plato did. In his final work, Laws (c. 350 bc), three men, led by the unnamed ‘Athenian’, discussed general principles behind governance and the law. The Athenian then applied them to the proposed new Cretan city of Magnesia. Plato defined ‘equality’ as (i) numerical or (ii) proportionate. This gave people what they merited, resulting in justice. So in Magnesia, private land-holdings were abolished and under (i), each household was given exactly the same amount of inalienable, heritable land, whose produce would serve the whole state.