Peter Jones

The British Museum’s aim is to use its collection ‘for the benefit and education of humanity’. If that manifests itself in jerking the knee to Black Lives Matter’s anti-colonial agenda, the Museum might do well to learn from the ancients. Near Eastern conquerors used to dedicate their loot in temples, and so exhibit it. It was Nebuchadnezzar II of Babylon (6th C bc) who gathered reliefs, weapons, inscriptions (one going back to 2,400 bc) etc. and placed them in a ‘Wonder Cabinet of Mankind’ for the public to enjoy. Greeks and Romans took up the idea, filling their temples with collections of relics, statuary and art. The temple of Lindos on Rhodes contained a bracelet of Helen of Troy, Orpheus’s lyre and the weapons of Heracles.

Many commentators have argued that the recent grading controversy indicates just how important public examinations are. Up to a point, Lord Copper. Romans did jobs, not ‘education’. Most who went to school (there was no state provision) probably learnt not much more than the basic three Rs (peasant families — the majority of the population — needed their children to work the land). A freed slave in Petronius’s Satyricon boasts that he knows ‘no geometry or fancy criticism or any such meaningless drivel, but I do know the alphabet and I can work out percentages and measures and currency’; Horace mocked pupils for being asked what is left from 1/12th subtracted from 5/12ths. One option for children was to be sent away as apprentices.

The kind of arguments raging about migrants crossing the Channel to enter Britain illegally never raged in the Ancient Roman world. The reason is quite simple: borders, in as much as they existed, weren’t controlled. Romans did their best to negotiate entry and settlement for armed tribal groups, many of whom they welcomed into the army. Otherwise, individuals and families came and went as they liked. The point is that newcomers were essential — they kept numbers up (Rome required about 10,000 immigrants a year net, not including slaves) and were not a ‘drain on the economy’ because the welfare state did not exist. If they could not carve out a living for themselves, no one would do it for them.

Arguments about the purpose or indeed very existence of anything resembling the House of Lords would have struck classical democratic Athenians as bizarre. But its Areopagus might prompt thought. This body had been in existence long before Cleisthenes invented radical democracy in 508 bc. It was made up of the wealthy aristocratic elite from whom alone the main state officials (archons) could be drawn. Their term of office completed, they joined the Areopagus for life. This body was the state’s legal guardian. The democratic reformer Solon (594 bc) slightly broadened its membership, and removed some of its political powers.

Tackling obesity is the latest government initiative, universally condemned as nannying. Ask a Spartan. From an early age, Spartan children were taught not to be fussy: to eat up their food, and not to fear the dark or being left alone. At the age of seven, boys were taken from their homes and lived together in ‘herds’, exercising bare-footed and often naked, keeping fit and learning obedience. Food was sparse, because ‘overeating produces a broad, squat frame, and laboured breathing’. Lean features ‘defined the body’s true shape’, unlike obese ones. Competitive games were fostered, winners encouraged and a proud mental resilience developed. Now that’s nannying: the full Rees-Mogg.

Should the PM move parliament to York? There is, of course, historical precedent for such a move, as he very well knows. Rome was founded in 753 bc and when it became a republic in 509 bc it had a population of about 40,000. By about 260 bc it commanded manpower across Italy of about 730,000. At the collapse of the republic in 31 bc when Augustus became its first emperor, Rome controlled all Italy and an empire from Gaul to North Africa and Syria.

In 1984, China agreed a ‘one country, two systems’ treaty with the UK, designed to control the relationship between Hong Kong and China for 50 years after Britain ceded control of the colony in 1997. It has now broken the treaty, for no other reason than that it can. So what next in that tinderbox? Classical Athens was at war three years out of four, and if arbitration had failed to solve the treaty problem, it would have gone to war. No Greek preferred war to peace, but fighting for life and territory was simply a given of the ancient world.

Word has it that ministers already do not bother to argue their corner with the government’s inner ring, while a slimmer, streamlined cabinet office threatens to disempower them still further. Ministers could soon resemble senators under Rome’s second emperor Tiberius (ad 14-37). The historian Tacitus painted an extraordinary picture of Tiberius’s early days in office. The fact was that his stepfather Augustus had exercised autocratic power after he ‘restored’ the republic that had collapsed in 31 bc. The question for senators, therefore, was what change to expect under the new man in power. Their experience suggested precious little. They already knew Tiberius as a cryptic, devious and heartless character, whose word could never be trusted.

When Covid-19 first appeared, its similarity to Sars made some assume it could not mount a pandemic; others that it would be infectious, but mild. Assumptions with unhappy consequences are nothing new: some can last millennia. Take the West’s understanding of malaria. This deadly fever, widespread across the ancient world and mentioned in Homer, is caused by mosquitoes carrying the malaria parasite. But the ancient view was that ‘bad air’ (mal’aria, from the Italian) was the cause, reasonably enough, since the disease was clearly associated with swamps. Roman encyclopaedist Varro nearly solved it, arguing that ‘certain small animals breed there, invisible but causing troublesome diseases by entering through mouth or nose’.

The actor John Cleese has been wondering if we should destroy Greek statues because Greeks believed ‘a cultured society was only possible if it was based on slavery’. That was not a Greek belief, but might the existence of ancient slavery suggest that their statues deserve to be knocked down anyway? Two points: first, the ancient world was one in which there were laws, but no concept of human rights, or of the sanctity of life; second, slavery was simply a universal fact of life, rather like hunting. Anyone could be enslaved at any time — captured in war or by pirates at sea — and many were born into it: all were the automatic private property of their owners. Few people thought twice about it. Everyone who was anyone had slaves.

When the PM’s chief adviser, Dominic Cummings, was discovered to have made his fateful journey to Durham during lockdown, there was uproar. Now that Durham police have judged that trip legal, one might have thought the issue would disappear. But as ancient Greeks knew, such hatreds last a long time. They would have seen three eternal issues at stake here: legal obligations; standing in society; and (most of all) friends and enemies. The fact that, as the police agreed, Cummings was following government regulations on ‘reasonable excuses’ for his trip to Durham, would have been to the Greeks quite irrelevant.

Education is cumulative. The idea that it will be lost on a generation because, for one out of 42 terms of schooling, pupils will have to take more responsibility for their own learning, is obvious tosh. Indeed that term may yield considerable benefits for all, especially older, pupils, whatever their future plans. Let Plato explain. Plato’s Seventh Letter (its authenticity has been doubted) deals with his failed efforts to turn Sicily into a Platonic state. Greeks had settled there from about 750 bc, and in the 4th century bc Plato was invited to help turn the apparently willing tyrant Dionysius II into a philosopher king. Plato went over there, but found the court riddled with intrigue.

The speed with which ‘model’ Nightingale hospitals have been designed and erected across the UK reminds one of the experts in this sort of thing: the Romans. Legionary fortresses provide a good example. All were designed on roughly the same pattern, and all had a hospital (valetudinarium). The fortress built at Inchtuthil in Scotland offers a typical illustration. Picture a quadrangle about 100 yards by 65 yards, surrounded on all four sides by a ring of ‘wards’, outside that ring a corridor, and outside that an outer ring of ‘wards’. The central corridor provides free movement round the whole block and access to both the inner and outer ring.

The Prime Minister recently quoted Cicero’s famous dictum salus populi suprema lex esto, translating it as ‘Let the health (salus) of the people be the supreme law’. No surprise there: he had just returned from his sick bed. But as he knows very well, that injunction was military: salus meant ‘security, safety’. The consuls must do whatever was needed to ensure the state’s survival. The state’s survival today is not a military but an economic issue. One interesting consequence is that it has become fashionable among the old to express a desire to help by being unlocked at once and so swept away by Covid-19. Then the young, most of them hardly affected by the virus, could get back to business as normal.

The Spectator’s 10,000th hebdomaversary (hebdomas, ‘a group of seven’: a weekly cannot have an anniversary) will surely be celebrated with the same enthusiasm that units of a thousand evoked in the ancients. But for them a thousandth-year celebration had to be symbolically significant. That required careful manipulation of dates. For example, the really big moment in both Greek and Roman history was the Trojan War. Greeks produced nine different dates for the fall of Troy, one of which was 1334 bc. That was the choice of Alexander the Great, who a thousand years after that date (334 bc) began his invasion of Asia, repeating and confirming Greek superiority over Asian peoples.

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.