Peter Jones

Dominic Cummings has written a modest blog inviting mathematicians, physicists, AI specialists and other experts to help him revolutionise the civil service with new standards of accurate, precision planning. Before he does so, perhaps he might reflect a little on the Ancient History side of the degree he studied at Oxford and the need for such precision. Without any similar technology, but from experience alone, the Romans re-organised and raised tax revenues to run, for more than 500 years, a rather successful empire of 60 million people across most of Europe, north Africa and the near East.

One might expect that the challenge of climate change would encourage many young people to take up Stem (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) subjects at A-level. Yet over the past ten years, with the exception of maths, numbers have risen only very slightly; and for ICT have dropped. Ancient attitudes to what then passed as ‘science’ may suggest a solution. Ancient Greeks were scrupulous about one fundamental breakthrough that remains the cornerstone of all serious research: supernatural explanations were impermissible. The reason was that no human could know the mind of a god. This did not mean Greek ‘scientists’ did not acknowledge the gods; they simply took it as axiomatic that bringing gods into the equation rendered the conclusions valueless.

As a contemporary John Clapham reported, Queen Elizabeth I ‘had pleasure in reading the best and wisest histories’, and translated the Roman historian Tacitus as a ‘private exercise’. This has been confirmed by a manuscript of a translation of Tacitus corrected by her, recently discovered in Lambeth Palace. But what on earth was she doing that for? It was nothing as juvenile as showing that she was the equal of any man in the education stakes. The point is that, up till the 16th century, Tacitus had enjoyed little reputation. This was because renaissance ‘humanism’, forged in city-state republics such as Florence and Venice, had found its origins in the noble liberty and self-government of republican Rome. Cicero was their hero.

Cicero said that the good orator could arouse in the listener many different feelings: ‘delight, grief, laughter, tears, admiration, hatred, scorn, envy, pity, shame, disgust, anger, relaxation, hope, fear’. But however the orator brought this about, the ancients were aware that there was more to making speeches than just words. The speaker should in a sense be an actor (Greek hupokritês, cf. ‘hypocrite’), using his whole body to reinforce what he was saying. Given the crushing verbal tedium to which the country, day in, day out, is currently being subjected, budding MPs might think about speech as performance. The professor of rhetoric Quintilian (d. ad 100) gave oddly specific hints about hand movements.

The England team reached the final of the rugby world cup in Japan but they lost. As athletes, they knew that was failure. So did the ancient Greeks: only the winner was worth a prize. The poet Pindar (c. 518-440 bc) explored the consequences of this mentality. In one of his commissioned poems hymning victorious athletes, he described how Aristomenes defeated three wrestlers en route to winning the prize (a bay laurel wreath) at the Pythian Games at Delphi. Of those losers, Pindar said: ‘They were left no happy homecoming. As they ran back to their mothers they heard no joyous laughter to give them delight: no, they slunk furtively home through the back-alleys, bitten by the pain of defeat.’ Exactly.

Last week the Lawyers Group of the charity Classics for All held its fifth moot (cf. ‘meet’) in the Supreme Court, under the stern gaze of Lady Arden. Previous moots have tried Socrates, Brutus and Cassius, Antigone, and Verres, corrupt governor of Sicily. The Romans put such moots at the heart of their education. The purpose was to teach men how to win the political — and, even more, legal —battles necessary to climb the greasy pole to power. Pupils would be asked to make the best case they could for or against the sides involved in historical or mythical situations (suasoriae, e.g. ‘did Orestes legally kill his mother?’, ‘Should the Romans have destroyed Carthage?’) and invented ones (controversiae).

Today’s funerals, featuring shiny black hearses and top hats, lack (we are assured) ‘emotional intelligence’. Colourful coffins featuring pictures of favourite musicians, leopard print hearses and burials in yurts will apparently correct this sad deficiency. The Romans might well have disagreed. Cremation and interment took place outside the boundaries of Rome (dead bodies were considered a polluting force — contrast the Christian view). The less well-off could for a fee join funerary clubs, meeting regularly to dine together, and have a niche in a highly decorated underground chamber reserved for the urn containing their ashes.

Dominic Cummings, chief adviser to the Prime Minister, thinks that there is no ‘better book than Thucydides as training for politics’. But what does he ‘teach’? His ‘lessons’ are legion. Herewith some possibilities. In his history of the war between Athens and Sparta (430-404 bc), in which he briefly participated, smart one-liners leap off the page: ‘Humans are dominated by three motives: honour, fear and advantage’; ‘Identity of interests is the surest bond between states and individuals’; ‘Men consider what is pleasant to be honourable and what is advantageous, just’; and so on. Typically of a Greek, Thucydides distinguished sharply between thought and action.

Extinction Rebellion is blocking the streets again, foolishly demanding the impossible on a very important issue. But what does one expect from the young? As Aristotle pointed out, since they have no experience of life, they always have exalted notions and think themselves equal to great things. As a result, never having been duped before, they readily trust others and are easy meat for adult exploitation. Platonic criminal theory can help them. The ancients generally argued that society was held together by systems of rewards and penalties, and revenge, recompense and deterrence were the main features of their penal thinking. Plato, however, took a different view. He thought of crime as a disease. The point about a disease was that it was not your fault: no one willingly caught one.

We read much about ‘fake news’ these days and of efforts to rid the internet of it. But what of media that report dodgy stories derived from ‘insiders’ and ‘government sources’ and ‘contacts’? The great Roman historian Tacitus knew what to make of such sources. The first Roman emperor Augustus died in ad 14. It was a critical moment: who would succeed — Augustus’s grandson Postumus Agrippa, banished (by his wife Livia) or Tiberius, Livia’s son by her first marriage? Tacitus reported that Augustus and a companion, Fabius, arranged a reconciliation with Agrippa; that Fabius leaked and paid the price; and Livia at once recalled Tiberius from abroad, and then ‘saw to’ Augustus.