Peter Jones

The country’s champions of free speech — the police — were recently out in force to ensure that the alt-right Trump-supporting Steve Bannon could address the student union in Oxford. The students, inevitably, wanted him silenced. But what were they so afraid of? Plato knew: it was a matter of the difference between the spoken and the written word. In Plato’s dialogue Phaedrus, Socrates told a story that the Egyptian wise man Theuth was responsible for many inventions, but presenting them all to the king Thamus, he claimed that writing was the finest of the lot, ‘the magic key to memory and wisdom’. Thamus disagreed: writing would destroy memory, and therefore internalisation of learning.

If Brussels is willing to offer the British Parliament only a dog’s Brexit, that should tell Parliament everything it needs to know about any future prospects for a Britain tied in with the EU. It is about time for Parliament to say, ‘Enough is enough’. As every Greek polis (city state), however small, averred, its aim was to ensure that it alone was the arbiter of its own freedom. Antiochus III, a distant successor to Alexander the Great, had ambitions in 196 bc to ‘bring all the cities of Asia under his domination, as they once had been’.

At the Labour party conference, Jeremy Corbyn said that he would do whatever his party members told him to. This, apparently, is what he means by democracy. Neither the original nor the modern version bears any resemblance to it. Full-on Athenian direct democracy developed from its origins in 508 bc into a system in which every Athenian male citizen over 18 could attend an official Assembly (usually once a week) and determine, by a majority show of hands, whatever policy was put before them. These policies were presented by the Council, which consisted of 500 citizens aged over 30, serving for one year only and never more than two. They were appointed by lot via proportional representation, from the 139 demes (roughly, parishes) that made up Athens’ city-state.

The 5th century bc Athenian historian Thucydides proposed that the driving force behind interstate relations was power and fear. But the soldier-essayist Xenophon (d. 354 bc) thought that humiliation, of the sort that the EU recently heaped on Mrs May, lay at the heart of the problem. In his Cyropaedia, Xenophon wrote an extended essay on the achievements of the Persian King Cyrus the Great (d. 530 bc), founder of a huge empire stretching from Turkey to India. In it, Xenophon invented a conversation between the experienced Tigranes, future king of Armenia, and the young Cyrus on the subject of foreign domination.

Boris the rhetorician is in full voice at the moment, delighting his followers and infuriating his enemies. But is this the purpose of rhetoric? It was the ancients who invented, or rather deduced, the rules. As the Roman professor of rhetoric Quintilian said: ‘Just as men discovered the art of medicine by observing that some things were healthy and some the reverse, so they observed that, when it came to speaking, some things were advantageous and others not. These they therefore noted for imitation or avoidance, while adding personal hints that logically followed. Experience then confirmed these observations, as a result of which people knew how to teach the subject.

Jeremy Corbyn regularly apologises on the subject of anti-Semitism, yet admits that he has done nothing wrong. So what does he actually mean by ‘apology’? He obviously does not feel the need to repent — the usual implication of the term — because he is convinced, as always, of his own unassailable rectitude. Perhaps it would clarify matters if he were to apologise in the Greek sense of the word. Apologia meant giving an account of what you had done and justifying your reasons for doing it. It was primarily a legal term. Socrates’ ‘Apology’ in 399 bc, for example, was his defence against charges laid at his door of corrupting the young and introducing strange new gods.

Forget David Davis, Boris, the cabinet, the commentariat. It’s time to concentrate on the big picture and the central question: where does final authority lie in the UK? The ancients grappled with this problem too. In the direct, radical democracy of 5th and 4th c Athens, it lay with the male citizens meeting in assembly. Appointed officials were under constant scrutiny by the assembly, and could pay a high price for failure (including execution). Indeed, any citizen who proposed a course of action to which the assembly agreed but which turned out to be a disaster could be impeached for ‘deceiving the people’. It was no defence to say that the assembly had agreed to it. The people were sovereign. They resisted two oligarchic coups.

Shadow chancellor John McDonnell has given all his cabinet a copy of Cicero’s advice on how to win arguments. This is a very foolish move. ‘Rhetoric’ (same root as ‘orator’), or persuasive speaking, was the name of this activity. In the 4th century bc, Aristotle produced the definitive guide in his Art of Rhetoric, from which most of Cicero’s advice is drawn. His top tips included: work from the general (is this good in principle?) to the specific (is this example of it practical?). Examine any course of action under four headings: is it possible? Necessary? Advantageous? Honourable (i.e. just, moral, etc.)? Set up arguments from evidence, logic, likelihood, maxims (‘too many cooks’) and parallel examples (usually from the past).