Peter Jones

Hardly a day goes by without someone making excitable predictions about human progress and how, thanks to AI, we are all going to become algorithms served by robots. The ancients took a different view. All ancient man had available to him was what nature in its raw state offered. Only fire (e.g. cookery, metal-work) or man’s ingenuity (e.g. papyrus, concrete, the arch) could significantly alter it. But men could still fantasise about flying to the moon, or imagine a world in which ‘Every stream ran with wine; fish came to the house, baked themselves, and served themselves up at table; rivers of soup, swirling with meat chunks, flowed by the dining couches; thrushes, served with milk cakes, flew down men’s gullets.

Given that we use only 2 per cent of the rain that falls on these islands, one would not think it an insuperable job to secure our water supplies during the longest dry spells. If the Romans could do it with their technology, surely we can with ours. Since communities in the ancient world could survive only if they had supplies of fresh water available in the first place — rivers, wells and cisterns — aqueducts were not strictly necessary for human survival. Many places never had one (e.g. London). It was the baths, the Romans’ leisure centres, that created the demand. According to a late survey, Rome had 154 public lavatories, 46 brothels, 1,352 water points — and 856 bath buildings.

Everyone talks about the importance of ‘charisma’ in a politician. But while it may take one a long way with the voters, it does not necessarily cut much mustard in parliament unless bolstered by other strengths. The Romans provided a useful checklist. Boris, still popular in the country but now, despite high office, in self-exile after failing to win over colleagues to his Brexit views, might care to contemplate them. Top priority were amici, political allies among the great and good. These would automatically include those joined by blood, marriage or other associations, but needed to spread much further into networks of relationships incorporating men from a wide range of political, legal and social backgrounds.

The UK obesity crisis is again in the headlines, and ‘life-style’ is the culprit. The ancients may have come up with a different analysis. Our word ‘diet’ derives from the ancient Greek diaita, which meant ‘way of living’ and, medically, a prescribed way of life, or regimen, especially in relation to diet for the ill. But whatever deficiencies are evident in the normal diet of the ancients, a tendency to promote obesity was not among them. Sugar was unknown (honey was the only sweetener), and fats too would have been enjoyed only on special occasions.

Matthew Parris feels that he has become a genuine Remainiac, and kindly readers, fearing for his mental health, have been springing to his aid. The Roman elite, who felt the same sense of disempowerment after the republic collapsed and Augustus became the first Roman emperor in 27bc, might have a solution. The point about Augustus was that he did not call himself ‘emperor’ but princeps (‘first citizen’) or Caesar (as the later emperors did); and he maintained the trappings of the republican system (senators, consuls, etc). But he was now the final source of all authority. Any popular control over laws and appointment of officials was gone. So Romans began to wonder how they should live under a system that allowed them no political say.

Alfie Evans was seven months old when he went to hospital with seizures. When more than a year later doctors said that nothing more could be done for him, his parents took the hospital to court. They lost a number of cases on the issue, and when the courts ruled he could not be moved abroad, public outrage ensued. The ancient view on such events was very different. In 1931 a well (dated to c. 150 bc) was excavated in Athens and found to be a mass grave into which some 450 babies had been discarded. Recent analysis shows that one third had died from bacterial meningitis, an infection of the brain caused by cutting the umbilical cord with an unsterile object. Others presumably died from common conditions that were often fatal in babies, e.g. diarrhoea.

Jeremy Corbyn, it is said, does not have a racist bone in his body, and therefore cannot, by definition, be anti-Semitic (‘Semitic’ here referring to Jews, not Arabs). The Jewish community, however, begs to differ. Perhaps the problem is that Corbyn and Momentum take a Roman attitude towards the Jews. If racism today relates to defining people as inferior simply because of some unalterable characteristic (e.g. heredity, colour), irrespective of evidence, the Romans, it has been argued, were ‘proto-racist’. The reason is that, like the Greeks, they thought that the environment or heredity made a people what they were.

Barely a day passes without yet another Russian explanation for the Salisbury nerve agent attack. What’s new? Such disinformation has a very ancient history. After Caesar’s assassination in 44 bc, his old friend Mark Antony and the 18-year-old Octavian, Caesar’s adopted son and heir, emerged as the two contenders for power. In 32 bc, it had become clear that it war between them was inevitable. At this critical juncture, two allies of Antony deserted to Octavian, and revealed that Antony had a will, which had been lodged with the Vestal Virgins. It was illegal to open the will of a living man, and the Virgins told Octavian that they would not touch it.